CWHC History
The Chicago Women’s History Center was founded in 1971 as the Chicago Area Women’s History Conference, a pioneer educational organization in the city’s burgeoning second wave women’s movement. Today, the Chicago Women’s History Center is the oldest, continuing, independent, non-profit women’s history organization in the country.
1971-1979: CWHC Begins
The organization was started by Jean S. Hunt, a historian at Loop College (later Harold Washington College), along with a small collective of women who were frustrated by the lack of support for professional women historians at the time and by the absence of women’s history curricula in secondary and postsecondary institutions.