In honor of Women’s History Month, the Ward Museum featured an exhibit of carvings by women from the early twentieth century to the present day. Although bird carving is associated strongly with me, women have been carving since at least the 1920s, when Helen Lay Strong of upstate New York began selling her carvings of miniature waterfowl, songbirds, and dogs. Gladys Black, “the bird lady of Iowa” and an avid conservationist, exhibited a carving in the very first Ward World Championship exhibition in 1968.
