3 Iowans named Women of Achievement

Three Iowans, including well-known Iowa City photographer and publisher Joan Liffring-Zug Bourret, will receive the 2024 Iowa Women of Achievement Award in October.

The awards will be presented Oct. 16 at the WLC conference in Des Moines at the Iowa Events Center.

This year’s honorees are Teree Caldwell-Johnson (1956-2024) of Des Moines; Martha-Ellen Tye (1909-1998) of Marshalltown; and Liffring-Zug Bourret (1929-2022).

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Liffring-Zug Bourret was attending the University of Iowa when she began working as a reporter and photographer for The Gazette in the early 1950s. After she married Art Heusinkveld, who became the newspaper’s opinion editor, she became pregnant and was quietly let go and told to stay home and raise her family.

Furious, she decided to photograph the birth of her son on April 6, 1951. The photos, though tame by today’s standards, were rejected by several publishers before appearing in the Des Moines Register, the Minneapolis Tribune and Look, a national photo magazine with a circulation of 3 million.

Liffring then supported herself with a successful freelance career. Her photos chronicled the lives of women and people of color and are in museum collections, including two at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City and 270 at the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art. Her best-known photos were collected in “Women 1957-1975.”

In 1979, she founded Penfield Press, now Penfield Books, with her second husband, John Zug, in Iowa City. After his death, she married Dwayne Bourret, who helped run Penfield until his death in 2021.

She was inducted into the Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame in 1996.

In 2012, her autobiography, “Pictures and People: A Search for Visual Truth and Social Justice,” won the Benjamin Franklin Award from the Independent Book Publishers Association in the category of Autobiographies/Memoirs.

Liffring-Zug Bourret, who died Oct. 16, 2022, at age 93 at the Solon Care Center, donated more than 500,000 of her negatives from the 1940s to 2007 to the State Historical Society of Iowa.

Other honorees

Teree Caldwell-Johnson was executive director of the Metro Waste Authority in Des Moines and then the Polk County manager before becoming president and CEO of Oakridge Neighborhood and Oakridge Neighborhood Services in 2004. She also served on the Des Moines school board.

Martha-Ellen Tye was a member of the Fisher family, whose ancestor founded Fisher Controls in 1880 and put Marshalltown on the map as the leader of the valve industry. In 1976, she established the Martha-Ellen Tye Foundation, where she supported numerous causes, particularly those involving education, theater, music and libraries.

WLC conference

Those wishing to register for the WLC (formerly Women Lead Change) conference can find details at wlcglobal.org/awards/women-achievement.

The names of this year’s honorees will be added to the plaque on the Iowa Women of Achievement Bridge in downtown Des Moines.