Papers of Anita Parkhurst Willcox, 1887-1990 (inclusive), 1918-1976 (bulk)

Commercial artist and pacifist Anita Parkhurst Willcox was born in Chicago, Illinois, in 1892, the only daughter of Henry Williams Parkhurst and Annie Hall Horine Parkhurst. She had two brothers. Her father, an engineer, suffered a stroke when she was nine and died when she was thirteen. She studied at the Art Institute of Chicago from 1909 to 1913. She began her commercial art career drawing illustrations of hats for Gage Brothers and Co., a Chicago millinery company, and moved to New York City in 1913. Her work included covers for Saturday Evening Post, Collier's, McCall's, and Screenland, as well as posters for the YMCA. She became known for creating the "New American Woman" image – idealized pictures of young, fashionable, beautiful women.

She married engineer Henry Willcox in 1918. In March of that year, two weeks after her wedding, she went to France to work with the YMCA in support of American troops in World War I. She worked in canteens and, with artist Neysa McMein and Jane Bullard, developed and performed a vaudeville show for troops on the front lines. She returned to New York in March 1919, resuming her work as an artist and reuniting with her husband. They had four children between 1921 and 1926: Roger, Warner, Sally, and Ann, and in 1930 they adopted her brother Roger's daughter, Dolores, after his wife died in childbirth. The family lived first in Staten Island and then in Greenwich Village in New York City. Willcox's mother, with whom she had a strained relationship, lived with them until her death in 1939. After the birth of her daughter Sally in 1923, Willcox spent several months in bed with puerperal fever and, during this period of enforced inactivity, became increasingly aware of the disparity between the idealized images she created in her artwork and her own life as a wife, mother, and working woman. In 1925, she gave up her work as a commercial artist and wrote the unpublished book Between Jobs and Babies, which examined the changing nature of women's roles in 20th century America. She also worked on a memoir, One Woman, which was ultimately edited by her granddaughter and published in 2010. She continued sketching and painting, developing a particular interest in murals, and engaged in freelance work.

During the Depression, Willcox designed posters for the League of Industrial Democracy and drew caricatures for Collier's. She underwent an abortion in the mid-1930s. Her experiences during World War I had made her a committed pacifist and she was plunged into depression by World War II; her depression was apparently compounded by carbon monoxide poisoning in 1940. During the war, she and her husband served as air raid wardens and she also worked with Lunchtime Follies, a group which held musical revues in defense plants to entertain factory workers. (Their first show was Irving Berlin's This Is the Army.) Towards the end of the war, Willcox designed posters for Americans United for World Organization, advocating the formation of the United Nations. In 1949, the Willcox family founded the first inter-racial cooperative community on the Eastern seaboard of the United States, in Norwalk, Connecticut. In 2010, this community, called Village Creek, was declared a National Historical Monument.

Willcox traveled widely, with her international trips including a visit to Cuba in 1916, and travel through India in 1948 and 1949. During this trip she made a number of sketches, including of the attendees of the first All India Conference after the cessation of British rule, and of a peace conference held on the anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi's assassination. In 1952, she and her husband represented the Quakers at the Asia and Pacific Rim Peace Conference in Beijing, China, with Willcox sketching the conference delegates. Due to their participation in this conference, they were considered communists by the United States government and by many of their neighbors, although neither of them were members of the Communist party. Upon their return to the United States, their passports were confiscated and Henry Willcox was forced out of the construction company he had founded, due to government officials' refusal to engage the company while he was affiliated with it. Willcox's opportunities for freelance work were also severely impacted. In 1953, Anita and Henry embarked on a cross-country lecture tour, to share their experiences in China. Upon their return they continued to face harassment and mistrust: murals she had designed as a gift for the Honey Hill Elementary School in Norwalk, Connecticut, were rejected, as some city officials denounced the hanging of work by an alleged communist. In 1977, the one mural she had completed was hung in the John D. Magrath School in Norwalk.

In 1955, Willcox was called before the Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security, also known as the Eastland Committee. The ostensible purpose for her summons was that she had posted bail for Harvey Matusow, an FBI informant and paid witness for the House Un-American Activities Committee, who recanted his testimony and was jailed for perjury. The committee also questioned her about her trip to China and did not permit her to read the statement she had prepared explaining her actions and beliefs. The following year, Henry Willcox was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee and questioned about the trip to China. Transcripts of these hearings are available online. However, no further direct action was taken against them, and after a prolonged court case which reached the Supreme Court, their passports were returned in 1959. (This case was brought by twelve people including Willcox and her husband, Paul Robeson, and the civil rights lawyer Leonard Boudin.) Upon the return of their passports, Willcox and her husband promptly resumed international travel, traveling to the Soviet Union in the 1960s and to Ghana in 1963, where Willcox created murals for the law library of the University of Ghana. They also returned to China in 1971, where they were reunited with Guo Moruo, the president of the peace conference they attended in 1952. Henry Willcox suffered from bouts of tuberculosis throughout his life and he died in 1973. Anita Willcox died at Village Creek in April 1984. One of her last drawings was a self-portrait, intended for her obituary.