Event Archive: "Resourceful Women: Researching and Interpreting American Women's History."

Introduction

On Thursday and Friday, June 19-20, 2003, the Library of Congress sponsored a free, two-day symposium titled, "Resourceful Women: Researching and Interpreting American Women's History." The event highlighted current research in the field of American women's history, showcased the Library's magnificent multiformat holdings, and explored in particular the sources and methodologies being used by academic scholars, filmmakers, journalists, theatrical performers, museum curators, children's book authors, and others engaged in uncovering and presenting the story of American women's experiences to a variety of audiences.

The panelists, reflecting the diversity of the Library's researchers, described interesting sources and where to find them, discussed new and creative ways of interpreting familiar sources, contemplated the effects of the electronic revolution on women's history research, and suggested how the nation's library can sustain and promote cutting-edge research in the field of women's history.

The symposium capped a multiyear effort to identify and publicize the Library's holdings in American women's history, which included the December 2001 publication of the 456-page American Women: A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women's History and Culture in the United States and the June 2003 release of a companion American Women Web site that served as a gateway to conducting research in the Library's vast online and traditional resources in American women's history..

June 19-20, 2003
Coolidge Auditorium, Ground Floor
Thomas Jefferson Building

Funding for the symposium and film series was made possible by grants from the Library of Congress Manuscript Division Benjamin Fund and the James H. Billington Endowment.

Web Archive of Original Symposium Pages

Webcasts of Proceedings

Resourceful Women Symposium Panel One: Biographical Writings

Date & Time of Original Event: 06/19/2003 @ 1:00PM
Sponsoring Division: Manuscript Division
Division Contact POC: Janice Ruth
Speaker(s) Names: Diane Nester Kresh, Susan Ware, A’Lelia Bundles, Joanne Passet, Allida M. Black
Language: English
Length of Video: 01:13:38

Opening remarks: Diane Nester Kresh, Director for Public Service Collections at the Library of Congress. Kresh directs a staff responsible for fifteen of the Library's reading rooms, including the historic Main Reading Room, and for custody and security of more than 113 million items in the Library's general and special collections. Kresh founded the Collaborative Digital Reference Service, a project to build a global, Web-based reference service among libraries and research institutions, which has now become QuestionPoint, a service codeveloped by the Library of Congress and OCLC. For her role in launching the Collaborative Digital Reference Service, Kresh received a 2001 Federal 100 award given by Federal Computer Week to top executives in government, industry, and academia who have made the greatest impact on the government information systems community. It honors those who have "made a difference in the way organizations develop, acquire, and manage information technology." Kresh is a frequent speaker at professional meetings and conferences and is the author of several articles on digital reference services. She holds a bachelor's degree in theater and a master's degree in library science from the Catholic University of America, and she has been a staunch supporter of her staff's efforts to promote the Library's women's history collections.
Susan Ware is currently editing the fifth volume of Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. She taught at New York University from 1986 to 1995. She is the author of several books on women and the New Deal, including the biographies Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism, and New Deal Politics and Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism. She has also served as an advisor for documentary editing microform projects on Eleanor Roosevelt and the League of Women Voters. Ware headed the Scholars Advisory Committee and wrote the introduction for American Women: A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women's History and Culture in the United States. She is currently completing a biography of radio pioneer Mary Margaret McBride.
A'Lelia Bundles, the director of talent development for ABC News in Washington, D.C., and New York, is ABC's former Washington deputy bureau chief and an Emmy Award-winning producer. Her 1991 young adult biography of her great-great-grandmother, Madam C. J. Walker, received an American Book Award. On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C. J. Walker, her adult biography, was named a 2001 New York Times Notable Book and received the Letitia Woods Brown Book Prize from the Association of Black Women Historians for the best book on black women's history published in 2001. She has served on the advisory board of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America and currently is at work on the first comprehensive biography of her great-grandmother, A'Lelia Walker, a central figure of the Harlem Renaissance.
Joanne Passet is an assistant professor of history at Indiana University East, in Richmond, Indiana. She formerly taught in the graduate programs of library and information science at Indiana University Bloomington, Dominican University, and University of California, Los Angeles. The University of Illinois Press issued her book, Sex Radicals and the Quest for Women's Equality, this spring in its Women in American History series. Passet also is the author of Cultural Crusaders: Women Librarians in the American West, 1900-1917, and coauthor with Mary Niles Maack of Aspirations and Mentoring in an Academic Environment. A graduate of the women's history program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, she serves on the executive board of the Indiana Women's History Association. Currently she is working on a study of the life and times of nineteenth-century spiritualist, water-cure physician, and political activist Juliet H. Severance.
Allida M. Black, research professor of history and international affairs at George Washington University, serves as director and editor of the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers, a letterpress and electronic documentary edition of Roosevelt's political writings and radio and television appearances. In addition to several books on Roosevelt (including Casting Her Own Shadow: Eleanor Roosevelt and the Shaping of Postwar Liberalism), Black has published an oral history of the Woman's National Democratic Club and edited Modern American Queer History. She is currently writing a political biography of Eleanor Roosevelt for Oxford University Press and First Women: Power, Image and Politics from Betty Ford through Hillary Rodham Clinton, an assessment of the influence of first ladies on cold war politics for Columbia University Press. She is a member of the Arlington County Human Rights Commission and a director of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute. She teaches classes on United States political history and twentieth-century social movements.

Resourceful Women Symposium Panel Two: Biographical Interpretations at Historic Sites, On State, and In Film; includes Historical Performance: Biographical Interpretations

Date & Time of Original Event: 06/19/2003 @ 3:15PM
Sponsoring Division: Manuscript Division
Division Contact POC: Janice Ruth
Speaker(s) Names: Susan Ware, Esther White, Virginia Yans, Kristy Anderson, and Lynn Schrichte
Language: English
Length of Video: 01:56:11

Susan Ware is currently editing the fifth volume of Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University. She taught at New York University from 1986 to 1995. She is the author of several books on women and the New Deal, including the biographies Partner and I: Molly Dewson, Feminism, and New Deal Politics and Still Missing: Amelia Earhart and the Search for Modern Feminism. She has also served as an advisor for documentary editing microform projects on Eleanor Roosevelt and the League of Women Voters. Ware headed the Scholars Advisory Committee and wrote the introduction for American Women: A Library of Congress Guide for the Study of Women's History and Culture in the United States. She is currently completing a biography of radio pioneer Mary Margaret McBride.
Esther White is the director of archaeology at Mount Vernon, George and Martha Washington’s home in Virginia. Since 1987, archaeology has functioned as a permanent part of Mount Vernon’s research program to study the plantation. Details about slave life, daily life of the Washington family, evolution of the plantation landscape, and various plantation activities such as blacksmithing and farming have been revealed through excavation. Currently White is in charge of the excavation and historical research of Mount Vernon’s 1797 whiskey distillery, a project that will help document one of Washington’s most lucrative business interests and allow better interpretation of his entrepreneurial activities. Her research interests include plantation life, the role of historic sites in presenting history, and historic ceramics. White has published articles on public archaeology, archaeology of enslaved African Americans, eighteenth-century material culture, teaching archaeology to deaf students, and reconstruction of a blacksmith shop at Mount Vernon.
Virginia Yans is a professor of history and former chair of women’s studies at Rutgers University, where she has taught since 1978. She is the author, coauthor, or editor of several books, including Family and Community: Italian Immigrants in Buffalo, 1880-1930, Immigration Reconsidered: History, Sociology, and Politics, and Ellis Island and the Peopling of America: The Official Guide. Her documentary film, Margaret Mead: An Observer Observed, aired on PBS television in 1996 and continues to be broadcast around the world. Yans is currently working on a biography of Mead and was an advisor to the Library of Congress on its recent exhibition Margaret Mead: Human Nature and the Power of Culture. She is the recipient of numerous fellowships and serves on various public history boards, including the advisory boards for the Museum of Women and Learning Center, now being planned for lower Manhattan, and the Sewall-Belmont House, home of the National Woman’s Party, in Washington, D.C. In fall 2003, Yans will begin a two-year study at the Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis on the history of single persons.
Kristy Andersen is currently finishing postproduction on BlackSouth: The Life Journey of Zora Neale Hurston, a feature-length film for PBS funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the Southern Humanities Media Fund, the National Black Programming Consortium, and the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs. With funds from humanities councils, she researched Hurston in eight states and was instrumental in assisting the Library of Congress to find and identify films recorded by Hurston at The Church of the Living God in Beaufort, South Carolina, in 1939. Andersen has represented BlackSouth at the International Film Financing Conference in San Francisco and the Independent Feature Film Market in New York, and recently presented Hurston’s Beaufort films at the Orphans Film Symposium at the University of South Carolina. She won an EMMY for her PBS documentary Sea Turtles Last Dance, has a degree in broadcast journalism from the University of Florida, and lives in Tampa with her husband and son.
Lynn Schrichte is a Washington, D.C. playwright and performer who transformed manuscript materials from the Library of Congress into a one-woman show on the famous actress Minnie Maddern Fiske (1865-1932). Schrichte then turned to newspaper and magazine articles to research the exciting life of world-circling journalist Nellie Bly (1865-1922). Since 1995, she has toured the United States with her two plays Mrs. Fiske: Against the Wind and Did You Lie, Nellie Bly? She is both the author of and actor in each. Schrichte began her professional acting and dancing career at age fourteen and has appeared on television and in productions around the country, including plays at the Studio, Roundhouse, Horizons, and Source theaters.

Resourceful Women Symposium Keynote: Women and the Law

Date & Time of Original Event: 06/19/2003 @ 8:00PM
Sponsoring Division: Manuscript Division
Division Contact POC: Janice Ruth
Speaker(s) Names: James H. Billington, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Wendy Webster Williams, Linda K. Kerber, Patricia J. Williams
Language: English
Length of Video: 01:24:10

James H. Billington was sworn in as the Librarian of Congress in 1987, the thirteenth person to hold the position since the Library was established in 1800. He has championed the Library's "American Memory" National Digital Library (NDL) Program, which has made freely available online millions of historical items from the Library’s collections. He also created the Library's first national private-sector advisory group, the James Madison Council, whose members have supported the NDL Program, purchased acquisitions for the Library's collections, and funded many other Library programs. Billington earned his doctorate from Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar at Balliol College. Following service with the U.S. Army and in the Office of National Estimates, he taught history at Harvard University and then at Princeton University. From 1973 to 1987, he was director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Among his many awards, Billington has received twenty-nine honorary degrees. He is the author of Mikhailovsky and Russian Populism (1956), The Icon and the Axe (1966), Fire in the Minds of Men (1980), Russia Transformed: Breakthrough to Hope, August 1991 (1992) and The Face of Russia (1998), the companion book to the three-part television series of the same name, which he wrote and narrated for the Public Broadcasting Service.
Sandra Day O'Connor became the first woman to serve on the United States Supreme Court when she took her seat as an associate justice in September 1981, following President Ronald Reagan's historic nomination. After graduating high in her class from Stanford Law School in 1952, O'Connor discovered that no law firm was willing to hire a woman, except as a legal secretary. Rebuffed by the private sector, she turned to public service and built an impressive legislative and judicial career in her home state of Arizona, serving as an assistant attorney general (1965-69), state senator and the nation's first woman senate majority leader (1969-75), Maricopa County Superior Court judge (1975-79), and Arizona Court of Appeals judge (1979-81). Justice O'Connor donated the first installment of her papers to the Library of Congress in 1991, and in 2002 she published with her brother H. Alan Day a warmly received family memoir Lazy B: Growing up on a Cattle Ranch in the American Southwest, which provides insight into the influences that family and place have had on her life and career.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg has served as an associate justice of the United States Supreme Court since August 1993, following her thirteen years as a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. For much of the 1960s and 1970s, Ginsburg was a professor of law, first at Rutgers University School of Law and then Columbia Law School, where she became the first tenured woman professor. During this time she was also a pioneering litigator for women's rights and in 1971 was instrumental in launching the Women’s Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. She served as the ACLU’s general counsel from 1973 to 1980 and argued many of the constitutional law cases that redefined women’s legal position in the 1970s. In 1998, Justice Ginsburg established at the Library of Congress a collection of her personal and professional papers, which includes her many speeches and writings reflecting her long advocacy of women's issues and her interests in gender law and Scandinavian law.
Wendy Webster Williams is a professor of law at Georgetown University Law Center and an expert in the areas of gender law and history, and international women's human rights law. She helped draft and testified before congressional committees on the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 and the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. Before joining Georgetown’s faculty in 1976, Williams was a law clerk for Justice Raymond Peters of the California Supreme Court, a Reginald Heber Smith Fellow, and a founder of Equal Rights Advocates, a public interest law firm in San Francisco. She is the coauthor of the recent casebook, Sex Discrimination and the Law: History, Practice, and Theory, and is currently writing a book with Georgetown colleague Richard H. Chused on Women's Legal History. She and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg cowrote the chapter "Court Architect of Gender Equality: Setting a Firm Foundation for the Equal Stature of Men and Women" in Reason and Passion: Justice Brennan's Enduring Influence.
Linda K. Kerber is the May Brodbeck Professor in the Liberal Arts & Sciences and professor of history at the University of Iowa, where she also teaches courses in gender and legal history in the school’s College of Law. She is the author or editor of ten books, including No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship, which won the American Historical Association’s 1999 prizes for the best book in U.S. legal history and the best book in women’s history. In her writing and teaching, Kerber has emphasized the history of citizenship, gender, and authority. She has received awards for excellence in teaching, is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, served as president of the Organization of American Historians and the American Studies Association, and currently is a member of the Japan-U.S. Friendship Commission, a federal entity designed to promote cultural and scholarly exchanges between the two countries.
Patricia J. Williams is the James L. Dohr Professor of Law at Columbia Law School, a columnist on legal, gender, and racial issues for The Nation, and the recipient of a recent MacArthur Fellowship for her provocative work on U.S. race relations and her innovative interdisciplinary approach to writing. In the 1970s, Williams was a deputy city attorney for Los Angeles and staff attorney for the Western Center on Law and Poverty. She taught law in the 1980s at Golden Gate University, City University of New York, and University of Wisconsin, Madison, before joining Columbia’s faculty in 1992. Among her numerous writings are the acclaimed books The Alchemy of Race and Rights: A Diary of a Law Professor (1991) and Seeing a Color-blind Future: The Paradox of Race (1998). She appears frequently on television and in documentary films, wrote and narrated a short film critical of talk radio and television (That Rush!), and serves on the board of Wellesley College.

Resourceful Women Symposium Panel Three: Women and Political and Social Reform

Date & Time of Original Event: 06/20/2003 @ 9:00AM
Sponsoring Division: Manuscript Division
Division Contact POC: Janice Ruth
Speaker(s) Names: James H. Hutson, Susan Stamberg, Kriste Lindenmeyer, Barbara Clark Smith, Gail G. Petri
Language: English
Length of Video: 01:45:34

Welcoming remarks from James H. Hutson, Chief, Library of Congress Manuscript Division.
Susan Stamberg's familiar voice informs and entertains a nationwide audience on National Public Radio, where her news stories and interviews have enlightened radio audiences for more than thirty years. In 1972, Stamberg became the first woman to anchor a nightly news program, and for fourteen years she served as the cohost of the award-winning All Things Considered. She then moved on to Weekend Edition Sunday and now is NPR Special Correspondent, primarily for NPR’s Morning Edition. She has regularly reported and spoken on women and women’s issues. A few examples of her work include interviews with Annie Leibowitz, Rosa Parks, Nancy Reagan, and Mary Hemingway; reports from Nairobi on the United Nations women's conference in 1985, a celebration of Eleanor Roosevelt's one-hundredth birthday, and interviews on what it means to be male in America. She describes her life and career in radio in TALK: NPR's Susan Stamberg Considers All Things. She is the recipient of all the major awards in broadcasting and has received numerous honorary degrees.
Kriste Lindenmeyer is an associate professor of history and coordinator of the Public History Track in the Historical Studies Masters Program at the University of Maryland Baltimore County, where she is also affiliated with the women’s studies program. She is the author of A Right to Childhood: The U.S. Children's Bureau and Child Welfare, 1912-1946 and the editor of Ordinary Women, Extraordinary Lives: Women in American History, a collection of seventeen short biographies of ordinary women from the colonial period to the 1980s. Lindenmeyer’s research focuses on women's history, social and political reform, and the history of childhood in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century United States. She is also interested in instructional technology and is a strong proponent of Web-enhanced teaching, having served as one of the first on-line editors for H-Net (Humanities and Social Sciences Online) and moderator of H-Women (Women’s History Discussion List and Web site).
Barbara Clark Smith is Curator of Social History at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History, where she has worked since 1983. Her research ranges from the material culture of household life to forms of popular participation in the era of the American Revolution. Dr. Smith has curated exhibitions on such topics as household and community life in the early republic, costume and the construction of gender, and the history of housework. Her publications include After the Revolution: The Smithsonian History of Everyday Life in the Eighteenth Century; "Food Rioters and the American Revolution," William and Mary Quarterly, (1994); and "Revolution in Boston," for the National Park Service handbook for the Freedom Trail.
Gail G. Petri is a curriculum consultant and specialist to the Learning Page, a Library of Congress Web site for educators. Petri began her career in education as a classroom teacher in the 1960s, but after a short leave to raise her children, she came back as a school librarian in the 1970s and recently retired after eighteen years as a media specialist at Fyle Elementary School in Rochester, New York. She has developed a variety of educational, interactive Web pages that support teachers' lesson plans, including a curriculum package created with fifth-grade teacher Doris Waud relating to the American women's suffrage movement, which drew extensively from the Library of Congress digital collections. For her commitment to students and her innovative use of technology for young children she was awarded WXXI Public Broadcasting Council's 2002 Teacher of the Year Award. Petri is the author of the recently published two-volume work The American Memory Collection: Primary Resource Activities Across the Curriculum and of a chapter in a forthcoming book on the Library's American Memory program to be published by the American Library Association.

Resourceful Women Symposium Panel Four: Women's Private Lives; includes Historical Performance: Women's Private Lives

Date & Time of Original Event: 06/20/2003 @ 11:00AM
Sponsoring Division: Manuscript Division
Division Contact POC: Janice Ruth
Speaker(s) Names: Elsa Barkley Brown, Valerie Matsumoto, Kelly Schrum, Valerie Tripp, Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith
Language: English
Length of Video: 01:56:09

Elsa Barkley Brown is an associate professor of history and women's studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, where she is also affiliated with the Afro-American Studies and American Studies programs. The recipient of the Anna Julia Cooper Award for Distinguished Scholarship in Black Women's Studies, Barkley Brown is the author of pivotal articles in African American, cultural, urban, and southern women's history. An expert on the history of the black community of Richmond, Virginia, she is the coeditor of Black Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia and Major Problems in African-American History. Her current research and teaching interests include cultural history and the arts and the documentary history of women in the Civil Rights movement.
Valerie Matsumoto is a professor of history and Asian American studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. Her teaching and research interests include Asian American history and art, United States twentieth-century history, women's history, and oral history. Matsumoto has been the guest editor of a special issue of Amerasia Journal on histories and historians in the making, and she is coeditor of Over the Edge: Remapping the American West. In addition to her book, Farming the Home Place: A Japanese American Community in California, 1919-82, she has published articles on oral history fieldwork in the Japanese American community, Japanese American gender roles, and Nisei women of the 1930s. She is currently working on the topic of Japanese American youth culture during the Jazz Age and the Great Depression.
Kelly Schrum is assistant director of the Center for History and New Media and assistant research professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University. She received her PhD from Johns Hopkins University in 2000 and is currently revising her dissertation, Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls' Culture, 1920-1950 for publication (Palgrave-St. Martin's Press, forthcoming). Other publications include "'Teena Means Business': Teenage Girls' Culture and Seventeen Magazine, 1944-1950" in Sherrie Inness, ed., Delinquent Daughters: Twentieth-Century American Girls' Culture (1998) and "'That Cosmopolitan Feeling': Teenage Girls and Literacy, 1920-1970" in Jane Greer, ed., Girls and Literacy (forthcoming). Schrum has also worked extensively in the areas of new media, history content development, and teacher training.
Valerie Tripp is the author of many books in The American Girls Collection, an historical fiction series for young readers, ages seven to twelve. To research her characters' time periods -- Molly, 1944; Kit, 1934; Samantha, 1904; Josefina, 1824; and Felicity, 1774 -- Tripp reads extensively; consults with historians, curators, educators, and archivists; visits historical sites, museums, and libraries; and when possible, interviews women who were born at the same time as her characters. Letters, diaries, advertisements, recipes, lullabies, oral histories, and other sources help make her stories accurate, authentic, and alive. A review of her work in the School Library Journal noted that her "characters are engaging, the plotting brisk, and the situations ones to which contemporary girls can relate. Accurate historical data is incorporated painlessly into the stories and fleshed out in 'Peek into the Past' sections." In addition to writing books and plays for the American Girls series, Tripp is the author of An Introduction to Williamsburg, a guide to Colonial Williamsburg for young audiences, was a writer for the Addison-Wesley Reading Program from 1974 to 1980, and has created educational materials for The Hampton-Brown Company and other major publishers.
Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith are independent scholars from Vermont whose collaborative ventures began back in 1978 in Montana. They have been involved in a variety of women's history projects designed for audiences within and beyond academe. Coauthors of nine books – including Dreams into Deeds and Women Who Changed Things (for young adults), Women in Waiting in the Westward Movement, The Gold Rush Widows of Little Falls, and Pioneer Women – they offer an array of presentations and workshops on researching, writing, and dramatizing women's lives. Operating as P.S., A Partnership, they have been involved in the development of screenplays, dramatic scripts, and musical theater productions, most notably Eric Funk's opera, Pamelia, for which they were co-librettists, and in research for documentaries such as Doris Loeser's Pamelia: History into Art. Senior historical consultants for the PBS reality history mini-series, Frontier House, they joined producer Simon Shaw in writing the show's companion book. Their work-in-progress explores the experiences of the Fort Shaw (Montana) Government Indian Boarding School's girls' "basket ball" team of 1904. Their award-winning article on the team appeared in Montana: The Magazine of Western History (Winter 2001).

Resourceful Women Symposium Panel Five: Women and Labor; includes Historical Performance: Women and Labor

Date & Time of Original Event: 06/20/2003 @ 2:30PM
Sponsoring Division: Manuscript Division
Division Contact POC: Janice Ruth
Speaker(s) Names: Sharon Harley, Lisa Ades, Elizabeth Clark-Lewis, Sheila Kirschbaum and Sheli Turocy
Language: English
Length of Video: 01:39:50

Sharon Harley is a professor and former director of Afro-American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. A specialist in African-American women's history, Harley’s research and teaching has focused on the history of black wage-earning women and black women's organizational activities, as well as other topics. In 2002-2003, she was a distinguished fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C. The recipient of many other honors, she is the coeditor of Afro-American Women: Struggles and Images and Women in Africa and the African Diaspora, as well as many articles on gender, race, and working-class consciousness. She has served as a consultant in race and gender curriculum development and K-12 textbooks in African American history. Her newest book is Sister Circle: Black Women and Work, produced with the Black Women and Work Collective, and she is currently directing a Ford Foundation-funded national research seminar on "Work in the Lives of Women of Color" as part of her "Center for African American Women's Labor Studies."
Sheila Kirschbaum is the school liaison and professional development coordinator and Sheli Turocy is a museum teacher and project assistant at the Tsongas Industrial History Center in Lowell, Massachusetts. Kirschbaum has more than twenty-two years of teaching experience as a high school and college teacher, a former museum teacher, and a teacher professional development presenter at the Tsongas Center, where she has collaborated on several history curriculum packets using primary source documents. She has chaired the Lowell Conference on Women's History for the past four years. Sheli Turocy has also had a long career as an educator, including as a teacher of primary and middle school students and as a presenter of teacher workshops. She is currently collaborating on the development and marketing of an in-school history program using costumed role play and artifact analysis, and on a primary-source curriculum packet. She is also one of the organizers of the Lowell Conference on Women's History.
Lisa Ades is an award-winning documentary filmmaker based in New York City. Her film credits with Ric Burns include the critically acclaimed five-part PBS series New York, as well as The Way West, The Donner Party, and Coney Island. Her most recent work through her production company Orchard Films includes Miss America, which premiered at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival and was produced for American Experience/WGBH Boston, and Beauty in a Jar, a history of the American beauty industry produced for A&E Television Networks.
Elizabeth Clark-Lewis is a professor and director of the Public History Program at Howard University. In those capacities she has taught courses in many areas, including African-American experience, women in the United States, history of the District of Columbia, and museum, archives, historic preservation studies, and oral history. Her books include First Freed: Emancipation in the District of Columbia and Living In, Living Out: African American Domestics and the Great Migration. She is the author of many articles and the recipient of major grants from the National Park Service, National Endowment for the Arts, and other agencies. Clark-Lewis was also the producer and creator of the PBS documentary Freedom Bags, on African-American women's labor and migration, which won the Oscar Micheaux Award.

Resourceful Women Symposium: Closing Address

Date & Time of Original Event: 06/20/2003 @ 4:30PM
Sponsoring Division: Manuscript Division
Division Contact POC: Janice Ruth
Speaker(s) Names: Nancy F. Cott
Language: English
Length of Video: 01:01:52

Diane Nester Kresh is Director for Public Service Collections at the Library of Congress. She directs a staff responsible for fifteen of the Library's reading rooms, including the historic Main Reading Room, and for custody and security of more than 113 million items in the Library's general and special collections. Kresh founded the Collaborative Digital Reference Service, a project to build a global, Web-based reference service among libraries and research institutions, which has now become QuestionPoint, a service codeveloped by the Library of Congress and OCLC. For her role in launching the Collaborative Digital Reference Service, Kresh received a 2001 Federal 100 award given by Federal Computer Week to top executives in government, industry, and academia who have made the greatest impact on the government information systems community. It honors those who have "made a difference in the way organizations develop, acquire, and manage information technology." Kresh is a frequent speaker at professional meetings and conferences and is the author of several articles on digital reference services. She holds a bachelor's degree in theater and a master's degree in library science from the Catholic University of America, and she has been a staunch supporter of her staff's efforts to promote the Library's women's history collections.
Nancy F. Cott holds a joint appointment at Harvard University as the Jonathan Trumbull Professor of American History and the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation Director of the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America. One of the leading scholars in the field of American women’s history, Cott was a longtime professor of history and former chair of the women’s studies and American studies programs at Yale University. She is the author of seven books and the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships. From her path-breaking 1977 work The Bonds of Womanhood: “Woman’s Sphere” in New England, 1780-1835, to her most recent book Public Vows: A History of Marriage and the Nation, Cott has explored nearly every facet of American women’s history, including aspects of citizenship and family law, origins of the feminist movement, and American political culture. She brings to the symposium’s closing address a remarkable scholarly output and her unique perspective as an educator, historian, biographer, film consultant, documentary editor, and director of one of the country’s leading women’s history libraries.

American Women: A Guide to Women's History Resources at the Library of Congress