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Documenting
Little-Known Feminists
By Trinity Peacock-Broyles '03
In the Second-Wave Feminism Project,
Smith College is partnering with the Ford Foundation to document
a part of the women’s
movement that has previously been ignored -- that of grassroots, underrepresented
feminists. The Ford Foundation’s $259,066 two-year grant, given
in September 2002, will allow the Sophia Smith Collection
to document and preserve the history of the “Second-Wave” feminist
movement, which began in the 1960s and ended, arguably, with
the defeat of the
Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1982.
By forming a team of interviewers, the staff at the Sophia
Smith Collection will be
able to collect letters and diaries as well as oral histories
of these women in order to present a view of the feminist
movement that encompasses
women of all races and classes.
Gloria Steinem ’56, writer, editor,
feminist activist and former trustee, is lending a hand by
providing contacts and personal experience. “What
she knows about who did what, when and where is exactly what we needed in order
to amass the raw materials needed to make the historical record more inclusive
and thus more accurate,” notes Sherrill Redmon, director of the Sophia
Smith Collection.
The Ford Foundation has also awarded Steinem
a grant that will allow her to delve through her own papers at the Sophia
Smith Collection
to research a book about
her 30 years of grassroots organizing. The Gloria Steinem Papers consist of
237 boxes of information ranging from 1940 to 2000. Steinem’s correspondence,
writings, speeches, subject files, memorabilia, photographs and other papers
provide a rich documentation of the women’s movement. As the description
of her papers testifies: “Within the papers is evidence of her friendships
and political work with pioneering African-American feminists such as Florynce
Kennedy and Dorothy Pitman Hughes; lesbian authors and activists Andrea Dworkin,
Rita Mae Brown, and Kate Millett; and labor organizers such as the United Farmworkers’ Dolores
Huerta.” Steinem was not only in contact with well-known figures; among
her friends were important feminists and activists who were never recognized
by the mainstream media. |
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