These days we take e-mail and electronic lists for granted, but imagine a world where there is no e-mail or exchange of information like we have now? That was the world for Humanities Librarian María Teresa Márquez at the University of New Mexico (UNM) Zimmerman Library and creator of CHICLE, the first Chicana/o electronic mailing list created in 1991, to focus on Latino literature and later on the social sciences. [1] Other Chicano/Latino listservs include Roberto Vásquez’s Lared Latina of the Intermountain Southwest (Lared-L)[2] created in 1996, and Roberto Calderon’s Historia-L,created in March 2003. [3] These electronic lists were influential in expanding communication and opportunities among Chicanas/os. CHICLE, nevertheless, deserves wider recognition as a pioneering effort whose importance has been overlooked.
In many instances the Internet revolution was shepherded by librarians in their institutions. Libraries and librarians were early adopters of this new technology. Márquez used computers and e-mail in her work in the Government Information Department at UNM. However, it was in the Library and Information Science Program at California State University, Fullerton, where she first learned about and used computers in a federally-funded program in the 1970s that sought to increase the number of Mexican American librarians. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Márquez earned a Certificate of Advanced Study in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, where she learned more about computers and databases.
In April 1991, Márquez attended the Nineteenth Annual Conference (Los Dos Méxicos) of the National Association of [Chicana and ] Chicano Studies (NACS) in Hermosillo, Sonora, México. One of the panels, moderated by Professor Francisco Lomelí, University of California, Santa Barbara, presented papers on “Literatura Chicana.” While discussing the topic, scholars raised problems encountered in communicating with each other and in sharing information on new publications and current research. Márquez volunteered to create a listserv or electronic mailing list and explained how it could be of use in keeping scholars informed. At UNM, she developed the list and Professor Erlinda V. Gonzales-Berry, then a faculty member in the UNM Spanish Department, coined its name-CHICLE (which translates into gum in Spanish). CHICLE stood for Chicana/Chicano Literature Exchange.
According to Márquez, most faculty members were not willing to join CHICLE, citing no experience with computers nor did they wish to consider its potential use in academic work. Yet, Márquez launched CHICLE with eight subscribers. She attended numerous academic conferences to distribute fliers and talk to people about the list and recruit subscribers. Furthermore, she attempted to impress upon her listeners the need to be at the forefront of technology, but Márquez said she had few takers. Believing in the importance of the list and in this new form of communication, she persevered and she states: “One day, all of a sudden, membership went up to 800!” As more institutions and faculty members started using computers, the list exploded in the number of subscribers.
The idea for the list evolved from Márquez’s work in a library setting that was used to basicallycommunicating internally. At first Márquez sent out all of the information on the list because she had most of it. She would use librarian’s tools and lists of new books, information of upcoming conferences, calls for papers, and articles that would be of interest, but she received very little in return. The list was limited to her contributions in its early years. Later, as the number of subscribers in the social sciences increased the list moved away from literature. Numerous topics were discussed over the list’s ten–year history (1991-2001), but eventually its popularity led to its demise. Subscribers often stated that the list contained too much information and was time consuming.
Among the active subscribers to CHICLE wasarchivist Dorinda Moreno, [4] who later went on to work with Laredas well as withDr. Robert Calderón‘sHistoria-L.Moreno contributed history-related information. In contrast to Márquez’s effort, Calderón changed his list to a closed list with a finite number of subscribers where he posted items of interest to the Chicano/a academic community, as opposed to CHICLE which was an open forum. [5] Initially CHICLE was designed as an open forum to encourage broad participation. Dr. Tey Mariana Nunn, now Director and Chief Curator of the Art Museum and Visual Arts Program at the National Hispanic Cultural Center Art Museum in Albuquerque, played a large role in promoting the list in its early days. Nunn was a graduate work-study student. Additionally, Renee Stephens, now at San Francisco State University, then a graduate work-study student at UNM, was also editor for the list, a task inherited from Janice Gould. All these women were instrumental in the success of CHICLE. Eventually, the expansion of the Internet eclipsed Chicana/o listservs.
When CHICLE began, Márquez acted as the sole moderator, but over time, as it gained popularity, she trained students to run it. The popular list existed until her funding to hire work-study students ran out. Her institution was reluctant to provide further support. CHICLE was not considered an appropriate academic part of Márquez’s professional responsibilities. Management of the list competed with duties at the library and as subscriptions grew, it became overwhelming and difficult. Márquez who often managed the list on her own time, stated she would have continued the list but that itwould have required more energy than she was willing to invest. When Márquez decided it was time to move on and discontinue the list, she approached the UNM Technical Center to store the CHICLE files. The Center claimed it did not have sufficient storage space for her files. As news of CHICLE’s imminent shutdown spread, people volunteered to keep the list going but were deterred by the amount of work entailed.
Dr. Diana I. Rios, who has a joint appointment in the Department of Communication and El Instituto at the University of Connecticut among others, made attempts to create an archive of CHICLE. She made copies of conversations via cut and paste. There were attempts to incorporate CHICLE into another list but Ríos did not want that to happen. Eventually, Latino literary blogs such as Pluma Fronteriza [6] and La Bloga [7] emerged to continue where CHICLE left off.
After CHICLE, Márquez took her energy and enthusiasm in supporting Latina/o students and created a program called CHIPOTLE. [8] She used CHIPOTLE to familiarize Chicana/o rural students with the academic environment and to reach out to surrounding communities. Via grant and affiliated department funded sponsorship, Márquez would take posters and boxes of books by Chicana/Chicano writers to give to students when she visited Hispanic-dominate schools. As part of CHIPOTLE, she created a forum to bring Latina/o speakers into the library and encouraged Latina/o students to utilize the research resources available to them. She directed two programs funded by Rudolfo Anaya: Premío AztlánandCritica Nueva.Premío Aztlán recognized emerging Chicana/owriters and Critica Nueva was an award honoring the foremost scholars who produced a body of literary criticism based on Chicana/o literature. For many years, Márquez was the only Latina librarian at the University of New Mexico University Libraries. Presently, she is an Associate Professor Emerita. No Latina/o librarians have been hired since her retirement.
In the era of search engines, web browsers, blogs, wiki’s, intranets, and social media, it is important to recognize the efforts of a pioneering Chicana librarian and a pioneering electronic list that was a unique cultural creation. It was given life by so many who read it, posted on it, and worked on it. CHICLE brought many voices together and established a foundation for the future. As Márquez stated, “CHICLE was the catalyst for many things.” [9]
Notes
[1] María Teresa Márquez, interview by the author, Albuquerque, April 28, 2007.
[2]Lared Latina of the Intermountain Southwest, was established in the Spring of 1996 by Roberto Vásquez, as a World Wide Web Forum, for the purpose of disseminating socio-political, cultural, educational, and economic information about Latinos in the Albuquerque/Santa Fe Metro area and the Intermountain Region which includes Metropolitan Areas such as the Salt Lake City/Ogden region, Denver, Phoenix, Tucson, Boise, Las Vegas and Reno, Nevada, accessed January 30, 2014: http://www.lared-latina.com/bio.html.
[3] Dr. Roberto R. Calderón, interview by the author, College Station, Texas, December 20, 2007. Historia-l, focused on Chicano/a history, started as “96SERADC” with 200 subscribers in May 1996 and continued through October 1997. Originally housed at the University of Washington, it helped mobilize the first Immigrant Rights March on Washington, D.C., held on Saturday, October 12, 1996. The march had upwards of 50,000 participants, half of whom were Latina/o college students from across the country. The listserv list then changed venues and was housed at the University of California at Riverside becoming “2000SERADC,” from November 1997 through August 1999, at which point the listserv list was discontinued. This twice-named listserv list project lasted three-and-a-half-years.
[4] Dorinda Moreno, Chicano/native Apache (Mother, Grandmother, Great Grandmother) has worked bridging Elders, Women of Color, Inter-generational networks and alliances, with a focus on non-racist, non-sexist (LGBT community), non-toxic–Chicano/a, Mexicano/a, Latino/a, Indigenous communities, projects and networks that give voice to under-represented groups and enable feminist empowerment through social change networks and innovations. As an early Web pioneer and archivist, she has been actively using the Internet since 1973.
[5] Calderón interview.
[6] Pluma Fronteriza began as a printed newsletter, then became a blog and currently has a companion site on Facebook: Accessed February 8, 2014: http://plumafronteriza.blogspot.com/
[7]La Bloga hosts various bloggers who write on Latino/a literature. Accessed February 8, 2014: http://labloga.blogspot.com/
[8] According to the Memidex Online Dictionary and Thesaurus, Chipotle comes from the Nahuatl word chilpoctli meaning “smoked chili pepper” is a smoke-dried jalapeño, accessed January 30, 2014, http://www.memidex.com/chipotles.
[9] Márquez interview.
Miguel Juárez is a faculty member in the Department of History at the University of Texas in El Paso (UTEP), where he earned a doctorate in Borderlands History. He has a Masters in Library Science (MLS) degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo and a Masters of Arts (MA) in Border History from UTEP. In 1997, he published the book: Colors on Desert Walls: the Murals of El Paso (Texas Western Press). Miguel has curated numerous exhibits, as well as written articles in academic journals, newsletters, and newspapers focusing on librarianship, archives, and the cultural arts. From 1998 to 2008, Miguel worked as an academic librarian at the following institutions and centers: State University of New York at Buffalo; Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona; Texas A&M in College Station, TX; and the Chicano Studies Research Center (CSRC) at UCLA. He is also co-editor with Rebecca Hankins of the upcoming book Where Are All the Librarians of Color? The Experiences of People of Color in Academia,part of the Series on Critical Multiculturalism in Information Studies of Litwin Books. The author would like to thank María Teresa Márquez, Dr. Roberto Calderón, Dorinda Moreno, Dr. Tey Mariana Nunn, Renee Stephens, Rebecca Hankins and Dr. Diana Ríos for making suggestions and recommendations for this article. This work is part of a larger body of research on Chicana/o electronic and digital projects during the advent of the Internet.
Welcome to another year of Women of Library History posts! Our first post will go up tomorrow (March 1st), and then we will have a post scheduled for every other Wednesday. Our goal for 2019 is to keep posts going all year, rather than only posting in March.
Submissions are still being accepted for 2019–please see our Call for Submissions for details.
2. We have a list of potential subjects who have been suggested by readers or located in the history of the Feminist Task Force newsletter. If you’re interested in doing some research and writing a post (or multiple posts) from this list, please e-mail Katelyn at womenoflibraryhistory at gmail.
3. Encourage a friend or colleague to write a post for us!
This year, we are planning to accept & run posts throughout the year, rather than focusing only in March. However, we definitely need some posts to get going in March–if you need a deadline to motivate you, let me suggest February 11th (next Monday)!
For over forty years Dr. Barbara Williams Jenkins greatly contributed to the library profession on a local, regional and national level. Even after retiring, she continues to contribute to her beloved profession.
Barbara was born in Union, South Carolina but grew up in Orangeburg, South Carolina, where she received her high school diploma from Wilkinson High School. She graduated from Bennett College in Greensboro, North Carolina, with a B.A. degree and earned a MSLS from the University of Illinois, Urbana, IL. Her post-Master’s work included advance study at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Atlanta University and Clemson University. These subsequent educational experiences were followed by her studying and receiving her Ph. D. in Library and Information Sciences from Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick in 1980.
Her professional career began in her hometown of Orangeburg as a Reserve and Circulation Librarian at South Carolina State in 1956. After serving in this role for two years, she became the Reference and Documents Librarian. This was followed by her becoming Library Director at South Carolina State in 1962 where she served until 1987. In 1987 she was promoted to Dean of Library and Information Services at South Carolina State. She served as Dean until her retirement in 1997.
During her tenure at South Carolina State (now known as South Carolina State University), Barbara served with distinction in all roles. At the only public supported Historically Black College and University in South Carolina, Barbara worked diligently to provide leadership on the campus, in the state and beyond. She was an advocate for the library program.
Some of the leadership roles that she assumed included the following: the first African American President of the South Carolina Library Association 1986-1987; Southeastern Library Association- College Section Director 1978 – 1980; American Library Association Council 1978-1982; Association of National Agricultural Library, Inc. 1890 Land -Grant Library Directors’ Association Tuskegee University (President 1979-85); American Library Association Black Caucus – Chairperson 1984-85, Southeastern Library Network ( SOLINET) - Board of Directors 1989-92; and South Carolina Governor’s Conference on Library and Information Services (1978 – 1979) and National Endowment for the Humanities – Evaluator – 1979. In 1969 she served as a Library Evaluator – Institutional Self- Study for the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools (SACS). She continued to serve in this capacity until her retirement in 1997. She also served on the College Consulting Network in 1991 and served until retirement.
Because of her love of African American history and her passion for preserving that history, she was a member of the African-American Heritage Council and the Palmetto Trust for Historic Preservation. As a collector of African American history and a researcher, she played a significant role in the establishment of the institution’s historical collection. Her work extended beyond campus by her affiliation with the South Carolina Archives & History Commission. She was instrumental in locating and identifying campus historical sites and buildings in Orangeburg along with providing training sessions on how to preserve this history. Her actions led to her becoming a charter member of the South Carolina African American Heritage Commission.
For her service to the campus community and beyond, she received many accolades and awards during her career. She received the “Boss of the Year Award” in 1980 from the Orangeburg Chapter of the Professional Secretaries International; 1890 Land-Grant Director’s Association Award 1978-84; President’s Award, South Carolina Library Association, 1987; South Carolina State College Distinguished Service Award, 1991; SOLINET Board of Directors Service Award, 1992 and the college’s First President’s Service Award in 1997. Additionally, on February 27,2000 at the Founders’ Day program, Dr. Leroy Davis, President of South Carolina State University bestowed upon Dr. Jenkins the first emeritus award.
As a leader and advocate for the profession, Dr. Jenkins worked diligently to share and instill these values with her staff and others in the profession. She served as a role model for many librarians.
In addition to a very active professional life, she also held memberships in many civil and social organizations including Delta Sigma Theta Sorority Inc. (Past Regional Director for the South Atlantic Region). She is also a member of the Williams Chapel AME Church.
She was married to the late Robert A. Jenkins and they had two children and five grandchildren. As a retiree she continues to devote her time to African American and local history. She also loves to talk about the library profession and continues to serve as a role model for librarians and aspiring librarians.
“Retirement: A New Beginning Reflections of Dr. Barbara W. Jenkins and Mrs. Eartha J. Corbett”, June 7, 1997 Kirkland W. Green Student Center, South Carolina State University.
Our post today comes from Melissa Freiley, an LIS student at the University of North Texas and the library cataloging technician at Denton (TX) Indepedent School District.
“I get the biggest satisfaction from teaching,” Dr. Lois Mai Chan declared when asked about her greatest achievement in this 2014 video created by the Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA). From 1970 until 2011, Chan influenced hundreds of future catalogers as she taught cataloging at the University of Kentucky (UK) School of Library and Information Science in Lexington. But this wasn’t all she did.
Born on July 30, 1934, in Taiwan, Chan studied foreign languages at National Taiwan University and went on to earn a Master of Arts at Florida State University. In 1966, Chan began working at UK as a serials cataloger. She joined the faculty of the then-UK College of Library Science in 1970, and in 1980 became a full professor after obtaining her Ph.D. in comparative literature at UK.
Dr. Chan had a deep impact on cataloging and classification. Not only did she teach hundreds of future librarians during her forty-five years at UK, but she also wrote over sixty research articles and published over twenty books throughout her career, including the popular textbook Cataloging and Classification: An Introduction, now in its fourth edition. In 1989 she earned the Margaret Mann Citation, “the highest honor in cataloging bestowed by the American Library Association,” which has been given annually since 1951. [We just published a post about Margaret Mann, for whom the citation is named, earlier this month! –ed.] CALA awarded her the CALA Distinguished Service Award in 1992 for outstanding leadership and achievement in library science at the national and/or international level. In 2006 she received the Beta Phi Mu Award for her distinguished service in library education. During her career, she also served as a consultant to the Library of Congress and OCLC’s Faceted Application of Subject Terminology project.
Dr. Chan died on August 20, 2014, but her legacy lives on through the newly-created Lois Mai Chan Professional Development Grant, established by the Cataloging and Metadata Management Section (CaMMS) of the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) in 2017. The grant seeks to assist library workers from under-represented groups who are new to the metadata field in attending the American Library Association Annual Conference. The UK Lois Mai Chan Enrichment Fund also seeks to honor Chan’s legacy by providing assistance to UK students studying library science.
Dr. Chan may have believed that luck was the reason for her success, but her hard work and passion for library science and teaching are undeniable and inspiring.
This post was written by Polly Thistlethwaite, Chief Librarian, The Graduate Center, City University of New York. The photo above, taken by Liz Snyder in 2013, shows BC Sellen and Polly Thistlethwaite in New Orleans.
Betty-Carol “BC” Sellen was born 1934 in Seattle, WA. She is a librarian and a collector of American folk and outsider art and author of several resource books on the subject. She attended the University of Washington for both her Bachelor’s (1956) and Master’s (1959) degrees, and she earned a second Master’s from New York University in 1974. She held positions of increasing responsibility in the profession, starting at the Brooklyn Public Library (1959-60), then with the University of Washington Law Library (1960-63), and finally at the City University of New York Brooklyn College Library from 1964 until her retirement in 1990 as Associate Librarian for Public Services. She resides in Santa Fe, NM, and also spends time in New Orleans, LA.
As a library school student at the University of Washington, Sellen engaged with student government to pressure the university to concern itself with housing for students of color, with particular focus on students from Africa who struggled to find places to live. A media campaign called attention to discriminatory city housing practices and forced the university to support students impacted by them.
With a cohort of librarian feminists, she organized an American Library Association Preconference on the Status of Women in Librarianship sponsored by the Social Responsibilities Round Table Task Force on the Status of Women in 1974 at Douglass College, Rutgers University. In the Introduction to the proceedings from that Preconference [1], Sellen describes initial meetings of the group with the incisive directness characteristic of her commentary:
Most of this first meeting was consumed by men telling the women how to improve themselves, and furthermore that what the profession really needed was more men to improve the image. In spite of these helpful suggestions and the scornful attitude of many male SRRT members, who fancied themselves a part of the macho left, where women’s issues were considered frivolous, the women were able to organize together and to become an active and notable presence at ALA conference meetings.
Sellen further explains her cohort’s librarian-focused strategies to “utilize talents and abilities already present among women librarians and not call up experts or ‘big names’ outside the profession” to build professional self-reliance in a likely long-term struggle against systemic oppression.
The preconference generated tangible results: a national survey about union types and priorities; a feminist librarian directory and support network S.H.A.R.E. (Sisters Have Resources Everywhere); a library education resolution presented to ALA membership directing the Committee on Accreditation to practice nondiscrimination in hiring and promotion of library school members; a statement to ALA regarding the Ford Foundation-funded Council on Library Resources to examine grant awarding and promotion practices; a variety of watchdog efforts directed at library schools, the library press, and professional journals; and the recommendation that a daily ‘sexist pig’ award be reported in the ALA Conference Cognotes publication with accompanying instruction about how to make nominations for it. The conference also generated resolutions presented to the ALA for deliberation during the 1974 Annual Conference Meeting in New York City involving accreditation, child care services, position evaluation, sexist terminology, support for affirmative action, terms of administrative appointment, and women in ALA Council positions.
Sellen was also active in New York City library politics. She was President of the Library Association of the City University of New York (LACUNY) [2] during the tumultuous years of 1969 – 71 and co-chair of the 1968 LACUNY Conference [3] New Directions for the City University Libraries that laid the groundwork for the CUNY union catalog and growth of the productive coalition of CUNY libraries. Sellen’s engagement with library politics around the country introduced varieties of library organization, policies, and political concerns into CUNY library activism.
Sellen was engaged in efforts to obtain and to maintain faculty status for CUNY librarians, to match the salaries, benefits, and prestige afforded other university faculty colleagues, achieved in 1965 [4]. In her role as president of the LACUNY Sellen encouraged librarians to publish in scholarly and literary journals as appropriate platforms for librarians’ work. She wrote Librarian/author: A Practical Guide on How to Get Published (Neal-Schuman, 1985) to further that concern.
Sellen was also a defender of academic freedom. When Zoia Horn, librarian at Bucknell College in Lewisburg, PA, was jailed for refusing to turn over library borrowing records regarding the Berrigan brothers (who were imprisoned for anti-American activities) [5], Sellen organized NYC fundraising to support Ms. Horn’s legal defense. [More from WoLH on Zoia Horn here–ed.]
Sellen valued collaboration and often co-authored her academic and professional work on library salaries, alternative careers, and feminist library matters. She was a prodigious author of letters-to-the-editor of library professional publications. She wrote brief, widely-read letters for American Librarians and Library Journal on topics such as librarian faculty status, the sexist underpinnings of the librarian image problem, intellectual freedom in Cuba, sexism and salary discrimination in the library profession, suppression of gay literary identities, and on unacknowledged incidents of censorship. In 1989 she criticized appointment of Fr. Timothy Healey to head the New York Public Library on the grounds that as a CUNY administrator, prior to his NYPL appointment, Healey had systematically undermined librarians and libraries. Sellen remembered publicly that Healey, in a CUNY meeting she attended, announced that “college librarians were about as deserving of faculty status as were campus elevator operators” [6], exposing a cluster of problematic biases held by a man appointed a leading NYC cultural administrator.
In the 1970s, Sellen convinced several other librarians, including Susan Vaughn, Betty Seifert, Joan Marshall, Kay Castle, to take up residence on E. 7th Street in New York City’s East Village. She resided at 248-252 East 7th St. Sellen joined with a multi-ethnic group of residents to rehab neighborhood buildings and establish them as self-governed cooperatives. Sellen was active in the same block association that battled the drug trade that flourished in the neighborhood as early as the 1970s and continued into the 1990s [7].
In 1990 Sellen received the ALA Equality Award, commending her “outstanding contributions toward promoting equality between men and women in the library profession.” The commendation recognizes her tireless labor and sustained coalition building as a leader in several landmark conferences on sex and racial equality, and her “inspiration to several generations of activist librarians.”
Sellen’s eclectic expertise was reflected in her published works. She assembled and edited The Librarian’s Cookbook (1990). She co-authored The Bottom Line Reader: A Financial Handbook for Librarians(1990);The Collection Building Reader (1992) and What Else You Can Do with a Library Degree(1997).
In her retirement, Sellen became an accomplished collector of American folk art. She authored and co-authored several reference books on the topic, including 20th Century American Folk, Self-Taught, and Outsider Art (1993) and Outsider, Self-taught, and Folk Art: Annotated Bibliography (2002) with Cynthia Johanson; Art Centers: American Studios and Galleries for Artists with Developmental or Mental Disabilities (2008); and Self-taught, Outsider and Folk Art: A Guide to American Artists, Locations, and Resources(2016).
Born in Pennsville, Morgan County, Ohio, on May 13, 1899, librarian Frances Lydia Yocom’s contributions to librarianship are many, but most notably are marked by her thoughtful, groundbreaking works on subject retrieval of research about and by African Americans, her book reviews of works concerning African Americans, and her bibliographies, which preserve for us titles that without her documentation would likely remain lost to future readers.
Her published works provide a bibliographic foundation for understanding the complexity of subject information retrieval, controlled vocabulary, and implicit bias. Notably, her Berkeley MA thesis published as A list of subject headings for books by and about the Negro, by the H.W. Wilson Publishing Company in 1940 and cited in Arna Bontemps 1944 Library Quarterly article “Special Collections of Negroana is one such seminal work. Her 1942 review of The Negro Federal Government Worker by Lawrence J. W. Hayes in the Southern Economic Journal minces no words on discrimination and shortcomings of the Civil Service merit system as researched and described by the author Lawrence Hayes. In the same issue of the Southern Economic Journal Ms. Yocom reviews with great care and praise, Eliza Gleason’s The Southern Negro and the Public Library[1]which in turn has been cited by library historian Cheryl Knott.[2] These titles are just a few of the works published by a scholar who is in need of remembering and deserving of a deep, and rich, biography.
Who was this white woman who worked at historically black colleges and universities as well as predominately white institutions, and was a librarian who used her bibliographic skills in the crusade for racial justice? Who and what shaped her mission to live in a world of racial equality?
The Yocom family moved to Oberlin in 1907, where the father, Eli King Yocom owned a dry goods store with his brother Joseph. Frances attended Oberlin public schools; she graduated from Oberlin High School in 1917, and graduated from Oberlin College in 1921 with a major in English. Her obituary lists her having earned the Master of Arts degree from Columbia University Teachers College in 1925. Oberlin alumni magazines from 1927 and 1929 report on Ms. Yocom working at Straight College (a predecessor of Dillard University) as a librarian and also as an English teacher. Frances Yocom’s interest in librarianship was greater than in teaching, as evidenced by her move back to Ohio to work in a library. She is listed in the 1930 Census as living with her mother and working as a librarian at Oberlin College.[3] She also lived in Cleveland where she earned the B.S. in library science from Western Reserve University (now Case Western Reserve University) in 1931.
In 1939, Yocom earned the M.S. in librarianship from the University of California, Berkeley. Her MA thesis was “List of Subject Headings for Books by and about the Negro,” 1939, M.A. (California) as cited in “Graduate Theses Accepted by Library Schools in the United States from July, 1938, to June, 1945” by Dorothy Ethlyn Cole, Library Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 1 (Jan., 1947), page 56.
The January 1946 issue of CRL News, lists Ms. Yocom as a Fisk University associate librarian and cataloger “for a number of years” who has taken a position at Humboldt State College, Arcata CA.[5] From Humboldt State College which is now Humboldt State University, Frances Yocom took a cataloging position at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill where she retired from in 1964. Her career at Chapel Hill was memorialized by Betty Bolton “Small in Stature, great in spirit: A Tribute to Frances Yocom ” North Carolina Libraries, Volumes 22, no.3, Spring 1964, pages 87-89.
After retirement, Frances Yocom returned to Oberlin, Ohio and later, moved into Copeland Oaks Retirement Community, Sebring, Ohio. From her obituary, it is stated she kept up an active correspondence with friends and former colleagues. One can only hope that the letters, diaries, and photos of this remarkable librarian have been preserved. This was a life rich in work, education, travel, living in various sections of the United States, and quiet social activism. She was involved in the American Library Association and attended its meetings. She presented at the Southeastern Library Association once it integrated. She is acknowledged in the works of some the nations foremost civil rights activists and historians—for example, Harry Emerson Fosdick[6] and John Hope Franklin. She was a librarian dedicated to civil rights and social justice, using the expertise of librarianship to make positive social change. Her story needs to be told.
Notes
[1] Yocom, Frances L. (1942) Review of The Southern Negro and the Public Library. Southern Economic Journal, 8 (April): 521–2.
[2] Knott, Cheryl The Publication and Reception of The Southern Negro and the Public Library, Race, Ethnicity and Publishing in America pp 51-76, Springer 2014.
[3]1930 United States Federal Census [database on-line]. Provo, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations Inc, 2002; Original data: United States of America, Bureau of the Census. Fifteenth Census of the United States, 1930. Washington, D.C.: National Archives and Records Administration, 1930. T626, 2,667 rolls.
[4] Franklin, John Hope, Mirror to America, 2005, page 47.
[5] “New from the Field” College and Research Libraries, January 1946, vol 7, no 1, page 83.
[6] Miller, Robert Moats, Harry Emerson Fosdick: Preacher, Pastor, Prophet, Oxford University Press, 1985, page 572.
This post was written by Keith Muchowski, who is an Instruction/Reference Librarian at the Ursula C. Schwerin Library, New York City College of Technology (CUNY), in Brooklyn, NY. He blogs at thestrawfoot.com. Keith also provided the image above of Nora E. Cordingley’s 1931 naturalization card.
Nora E. Cordingley died on March 14, 1951. The name may not be familiar, but Ms. Cordingley was active for three decades in one of the most significant projects in presidential librarianship: the collection, preservation and dissemination of the letters, papers, and hundreds of thousands of other items related to the short, strenuous life of Theodore Roosevelt. When the twenty-sixth president died on January 6, 1919, his family, friends, and close associates formed the Roosevelt Memorial and Woman’s Roosevelt Memorial Associations. One of the first moves of the RMA and WRMA was purchasing the East 20th Street site upon which Theodore Roosevelt was born in 1858, and where he lived until his early teens. The groups also bought the neighboring lot where young Theodore’s uncle, Robert B. Roosevelt, resided. Roosevelt House, as it was originally called, opened to great fanfare on October 27, 1923, what would have been Theodore Roosevelt’s sixty-fifth birthday. The institution had two missions: to be a museum & library and to serve as something of a center for American Studies. Ironically however one of Roosevelt House’s most important players in these years was not American, but Canadian: Nora Evelyn Cordingley.
Ms. Cordingley was born in Brockville, Ontario on January 23, 1888. She came to New York City to attend Queens College, from which she seems to have graduated around 1910. Cordingley was a student in the first class of the Library School of The New York Public Library in 1911. The NYPL’s new initiative was not a library program as we know it today, but more a vehicle to train para-professionals who would go on to work in various support services. (The New York Public Library program lasted fifteen years. It was merged along with the New York State School at Albany to become part of Columbia University’s new School of Library Service.) Somewhere in these years—the chronological record is unclear—Cordingley, her parents, and her sister settled in Tuckahoe just north of New York City in Westchester County. Cordingley worked as an assistant in the library of the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. The work was probably unrewarding, but in all likelihood it was through this position that she got her break, for it happened to be at the Metropolitan Life Tower at 1 Madison Avenue and 23rd Street that the Roosevelt Memorial Association opened its headquarters in 1919. It was there in 1921 that the RMA offered Ms. Cordingley a job as a cataloger with the Bureau of Roosevelt Research and Information.
Memorial officials had been collecting material even in these years before the House opened in 1923. By 1921, the year she hired on, the RMA had gathered nearly 15,000 individual items. The items were as disparate as the life they represented and included many of the over 100,000 letters that Roosevelt penned, various editions of the nearly three dozen books he authored, positive and negative political cartoons that captured his unique physical bearing and caricaturist’s dream of a visage, scrapbooks, political campaign ephemera, speeches, a vast film archive, and much more. One must remember that this was something of a new and original enterprise; presidential libraries did not exist at tis time and would not for another two decades when another Roosevelt, Franklin D., created the first one at his home in Hyde Park. The Theodore Roosevelt Collection only grew after the opening of the house in 1923. Assessing the RMA’s work in 1929, a decade after its founding, Director Hermann Hagedorn told an audience at the American Library Association conference in Washington D.C. that a New York Public Library official had informed him that Bureau of Roosevelt Research and Information was the largest library dedicated to one individual in the United States. The work continued into the 1930s. Meanwhile, Ms. Cordingley became became a naturalized American in 1931. In 1933-34 she served as chairperson of Museums, Arts & Humanities Division of the Special Libraries Association.
After twenty years on East 20th Street the Roosevelt Collection moved to Harvard’s Widener Library in 1943. When the collection relocated, so did Ms. Cordingley. She moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts and continued her work. She gave an address on the rarities within the collection at the Bibliographical Society of America conference in January 1945. One of her many projects in these years included assisting with the organization and eventual publication of Roosevelt’s correspondence. Starting in 1948, the Harvard Library, Roosevelt Memorial Association and Massachusetts Institute of Technology began a project to edit and annotate Theodore Roosevelt’s 150,000 letters. Harvard University Press published volumes one and two of The Letters of Theodore Roosevelt in April 1951. These were the first installments of what would eventually be an eight volume undertaking. About 10% of Roosevelt’s total output—nearly 15,000 some odd letters—were eventually published in the set over the next several years. Sadly, Nora was not there to see any of it. Nora Evelyn Cordingley died of a heart attack in her office in Harvard’s Widener Library on March 14, 1951.
Bibliography:
Cordingley, Nora E. “Extreme Rarities in the Published Works of Theodore Roosevelt.” The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, vol. 39, no. 1, 1945, pp. 20-50.
Hagedorn, Hermann. “Building Up the Roosevelt Memorial Collection.” Bulletin of the American Library Association, vol. 23, no. 8, 1929, pp. 252–254.
Roosevelt Memorial Association: A Report of Its Activities, 1919-1921, Roosevelt Memorial Association, New York, 1921.
Today’s submission was written by an anonymous submitter from New England who is passionate about public libraries’ roles to educate the public on digital privacy and surveillance.
Alison Macrina is a librarian, internet activist, the founder and director of the Library Freedom Project, and a core contributor to The Tor Project. Alison is passionate about connecting surveillance issues to larger global struggles for justice, demystifying privacy and security technologies for ordinary users, and resisting an internet controlled by a handful of intelligence agencies and giant multinational corporations.
Alison was a longtime public librarian and left her job to found the Library Freedom Project. This non-profit’s mission is to train and lead librarians on key privacy issues. Their services are free, and the Project offers timely tools, articles, and resources for the general public as well as librarians. Alison started the Library Freedom Project because she is a believer in access to information. She notes that, as stewards of information and providers of Internet access, librarians play a central role in meeting the information needs of communities and are in an obvious position to educate patrons about how to shield their privacy from surveillance threats.
The Library Freedom Project began by teaching privacy tools to librarians all over New England, and they have scaled their work in a huge way, bringing anti-surveillance workshop to libraries across the country. The Library Freedom Institute has started in 2018, which is a privacy-focused collaborative program between New York University and the Library Freedom Project. Alison has inspired many libraries and librarians to walk the privacy walk, not just talk about privacy. She taught over 50 classes in 2017, and while she continues to do outreach, her work is on training others in the Library Freedom Institute to spread the privacy bug.
Libraries provide access to information and in doing so should protect patrons’ right to explore new ideas, no matter how controversial or subversive, unfettered by the pernicious effects of online surveillance. What’s more, public libraries serve communities that have historically come under more surveillance and scrutiny than the general population, including people of color, Muslims, queer people, transgender people, political activists, the formerly incarcerated, and people living in poverty. Libraries are centers of democracy, and the Library Freedom Project gives librarians the information and tools they need to ensure their institutions remain beacons of intellectual freedom in an open society. Alison works with organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Tor Project, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Free Software Foundation.
(Sections used with permission from Libraryfreedomproject.org)
Today’s submission is by Christopher A. Brown, Special Collections Curator for the Children’s Literature Research Collection, Free Library of Philadelphia. The image of Mrs. Field is courtesy of the Children’s Literature Research Collection, Free Library of Philadelphia.
It’s impossible to think of the field of children’s librarianship without thinking of Carolyn Wicker Field. Mrs. Field (as she is still known at the Free Library of Philadelphia) was a driving force across the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania as well nationally. In her 30-plus year career, Mrs. Field headed the Office of Work with Children and oversaw the creation of the Children’s Literature Research Collection, the second largest repository of children’s literature, original artwork, manuscripts, and ephemera in the nation. Field’s passion for the promotion of children’s literature was unquenchable; she served as the president of the Children’s Division of the American Library Association (now known as the Association for Library Service to Children) and the Pennsylvania Library Association. From 1958-1960, Mrs. Field was a member of the Newbery-Caldecott Medal Selection Committee and chaired the committee in 1958.
Mrs. Field was honored with numerous awards throughout her lifetime. In 1963, she was awarded the Scholastic Library Publishing Award. In 1974, she was named a Distinguished Daughter of Pennsylvania, an award given to Pennsylvania women whose accomplishments have state or national importance. In 1994, Mrs. Field was the recipient of the Association for Library Service to Children’s Distinguished Service Award, and in 1996 she was the first recipient of the Catholic Library Association’s Mary A. Grant Award for outstanding volunteer service. She was honored by the Pennsylvania Library Association in 1984 when the Youth Services Division named an award in her honor. The Carolyn W. Field Award is presented annually to a Pennsylvania children’s author or illustrator.
Carolyn Wicker Field died from congestive heart failure in Philadelphia on July 24, 2010. A copy of her favorite quote by Walter de la Mare still hangs in the Children’s Literature Research Collection: “Only the rarest kind of best in anything can be good enough for the young.” It is a philosophy that is still firmly embraced at the Free Library of Philadelphia.
Today’s post is from Ashley C. Huser, Digital Resources Librarian at the Evans Library, Florida institute of Technology. The photographs of Barbara Gittings are from LGBT History Month, where additional resources about Gittings are available.
Born on July 31st 1932, Barbara Gittings “is widely regarded as the mother of the LGBT civil rights movement” (LGBT History Month, 2006, para. 1). Her involvement in the movement began in 1956, long before the infamous Stonewall Riots of 1969 (Stein, 2009). Her prolific pioneering activism spanned far and wide, including within the world of libraries.
Gittings’ immersion into library service happened organically. While attempting to accept and learn about her own homosexuality, she scoured libraries and bookstores on a quest for literature on the topic, but remained largely empty-handed and unsatisfied (Kniffel, 1999). Therefore, when she got wind that a collection of gay librarians had formed a group within the American Library Association (ALA), she decided to join their mission, hoping to help increase the availability and discoverability of gay literature (Kniffel, 1999). In 1970 she created “a list of 37 gay-positive books, magazine articles, and pamphlets – the first version of a resource that would be known as ‘A Gay Bibliography’” (ALA, 2017, para. 3). In 1972 she officially joined the ALA and became the Task Force Coordinator of what was then known as ALA’s Task Force on Gay Liberation (ALA, 2017). This task force was the first professional organization of its kind. Today, this trailblazing group is known as the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table (GLBTRT).
Although not formally trained as a librarian, Gittings was welcomed by the ALA with open arms (Kniffel, 1999). She went on to become an essential activist within the library community, serving as the Task Force Coordinator for fifteen years (Independence Branch Library, 2012). In an interview with Kniffel in 1999 she reflected that,
What has changed, in the nearly 30 years since the task force started, is simply that librarians have not only become accustomed to gay literature – which is now, happily, a flood of gay literature – but they have embraced it and taken it up. You don’t have to have quite the nudging and pressure that we had to use in the early years to get librarians to pay attention at all to the emerging gay literature. (p.75)
Gittings died at the age of 74 on February 18th, 2007 (Fox, 2007). However, her legacy and accomplishments live on in infinite respects within the library world and the LGBT community as a whole. Several library related tributes have been created to memorialize her legacy including: the Barbara Gittings Gay & Lesbian Collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia, the Barbara Gittings and Kay Tobin Lahusen Gay History Papers and Photographs collection of The New York Public Library, and the GLBTRT’s Barbara Gittings Literature Award.
This article was written by kYmberly Keeton, who is a writer, independent publisher, and art librarian. A version of this article previously appeared in the Dallas Weekly, and kYmberly has updated it with her recent research findings. She notes, “I am also a native of Fort Worth, Texas–[Horace] lived there the majority of her life… I have had the opportunity to visit where she lived, did extensive research, read the book mentioned in the article, and now continuing on to include her in a forthcoming book that I am writing. I am the second author and only librarian to have documented her life at this point.”
The image is courtesy of the Tarrant County Black Historical and Genealogical Society.
Texas’ first African American woman novelist was also a biographer, diarist, educator, publisher, and librarian. Lillian B. Horace was born on April 29, 1880 in Jefferson, Texas. Her parents were Thomas Armstead and Mary Ackard. The family moved to Fort Worth, Texas when Lillian was a young toddler. She would go on to receive her early and formal education, graduating from the historically black institution, I. M. Terrell High School. Lillian enrolled in Bishop College in Marshall, Texas, where she took classes from 1898 to 1899. She focused her entire life around writing, entrepreneurship, community activism, philanthropy, and her faith.
Like most women in the south, Lillian B. Horace began her journey in education before she graduated from college. She taught in area schools in Fort Worth, Texas, for six years, and then traveled to different universities throughout the United States to further her education. Lillian received a Bachelor’s Degree in 1924 from Simmons University in Louisville, Kentucky. After graduating from college, Lillian B. Horace was appointed as Dean of Women at Simmons University for two years. She then returned to Fort Worth, Texas, to become the Dean of Girls at I.M. Terrell High School where she established the school’s library, journalism, drama departments and the school newspaper. Lillian B. Horace was a member of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Alphin Art and Charity Club, Progressive Woman’s Club, and the Order of the Eastern Star. Through all of Lillian B. Horace’s contributions in the community, little is known or has been publicized about her writing career until now. The writer’s papers are available in Fort Worth, Texas at the Genealogy, History & Archives Unit at the Fort Worth Public Library, and at the Tarrant County Black Genealogical Society.
During the early part of the 20th century, few African American women were known to carry the title of writer or entrepreneur in the south. Horace was a publisher and shared an office with James I. Dotson where they established the Dotson-Jones Printing Company. Lillian B. Horace self-published her first book in 1916, Five Generations Hence –a utopian novel. Lillian’s themes in her first body of work focused on black women’s education, philanthropy, economic self-empowerment, and social etiquette. She used her first novel as a platform for discussion about blacks returning to their origins – the continent of Africa. The writer began working on her second novel, Angie Brown, in the 1930’s; married a preacher, Joseph Gentry Horace of Groveton, Texas; and became a member of the National Association of Colored Women’s Club. The couple divorced and Lillian B. Horace continued writing and added another genre to her literary prowess: Biography.
Dr. Lacey Kirk Williams presented Lillian B. Horace with the opportunity to write his biography. In 1938, the writer began documenting his life, and produced Sun-Crowned: A Biography of: Dr. Lacey Kirk Williams, published in 1964, by L. Venchael Booth. In the writer’s own words at the beginning pages, she clearly expresses to the reader that this is an accurate portrait of the subject:
“This is not a report on notes gathered from out-of-the-way sources, nor an additional stroke to an already developed portrait. The subject stood before me a living, breathing human being, plodding this work-a-day world shackled by all superstitions, inhibitions, and privations and restrictions of a member of an underpriving group. I saw that he had the furnace finer than most given the same test, and he rose about the mediocrity that might have been his.”
Lillian B. Horace begins the biography with a stroke of prose about the life of Dr. Lacey Kirk Williams. His parents, Levi and Elizabeth Williams were both slaves; and were given their freedom in 1865, per the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation by President Lincoln. They had seven children; Lacey Kirk Williams was the second son born on July 11, 1811. The writer provides the reader with information about the Williams family migration from the backwoods of Alabama to the southwest region of Texas. In like manner, the author states that she does her best to have the voice of an interviewer, but filled with the spirit of her faith, her talent for writing prose seeped into the biography to paint a portrait vividly for the reader, ultimately always wanting to offer an honest and thorough visual depiction of the subject’s life.
Dr. Lacey Kirk Williams received a major part of his education and life-skills, religion, society, and culture from Thankful Baptist Church, in Alabama. He received his formal education under the direction of a white church member that was originally from the east coast. His father was ordained as a deacon in the church and his mother became a prayer leader. They became a religious force in their community, gaining the trust of their peers. Levi Williams received with word from another well-known preacher that resided in their town about the opportunities given to newly freed slaves in the southwest region of Texas. He decided to leave his family for a brief time and visit the southwest, to check out the possibilities that were available for black people. In the late 1800’s, the Williams family migrated from the state of Alabama to Burleson County, Texas. Once there, young Lacey Kirk Williams attended a school that his father helped found, River Lane Public School. Their lives never were the same after they migrated to Texas.
Levi Williams would go on to run for County Commissioner, was into education, and ordained a reverend. Lacey Kirk Williams followed his father’s every move and mimicked a preacher every time a chance presented itself. Lillian B. Horace portrays his character from boyhood to a young man as a life filled with wisdom passed on from generations of slaves and freedmen. The young man’s journey as an educator and minister led him through many doors and cities; opportunities opened up for him in many ways. He married one of his pupils, Georgia Lewis; their families had migrated to the southwest together. As a family man, Lacey Kirk Williams took full advantage of everything that came his way, including passing the state educator’s exam, and receiving his call and license as a minister in December of 1894. In the early 1900’s the Baptist minister enrolled in Bishop College in Marshall, Texas, and supported his young wife’s quest for knowledge; she enrolled in a women’s school and became a student-teacher. Lacey Kirk Williams’ first sermon was given at a revival in Cookespoint, Texas.
Lillian B. Horace documents in the biography that Dr. Lacey Kirk Williams would go on to receive a D.D. degree from Selma University and an LL.D degree from Bishop College. He then began preaching on a full-time basis. During his tenure as a religious leader, he led congregations at Macedonia Baptist Church in Dallas, Texas in 1907 and then took over Mt. Gilead Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas in 1909. He was a leader and supporter of the Lincoln Association, Baptist Missionary, and the Educational Convention. Williams transitioned out of Texas to become pastor of Chicago’s Olivet Baptist Church in 1916; it was the largest Black church in the United States with 12,000 members. He went on to receive awards and accolades for his work in the black community on a national scale. Lacey Kirk Williams died shortly after accepting an award on October 29, 1940 in Flint, Michigan. He was buried at Lincoln Cemetery in Chicago.
Lillian B. Horace documented the southern migration of an African American male born to parents of slaves, his rise to prominence as a Baptist minister, and national leader. The biography is listed in The Papers of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.: Advocate for Social Gospel–referencing the work of the author.
Horace, L. B. (1995). Daring to Dream: Utopian Fiction by United States Women Before 1950. In C. F. Kesslee, Daring to Dream: Utopian Fiction by United States Women Before 1950 (pp. 175-186). Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press.
Horace, L. (1964). Sun-Crowned: Biography of Dr. Lacey Kirk Williams. Fort Worth: L. Venchael Booth.
Margaret Mann (1873-1960) was a librarian and educator whose work and scholarship emphasized the role of theory in cataloging and classification. Her passion for information organization inspired the many students she taught to see cataloging and classification as an essential service to library users.
Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on April 9, 1873, as an adolescent Mann moved with her family to Chicago and graduated from Englewood High School. She enrolled at Chicago’s Armour Institute in 1893, as one of the first twelve students in the library program (the Armour Institute was only the fourth school for the education of librarians in the U.S. and the first west of the Alleghanies). There she studied preservation, cataloging, accessioning, and shelf-listing, as well as learning library hand. After graduating a year later, most of her cohort moved on to library jobs, but Mann was asked to stay on as an assistant at Armour, serving as a cataloger and occasional instructor. When the library science department was moved from Armour to the University of Illinois in 1897, Mann was appointed to the staff of the new program. While teaching at the University of Illinois, she also worked towards creating consistent policies of cataloging and classification within its library. Mann moved on to the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh in 1902, serving as head of the Cataloging Department until 1919. From 1919 to 1924 she undertook a massive reorganization of the collections of the Library of the Engineering Societies in New York City.
After returning from teaching cataloging and classification at the École de Bibliothécaires in Paris in 1926, she began as an instructor at the University of Michigan as one of the first three faculty hired at the beginning of the school’s library science program. Unlike her own library school experience thirty years earlier, which was highly focused on everyday library practice, Mann’s publications and teaching focused on the need to understand the theory of cataloging and classification to serve library users well. Her textbook, “An Introduction to Cataloging and the Classification of Books,” first published in 1930 by ALA, was widely used by library schools and helped standardize the cataloging content taught to library students. She would remain at the University of Michigan until her retirement at age 65 in 1938, impressing upon her many students the important role of information organization in libraries.
Mann died in 1960 but her name and legend live on in the University of Michigan’s Margaret Mann Award, established in 1938, as well as in the Margaret Mann Citation, awarded yearly by ALA to recognize outstanding professional achievement in cataloging or classification. Mann was also listed within American Libraries’s 1999 article on “100 of the Most Important Leaders We Had in the 20th Century”.
Resources consulted:
Clack, Doris H. (1993). Education for Cataloging.Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 16:3, 27-37, DOI: 10.1300/J104v16n03_04
“As a journalist visiting El Salvador during its brutal civil war, I met Ana Margarita Gasteazoro in the women’s prison of Ilopango. I was struck by her passion for justice, her honesty, and her compassion for what the people of her country have suffered. The same qualities shine through in this book. Judy Blankenship and Andrew Wilson have done a great service in making this remarkable woman’s story available to readers. I hope they will be as inspired and moved by it as I am.”
Sadie Hawkins came into conversation during an episode of Little House on the Prairie where Laura and Mrs. Snider try to get their respective gents jealous so they can get invited to the Spring Dance. They instead ask their guys to go to the dance.
The origin of Sadie Hawkins and the dance that has her name is interesting. I had no idea It originated in the Al Capp comic strip Lil Abner.
On This Day in History June 12, 1931: Nurse, adventurer and inspirational speaker Barbara Hillary (June 12, 1931 - November 23, 2019) is born in New York, NY.
Hillary holds the distinction of being the first black woman to reach the North Pole on April 23, 2007 and the South Pole on January 6, 2011. She was 75 when she reached the North Pole and 79 at the South Pole!!!! Amazing!!!
Hillary was also the founder of the Arverne Action Association and the Peninsula Magazine.
Hillary would earn the Woman of Courage Award in 2008 from the National Organization for Women. In 2020, she was posthumously inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.
On This Day in June 10, 1963: President John F. Kennedy signs the Equal Pay Act of 1963 (Pub. L. 88-38) which is part of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, as amended (FLSA).
The act purpose was “to prohibit discrimination on account of sex in the payment of wages by employers engaged in commerce or in the production of goods for commerce.”
In other words, the act “prohibited sex-based wage discrimination between men and women in the same establishment who perform jobs that require substantially equal skill effort responsibility under similar working conditions.
The act was part of JFK’s New Frontier Program. Alas, almost 60-years later, women are still fighting for equal pay compared to men in the same jobs within the workplace.
“"She was an immigrant fleeing persecution. A refugee in need of safe haven. And like so many before her — and after — she was proudly American. To make this country that she loved even better — she defied convention and broke barriers again and again,”“
“"Girls sort of start to take the bull by the horns and not only ask, but in some cases demand that they be given full rights, like their male counterparts,” Balin says. “And that’s what happens.”“
