In 1951, Joan Liffring-Zug Bourret was fired from her job as a photojournalist at the Cedar Rapids Gazette. The reason: she was pregnant.
She responded by photographing the birth to her son — an audacious proposition at the time. The photos — mostly shots of the doctors, nurses and newborn Artie from her POV on the delivery bed — were deemed “unfit to print” by many of the magazines she submitted them to, but were ultimately printed by the Des Moines Sunday Register, Minneapolis Tribune and Look magazine.
This fierce rebuke of sex-based discrimination helped launch, and set the tone for, Liffring-Zug Bourret’s trailblazing career. Through her own freelance photography business in Cedar Rapids, she captured images of the city’s prominent families, women’s clubs, underrepresented and misrepresented Iowans, and famous people who visited the area, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Barack Obama. She was inducted into the Iowa Women’s Hall of Fame in 1996.
Liffring-Zug Bourret passed away in 2022 at the age of 93…