Activist Women's Voices

Last updated
Activist Women's Voices
Housed at Mina Rees Library, CUNY Graduate Center
Website Activist Women's Voices

The Activist Women's Voices collection is an oral history project of 35 women activists who worked in community-based organizations in the New York City area. The project covers the period from 1995 to 2000 and was a project of The City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center's Women's Studies Program and Center for the Study of Women. The digitized collection is made up of women from a diverse cross-section of cultural and ethnic social service organizations including activists from Arab-American, Haitian, Hispanic, African-American, and Asian-American communities. It is held at the Mina Rees Library, within the Graduate Center's B. Altman and Company Building. [1] [2]

Contents

History

The project began in 1995 under the aegis of the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center's Women's Studies Program and Center for the Study of Women and Society, initially as part of a graduate class "Women, Community, and Public Voice", [3] in which Women's Studies Director Joyce Gelb and Deputy Director Patricia Laurence curated a list of oral history subjects: New York City-based women who were leaders in their communities. [4] [5] The specific focus was on unheralded women from a diverse cross-section of the five boroughs of New York. [6] Although the project was based in the Women's Studies Program, the subjects were not specifically working in organizations that specifically supporting women. The focus was on the women leaders themselves. The last interviews were completed in 1998. [1]

The scope of the project included compiling a list of oral history projects [7] as well as a now-defunct searchable database of oral history collections. [8] [9]

Methods

Graduate students from different concentrations within CUNY Graduate Center completed weekly internships as part of their degree programs, working at the organization that was the focus of the oral history project. Through this process they identified and interviewed leaders in the organization in a fieldwork environment within the metropolitan area of New York City. [3] After receiving training on conducting oral history interviews, the graduate students went into the field and interviewed their subjects. [1] [10]

The main focus of the interviews was on biographical experiences that shaped their community-based work, and on challenges, achievements, motivations, and methodologies used to effect changes within their communities. [1] The project was categorized into a subject map. [11]

Processing

In 2011, a finding aid was completed. In 2013, digitization of the 77 audio cassettes and 2,300 pages of interview transcripts was completed, with clips of some of the oral histories made available online in 2014. [12] There were an additional 80+ press articles on subjects as well as various ephemera included in the collection. Under the guidance of the Chief Librarian, a Reference Librarian, and a Digital Services Librarian, two Special Collections Interns and a Special Collections Volunteer worked on the digitization team portion of the project. [13]

Funding

The Activist Women's Voices oral history project was funded by the following organizations: [1] [3]

Collection

The project included 26 separate activists and three organizations, who each had individual interview subjects. The total number of interviews digitized was 35. [13] The timeframe of the project was 1995–2000. Subject areas are listed below in parentheses. The collection is unique in the diversity of subjects of the oral history interviews and the wide range of subjects covered. [10]

Activists

Organizations

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Queens College, City University of New York</span> College in New York City

Queens College (QC) is a public college in the Queens borough of New York City. It is part of the City University of New York system. Its 80-acre (32 ha) campus is primarily located in Flushing, Queens. It has a student body representing more than 170 countries.

The Graduate School and University Center of the City University of New York is a public research institution and postgraduate university in New York City. Serving as the principal doctorate-granting institution of the City University of New York (CUNY) system, The CUNY Graduate Center is classified among "R1: Doctoral Universities – Very High Research Activity". The school is situated in the landmark B. Altman and Company Building at 365 Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan, opposite the Empire State Building. The CUNY Graduate Center has 4,600 students, 31 doctoral programs, 14 master's programs, and 30 research centers and institutes. A core faculty of approximately 140 is supplemented by over 1,800 additional faculty members from CUNY's eleven senior colleges and New York City's cultural and scientific institutions.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mike Wallace (historian)</span> American historian (born 1942)

Mike Wallace is an American historian. He specializes in the history of New York City, and in the history and practice of "public history". In 1998 he co-authored Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898, which in 1999 won the Pulitzer Prize in History. In 2017, he published a successor volume, Greater Gotham: A History of New York City from 1898 to 1919. Wallace is a Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, and at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Blanche Wiesen Cook</span> American historian

Blanche Wiesen Cook is a historian and professor of history. She is a recipient of the Bill Whitehead Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Barbara Smith</span> American activist and academic (born 1946)

Barbara Smith is an American lesbian feminist and socialist who has played a significant role in Black feminism in the United States. Since the early 1970s, she has been active as a scholar, activist, critic, lecturer, author, and publisher of Black feminist thought. She has also taught at numerous colleges and universities for 25 years. Smith's essays, reviews, articles, short stories and literary criticism have appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Ms., Gay Community News, The Guardian, The Village Voice, Conditions and The Nation. She has a twin sister, Beverly Smith, who is also a lesbian feminist activist and writer.

Byllye Yvonne Avery is an American health care activist. A proponent of reproductive justice, Avery has worked to develop healthcare services and education that address black women's mental and physical health stressors. She is best known as the founder of the National Black Women's Health Project, the first national organization to specialize in Black women's reproductive health issues. For her work with the NBWHP, she has received the MacArthur Foundation's Fellowship for Social Contribution and the Gustav O. Lienhard Award for the Advancement of Health Care from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, among other awards.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">City College of New York</span> Public college in New York City, US

The City College of the City University of New York is a public research university within the City University of New York (CUNY) system in New York City. Founded in 1847, City College was the first free public institution of higher education in the United States. It is the oldest of CUNY's 25 institutions of higher learning and is considered its flagship college. It has historically been known as "the poor man's Harvard."

The Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College is an internationally recognized repository of manuscripts, photographs, periodicals and other primary sources in women's history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Carmen Vázquez</span> American LGBT rights activist (1949–2021)

Carmen Vázquez was an American activist, writer, and community intellectual.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Life Stories</span>

National Life Stories is an independent charitable trust and limited company based within the British Library Oral History section, whose key focus and expertise is oral history fieldwork. Since 1987 National Life Stories (NLS) has initiated a series of innovative interviewing projects funded almost entirely from sponsorship, charitable and individual donations.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Queens Memory Project</span>

The Queens Memory Project is a community archiving program which aims to record and preserve contemporary history across the New York City borough of Queens. Community archives are created in response to needs defined by the members of a community, who may also exert control over how materials are used. The project is a collaborative effort between Queens College, City University of New York and Queens Public Library that was initially funded in 2010 through a grant from the Metropolitan New York Library Council (METRO). Materials in the archive are made accessible to the public through a website which contains oral history interviews and photographs documenting the lives of Queens residents. The stories and images are presented alongside digitized historical photographs, maps, news clippings and other archival records. The goal of the project is to allow visitors to the site to view otherwise scattered archival materials and personal stories in a searchable database of collective memory representing the borough of Queens.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Darnell L. Moore</span> American writer and activist (born 1976)

Darnell L. Moore is an American writer and activist whose work is informed by anti-racist, feminist, queer of color, and anti-colonial thought and advocacy. Darnell's essays, social commentary, poetry, and interviews have appeared in various national and international media venues, including the Feminist Wire, Ebony magazine, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, and The Advocate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Samuel Proctor Oral History Program</span>

The Samuel Proctor Oral History Program (SPOHP) is the official oral history program at the University of Florida. With over 6,500 interviews and more than 150,000 pages of transcribed material, it is one of the premier oral history programs in the United States. SPOHP's mission is "to gather, preserve, and promote living histories of individuals from all walks of life." The program involves staff, undergraduate and graduate students, and community volunteers in its operation.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Oral History of American Music</span>

Oral History of American Music (OHAM), founded in 1969, is an oral history project and archive of audio and video recordings consisting mainly of interviews with American classical and jazz musicians. It is a special collection of the Irving S. Gilmore Music Library at Yale University and housed within the Sterling Memorial Library building in New Haven, Connecticut. It currently holds approximately 3,000 interviews with more than 900 subjects and is considered the definitive collection of its kind.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vivian Perlis</span> American musicologist (1928–2019)

Vivian Perlis was an American musicologist and the founder and former director of Yale University's Oral History of American Music.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Lucy Miller Mitchell</span>

Lucy Miller Mitchell was an early childhood education specialist and community activist from Boston who was instrumental in getting the state to regulate day care centers. She is credited with modernizing the day care system in Massachusetts.

New York City was affected by the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s more than any other U.S. city. The AIDS epidemic has been and continues to be highly localized due to a number of complex socio-cultural factors that affect the interaction of the populous communities that inhabit New York.

Alice Cardona was an activist and community organizer.

Luz Rodriguez is a Puerto Rican reproductive rights advocate.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Disability Visibility Project</span> American disability organization

The Disability Visibility Project (DVP) is an online community dedicated to creating, recording, sharing, and amplifying disability media, stories, and culture. DVP is a community partnership with StoryCorps, an American oral history organization dedicated to preserving and sharing stories through interviews. Interviews recorded with StoryCorps are archived at the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress with the permission of the interviewer. The DVP platform consists mainly of blog posts and podcast episodes, but also creates disabled media from collected oral histories in the form of tweets, radio stories, audio clips, images, etc.

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 "Research Projects: The Activist Women's Voices Oral History Project and Archive". CUNY Graduate Center . Retrieved September 26, 2015.
  2. ↑ Gelb, Joyce; Laurence, Patricia Ondek (1995). Activist Women's Voices Oral History Archives. OCLC   55492073.
  3. 1 2 3 Fong, Timothy P.; Kahn, Ava F. (Summer–Fall 1998). "An Educational Exchange: Teaching Oral History on the Post-Secondary Level". Oral History Review . 25 (1–2): 9–34. doi:10.1093/ohr/25.1.9. ISSN   0094-0798. OCLC   193192588 . Retrieved September 30, 2015.
  4. ↑ "Chronicle: Lecture by Professor Joyce Gelb". Lviv Center. September 28, 2010. Retrieved September 30, 2015.
  5. ↑ Nelson, Emmanuel S. (2005). The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Multiethnic American Literature . Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. p.  1, 308. ISBN   978-0-313-33059-9. OCLC   60839325 . Retrieved September 30, 2015. activist women's voices.
  6. ↑ Berkin, Carol; Crocco, Margaret; Winslow, Barbara (2009). Clio in the Classroom A Guide for Teaching U.S. Women's History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. p. 264. ISBN   978-0-199-71776-7. OCLC   311040200 . Retrieved September 30, 2015.
  7. ↑ Smith, Kai Alexis (March 27, 2013). "Wayback Links: Women's Oral History Collection Links". Activist Women's Voices, The Graduate Center Library, CUNY: Special Collections. Retrieved September 26, 2015.
  8. ↑ "Activist Women's Voices: Consortium". Activist Women's Voices, The Graduate Center Library, CUNY: Special Collections. March 2013. Retrieved September 26, 2015.
  9. ↑ The Office of the Gender and Women's Studies Librarian. "Oral Women's History in the United States". University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries . Retrieved September 26, 2015.
  10. 1 2 Armitage, Sue (2011). "The Stages of Women's Oral History". In Ritchie, Donald A. (ed.). The Oxford Handbook of Oral History. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 180–181. ISBN   978-0-195-33955-0. OCLC   827753920 . Retrieved September 26, 2015.
  11. ↑ Smith, Kai Alexis (March 27, 2013). "Wayback: Subject Map". Activist Women's Voices, The Graduate Center Library, CUNY: Special Collections. Retrieved September 26, 2015.
  12. ↑ Handis, Michael W. (May 2011). Activist Women's Voices Oral History Collection, 1995-2000, Finding Aid (Archives and Special Collections. Paper 2.). New York, NY: Mina Rees Library, Graduate Center Library, CUNY. OCLC   55492073 . Retrieved September 26, 2015.
  13. 1 2 Smith-Cruz, Shawn(ta) (April 30, 2013). "April Status Update". Activist Women's Voices, The Graduate Center Library, CUNY: Special Collections. Retrieved September 26, 2015.
  14. ↑ Reaven, Marci; Zeitlin, Steven J. (2006). "Art and Music, City Style; Richmond Barthé's Frieze at Kingsborough Houses". Hidden New York A Guide to Places That Matter. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rivergate Books, an imprint of Rutgers University Press. pp. 211, 365. ISBN   978-0-813-54124-2. OCLC   191953101 . Retrieved September 26, 2015.

Further reading

40°44′55″N73°59′01″W / 40.74852°N 73.98361°W / 40.74852; -73.98361

This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.