Papers of Fran Leeper Buss, 1968-2012

Frances Ann (Barker) Leeper Buss was born on March 3, 1942, in Manchester, Iowa, into a working-class family. She had two younger siblings, Jim and Barbara. Her father, Clyde Francis Barker, worked as a radio engineer. Her mother, Wilma (Richardson) Barker, had been adopted and abused as a child, and suffered throughout her life with suicidal episodes and depression. After Clyde Barker lost his job, the family moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where Fran Buss finished high school at Washington Senior High School, graduating in 1960. She first attended Iowa State Teachers College in Cedar Falls, Iowa, then transferred to the University of Iowa, where she received a B.A. in social studies and English education in 1964.

In 1965, Fran Buss married Dennis Leeper. They had three children: Kimberly (b. January 4, 1965), Lisa (b. December 10, 1966), whom they adopted in 1967, and Jim (b. April 25, 1968). The family moved to Fort Collins, Colorado, and in 1970, Fran Buss and Dennis Leeper divorced. Leeper, who had received his Ph.D. in Radiation Biology from the University of Iowa, moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Fran Buss stayed in Fort Collins, where she struggled financially as a single mother of three children and was briefly on welfare. She started a craft store where she made and sold leather and wood gifts. And in 1971, she joined with other single mothers to form the Women's Crisis and Information Center, one of the first women's centers in the nation. In 1972, Fran Buss married David Buss, a graduate of the University of California (1969) and an intern in campus ministry at the Colorado State University. In 1973, David Buss was arrested and convicted for refusing induction into the armed services during the Vietnam War and spent some months in jail. By 1974, the Busses had moved to Denver, Colorado, where Fran Buss worked part-time as a community organizer at Washington Park Community Center. They both matriculated at Iliff School of Theology. David Buss graduated and was ordained in 1974. That same year they moved to Las Vegas, New Mexico, to work in campus community ministry. Fran Buss received an M.A. in Divinity in 1976, and was ordained into the ministry of United Church of Christ in 1977.

While in Las Vegas, working half-time as a campus community minister, Fran Buss met and conducted her first oral history by interviewing Jesusita Aragon, a healer and midwife living in northern New Mexico. She also interviewed Rheua Pearce, who had worked with Jane Addams in Chicago's Hull House. The results of Buss's interviews with Jesusita Aragon would become her book, La Partera: Story of a Midwife (1980). Fran Buss also took a part time position as director and teacher at New Horizons United Presbyterian Preschool and Day Care Program, in order to earn more money. In 1977, the Buss family moved to Wisconsin after Fran Buss and David Buss accepted new jobs in campus ministry at the Shalom Center for All Faiths at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater. In Wisconsin, Buss continued her oral history work, interviewing Native American women in Winnebago Mission, near Black River Falls, Wisconsin, and lower income women throughout Whitewater, Wisconsin, and on trips to Minnesota, New Mexico, Colorado, and throughout the South. Ten of these women's stories were later published in her book Dignity: Lower Income Women Tell of Their Lives and Struggles (1985). In the early 1980s, Fran Buss first met and talked with the civil rights and textile union activist, Mary Robinson, and with Mexican-American labor leader, Maria Elena Lucas. Her interviews with Maria Elena Lucas were published in her book: Forged under the Sun: The Life of Maria Elena Lucas (1993); and Mary Robinson's stories would become Moisture of the Earth: Mary Robinson, Civil Rights and Textile Union Activist (2009).

In 1981, Fran Buss resigned from her part-time work as a campus minister, citing her personal doubts about traditional Christian faith and the church's sexism and classism. After her resignation, she focused more closely on her oral history research and writing, and teaching. She was appointed honorary women's studies scholar at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater for two academic years (1982-1984), and taught part time in women's studies for the university extension school. In 1987, Fran Buss and David Buss moved to Tucson, Arizona, for another shared campus ministry position with United Campus Christian Ministry at the University of Arizona. They both became involved in the Sanctuary Movement, an organization which smuggled Central American refugees into the United States during the civil wars in the region.

In 1991, Fran Buss published a young adult novel, Journey of the Sparrows, about a family of Salvadoran refugee children. The money from the sale of the rights for a paperback edition helped pay for David Buss to pursue a Masters in social work from the University of Arizona; by 1995 he was working as a social worker and chaplain for the Carondelet Hospice Services.

Fran Buss received her Ph.D. in women's history and racial and ethnic history from the University of Arizona, Tucson, in 1995, and started teaching part time at the University of Arizona and at Pima Community College (Tucson, Arizona). She continued to travel for her oral history work and writing, often developing close and meaningful relationships with the many women she interviewed. Her friendships with Mary Robinson and Maria Elena Lucas deepened during these years.

In 1998, Fran Buss received the Prelinger Award from the Coordinating Committee on Women in the Historical Profession for her long-term contributions to oral histories of low-income and minority women. In 1999 she started working for the Arizona Historical Society, interviewing older women activists in the area. In the early 2000s, Fran Buss drafted Collaborative Voices, an unpublished memoir which included her interactions and experiences with Maria Elena Lucas and Mary Robinson, and was based on her journal notes and memories.

Fran Buss recently completed a sixth book, Memory, Meaning, and Resistance: An Oral Historian Remembers. She is currently working on a project she calls Radical Respect: An Oral Historian on Friendship, a work which focuses on cross-cultural friendship (across race, class, gender, and sexual orientation), and which incorporates theory, personal stories of friendship, and oral history work. Her tapes and transcripts from many of her oral history interviews are archived in seven research libraries in a collection called Work and Family: Low Income and Minority Women Talk about Their Lives (MC 420). Fran Buss and David Buss currently live in the Sonoran Desert of Southern Arizona.