Documenting Women’s Activism and Leadership
in the Chicago Area, 1945 - 2000
Project Description
“Documenting Women’s Activism and Leadership in the Chicago Area, 1945 - 2000” combines scholarly research, identification and preservation of archival material, oral history interviews, and engagement with Chicago women activists to develop, preserve and share resources for the study of women’s activism during the post WWII period.
The project takes an intersectional approach to Chicago women’s activism, embracing various feminisms in all their diversity and contradictions. It emphasizes a multi-cultural, multi-racial, multi-class, multi-ethnic, multi-sexual, gendered and differently bodied view toward movement issues.
Chicago women during this period were local and national leaders in many areas, but their contributions are often absent from historical accounts. It is therefore critical that this documentary project be undertaken while precious historical materials and personal memories are still available.
Our project has identified and collected documentary materials on influential Chicago women activists and leaders, women’s organizations and publications, women’s businesses and cultural institutions, artistic and media productions, legislative initiatives and other elements that contributed to the vast social, cultural, political and legal changes that occurred for women during in this period.
Project Goals
The goal of this project is to identify, preserve and share resources for a more complete understanding of women’s activism and leadership in the Chicago during the post WWII period. The resources created by this project will be used by scholars, teachers, students, media makers, writers, filmmakers and many others interested in researching Chicago and women’s history.
A further goal of the project is to inspire and empower present and future activists who will recognize in the histories presented here a vital tradition of Chicago women’s organizing and advocacy, transmitted from one generation to another, creating a long history of resistance to social injustice of many kinds.
Project Components:
At this point, the major components of the project are the oral history interviews with women activists and leaders, an extensive reference file on more than 300 women’s organizations that were active during the late 20th century, reference files on nearly 700 women activists and leaders, bibliographies related to project topics, and other relevant sources. For more information about each of these components see below:
Oral Histories: Our “Voices of Chicago Women’s Activism and Leadership: Oral Histories 1945 – 2000 Project” has conducted interviews with Chicago women active in the Second Wave women’s movement, women’s liberation, civil rights, peace and anti-war activities, community organizing, the Black Freedom movement, LGBTQ rights, reproductive rights/reproductive justice, self-defense, anti-violence/anti-rape campaigns, environmental justice, women religious reformers, and many other areas.
Our partners in this project include professors and students from Loyola University Chicago’s History and Women and Gender Studies Departments, Columbia College’s Oral History Seminars and the Illinois Women’s Bar Association. We are in the process of putting many of these oral histories online. For a list of those currently available, see below.
Organizations: So far we have identified 338 women’s organizations that were active in Chicago between 1945 - 2000. These organizations were established for the benefit, empowerment, enlightenment, advancement or general well-being of women and it was generally women themselves that created and nurtured them. If you know about a women’s organization that we have missed, please let us know.
Activists and Leaders: We have identified, and are collecting reference files on, nearly 700 Chicago women activists and leaders who were active during the 1945 - 2000 period. Here is a list of the women we have identified so far. If you know of a woman activist that isn’t on this list, please let us know.
Bibliographies: We have assembled an extensive library of books on topics related to Chicago women’s activism during late 20th Century, all of which have been entered into the bibliographic program Zotero. From this we are able to generate bibliographies on specific topics. For a general project bibliography organized by topic, plus one on the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union, see below.
