Here's to the Women: Western Women Speak Up

Abstract

Western women's history began in the mid-1970s in a flurry of oral history projects. For a few short years, there were large and relatively well funded women's oral history projects in Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, and Wyoming and numerous smaller projects throughout the West. These first projects took many different forms. In 1972 in California, Sherna Berger Gluck's Feminist History Research Project began interviewing radical female labor activists. In 1973, the Idaho Rural Women's Oral History Project created minidramas from interview materials, and through performances and discussions, took them back to the rural Idaho farm women from whom the interviews came. In 1975 in San Francisco, Judy Yung, Him Mark Lai, and Genny Lim turned to their own relatives who had emigrated from China to recover memories of detention and interrogation on Angel Island in the years before 1941. In 1976, the Hidden Faces Project gathered oral histories and photographs for a touring exhibition on the lives of Colorado women, and I initiated a course at the University of Colorado that launched the Boulder Women's Oral History Project. In 1978 in Portland, Oregon, the Northwest Women's History Project rediscovered the story of women workers in the World