Women’s Voices: An Oral History of DC Women
A team of interviewers led by Judy Hubbard has compiled the stories of thirty women who influenced the social, political, and cultural life of Washington, DC and the nation. With funding from Humanities DC, WNDC Educational Foundation supported the project to reach thirty women aged 79 – 104 representing seven of the eight DC wards who contributed their life stories. The interviews have been transcribed and will be available online. An interactive timeline has been created using the words and photographs of narrators in the context of events, neighborhood development, advocacy, and civil right activism.
This project builds on an Educational Foundation tradition of interviewing women in DC to capture their experiences and insights. Earlier oral histories in the Foundation’s archives resulted in the book, Democratic Women: An Oral History of the Woman’s National Democratic Club,by Jewell Fenzi and Allida Black. Published in 2000, the book is currently out of print. Nine out of the thirty women interviewed are current WNDC members and two are former members.
The Foundation wishes to thank the following for their participation in the project: Dr. Daniel Kerr of the Department of History at the American University and AU graduate students Rebecca Brenner Graham and Emily Rheault; Helen Compton-Harris and student Amora Campbell at the Richard Wright School of Media Arts and Journalism; Jewell Fenzi, founder of the EF Oral History Program; Project Manager Judy Hubbard; interviewers Anna Fierst, Pege Gilgannon, Bonnie Heather McCabe, Nuzhat Sultan, and Toni Travis; and, WNDC staff members Patricia Fitzgerald and Walter Springman. Valuable assistance came from Vicky Marchand, Sarah Shoenfeld, Bernadette McMahon, Abby Porter, Jane Freundel Levey, Karyl Cafiero, and Rempee Kalia.
Publications
Democratic Women: An Oral History of the Woman’s National Democratic Club, by Jewell Fenzi and Allida Black, was an oral history project, edited from interviews with more than 50 club members, including Daisy Harriman, Esther Peterson, Lindy Boggs, and Ellie Seagraves (granddaughter of Eleanor Roosevelt). The book, now out of print, will be revised and expanded in 2020.
Women and the Vote: Centennial Calendar. An 18-month calendar (July 2019 to December 2020) was published June 4, 2019 in recognition of the passage of the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment. It is illustrated with historic photos and factoids about the struggle to gain the vote for all women from 1776 to the present. Click SHOP to learn more.
