09:35:46 And I know that the program committee had that in mind when they invited me to speak at the conference at the Library of Virginia. We really threw ourselves into observing and celebrating the suffrage centennial. 09:36:01 One important reason was that we are the institutional home of the papers of the equal suffrage League of Virginia. 09:36:09 The organization formed in 1909 to secure the right to vote for Virginia women, the centennial provided us with a golden opportunity to showcase this important collection. 09:36:23 We mined the collection for an exhibition titled, we demand. Woman Suffrage in Virginia. 09:36:30 An exhibition that was supposed to close at the end of 2020 but which we have extended through this May, in the hope that people will start to feel more comfortable coming into public spaces. 09:36:42 And we'll have a chance to see this wonderful exhibition. 09:36:47 We planned a series of programs that highlighted several of the themes of the exhibition as well And fortunately, we were able to transition most of those fairly easily from in person to virtual events in doing the research for the exhibition, our staff 09:37:05 uncovered a wealth of new information, much more that could fit into one show. So the exhibit curators ended up writing a book length history of the suffrage movement that was published last year by the history press titled, The campaign for women's suffrage 09:37:23 in Virginia. 09:37:25 And this publication will ensure that the work we did during the centennial will continue to be available in the future to anyone researching or teaching the history of Virginia, women's political activism. 09:37:41 The library also served on a task force that was created by the Virginia General Assembly to plan events, and educational programs, highlighting women's efforts on behalf of suffrage. 09:37:54 This state Task Force provided financial support for our exhibition, and a companion one mounted by the Virginia Museum of History and Culture called agents of change agents of change picked up where the suffrage movement left off in 1920 and focused 09:38:13 on Virginia women's activities, breaking down barriers that women face and Improving life for all Virginians in connection with this exhibition. The VMHC recreated an iconic photograph of Virginia suffragists about 1915 seated in an open top automobile 09:38:34 parked on Capitol Square. 09:38:38 Last year, a vintage car was placed on this very same spot as it had been in 1915, but posed with it were a number of contemporary women activists. 09:38:56 The VMHC also worked with Virginia public media to produce a documentary about the suffrage movement titled these things can be done, which has aired on PBS stations across the country. 09:39:09 There is a session on the Merrick program tomorrow that discusses these activities in greater depth, and I hope you'll sign on. if you're interested in learning more, 09:39:20 planning events and programs to observe the suffered Centennial reminded me, just what an amazingly rich body of materials the equal suffrage league collection contains the work we did last year would not have been possible without it. 09:39:37 And it also reminded me of the circumstances that caused that collection to be created in the first place. 09:39:43 And how when I first discovered it tucked away in the archives in the early 1980s. I was stunned when I realized how little the collection had been used and how few people were aware of its existence. 09:39:58 When I first encountered the collection there was a brief description of the materials that contained. But it had not yet been processed, and it was still housed in the original boxes in which it hadn't been transferred to the library in 1942, discovering 09:40:14 this collection and a wealth of other material, documenting women's lives and experiences at the Library of Virginia. And in our holdings was a turning point for me. 09:40:26 I started researching and writing, Virginia women's history in the hope of making more of this information known. 09:40:34 And I did my best to encourage others to join in that pursuit. 09:40:39 When I was in graduate school in the 1970s, and yes I'm dating myself but that's okay. 09:40:47 It never occurred to me to pursue a career in women's history, the field, didn't really exist yet still young graduate students like me, were very interesting in learning what we could about women's contributions to our collected past. 09:41:21 We were definitely influenced by the second wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s, and by the field of social history, which was taking off in the United States, at the time, social historians, studied social structures and the interaction of different 09:41:25 groups and societies. 09:41:27 And in doing so they why not perspective of what history was and what aspects of the past were worthy of study. 09:41:36 They showed us that history was so much more than politics and affairs of state, which were the subjects that most historians wrote about at that time. 09:41:46 And that is certainly where the emphasis was in history classes from grade school through university politics and public affairs, were fields of endeavor from which women had traditionally been excluded. 09:41:59 But the new social history opened up windows to the past where women figured prominently. 09:42:05 And it was exciting. 09:42:08 I was fortunate enough to have had a fellowship when I was in graduate school. That gave me the opportunity to teach a class for freshmen on any subject I chose. 09:42:18 I picked the history of women in America because I wanted to learn about the topic. 09:42:23 I am virtually certain This was the first women's history class ever offered at the University of Virginia, because there was no one at the time on the history faculty researching and writing about women. 09:42:35 Well, there were a few books I could assign to the students, most of the readings for the class consisted of primary sources that I put on reserve at the library. 09:42:45 Because the secondary literature was so thin. 09:42:49 And I wondered at the time. Is this because there aren't enough women's history sources in archives, or historical repositories, or whether librarians archivists and historians just hadn't fully uncovered them yet. 09:43:05 I expected to teach history to college or university when I finished my PhD, but tenure track positions were hard to find at the time. 09:43:12 And when I saw job as an editor of historical publications at the Virginia State Library, which is what we were known as then I decided to take it thinking I would stay for a year or two. 09:43:26 That's when I discovered the incomparable collection is a gold mine of information on women of all backgrounds and walks of life, and I've been here ever since. 09:43:37 In those days when one thought about sources for studying women's history, the repository that came readily to mind was the messenger library at the Radcliffe Institute in Boston. 09:43:49 The library had been founded in 1943 when Radcliffe alumina and woman's rights activist mod would park gave her papers to the college first known simply as the women's archive the library was renamed in 1965 for Harvard historian, Arthur Schlesinger and 09:44:08 his wife Elizabeth, both of whom work tirelessly to build its collections, by the 1970s the messenger library was well on its way to becoming the leading center for scholarship on the history of women in the United States. 09:44:26 Smith College established about the same time would eventually become an internationally known women's history archives, specializing in birth control and women's reproductive rights, and a wide variety of women land or supported, political and social 09:44:44 movements. 09:44:45 But this lessons your library was consciously striving to foster research and writing about women, and actually create the field of women's history. 09:44:58 One of the projects that helps secure a prominent role for this lesson early on was the publication of a three volume reference work titled notable American women from 1607 to 1950, which came out in 1971. 09:45:16 Normal American women was undertaken to address the woeful under representation of women in the major biographical reference works at the time, the most comprehensive being the 22 volume Dictionary of American biography. 09:45:33 Only 700 of the 15,000 subjects in the dab, or about 4.5% were women. 09:45:42 Several years of research by the staff at the messenger yielded a list of 4000 names of women for possible inclusion in notable American women, and the editorial team narrow that list down to a little over 1300. 09:46:04 1950, and they made the final cut. represented among the final selections were many women the dictionary of American biography might have considered including had they known about them, because they were involved in public life in some way. 09:46:18 But there were also many women in notable American women who would never have been given a second, second glance by Dictionary of American biography editors who measured worthiness by a person's accomplishments in octet occupations and activities that 09:46:34 for the most part, our history in our history were primarily male. 09:46:40 Notable American women certainly included many subjects who made contributions in male dominated fields like aviator a million, your heart, or college president, Martha carry Thompson, but it also included hundreds of subjects who made important contributions 09:46:57 in fields that women valued, nursing, public health, K through 12 education charitable organizations social work in the like the notable American women biographies ranged in size from 400 to 7000 words, to some extent the length of each biography reflected 09:47:17 a woman's importance. 09:47:19 but many shorter biographies would have been much longer had the information been available. 09:47:25 The hope was that notable American women would raise awareness of the myriad ways in which women had contributed to shaping our past, and that it would spark numerous research and investigation. 09:47:38 But for that to happen, scholars had to know where the sources were in an effort to get intellectual control of the primary sources that could support research in women's history, a group of prominent historians and archivists enlisted the help of the 09:47:56 social welfare history archives based at the University of Minnesota, which has been founded in 1964 to document the history of social service and social reform in the United States. 09:48:12 The social welfare history archives secured an NIH grant to undertake what they described as a grand manuscripts search the archives compile a list of 11,000 state and local historical societies manuscript collections departments in university libraries, 09:48:31 federal, state and municipal government archives and institutional archives within corporations labor unions professional societies, on and on. 09:48:44 Just compiling that list was a major undertaking. 09:48:47 Then the staff wrote to each repositories asking, do you hold primary resources that document women's history. 09:48:57 2000 responded that they did. 09:48:59 And those about 1500 actually completed a survey form and provided the names and brief descriptions of their Women's History Collections repositories were asked to include not only collections that pertain to a particular woman so the papers of Jane Addams 09:49:28 and Paul house for example, but to include the papers of women's organizations of movements in which women played a significant part organizations whose work significantly affected women, such as the birth control federation of America, and family papers 09:49:35 that might be catalogued under a man's name, but which included correspondence, a female family members. 09:49:43 The result was the publication of a work titled women's history sources. A Guide to archives and manuscript collections in the United States, which came out in 1979 into volumes. 09:49:58 Andrea hindering curator of the social welfare history archives compiled and edited this invaluable resource. 09:50:08 Today we know that the 18,000 collections described in women's history sources represent only a fraction of what libraries and archives across the United States contain relating to women. 09:50:21 So it may be hard for those of you who are not practicing archivists at that time to fully appreciate just how pathbreaking a worth work, this was, there was nothing like it out there. 09:50:34 There simply was no other way in the world before library automation and online catalogs to pull this information together in one place. 09:50:46 Publication of women's history sources, truly marked as the preface to the work proclaimed the beginning of a new era of research into women's lives. 09:50:59 Shortly after, endings manuscript guide was published. I checked the entries for Virginia to see what I might discover. 09:51:07 And I was really pleased to see that my library had reported the largest number of collections, 28, which included a few large ones like the equal suffrage league. 09:51:18 But most of the entries were one item, like one diary or a woman's memoirs, in the collection. 09:51:26 The Special Collections department at swim library at the College of William and Mary Kay and second with a team, followed by the University of Virginia which reported 10. 09:51:36 Most of the collections identified by the archivists at these and other Virginia institutions, more items that were catalogued under an individual woman's name. 09:51:46 No one, then quite knew how to identify collections that might be helpful to women's historians, if the word woman, or women wasn't included in the collection name or description, and having the time the money and the staff to devote to this was a huge 09:52:04 challenge for most historical repositories. So I'm actually surprised at how many archives did respond to that survey. 09:52:14 Recognizing that women's history sources had been neglected by most manuscript repositories and hoping to raise the visibility and influence of women in the archival profession, several women active in the Society of American archivists arranged a session 09:52:31 for the annual meeting of the SAA. In November, 1972, titled women in the archives, the presentations were printed in the American archivist the following spring, the effort that led to him things women's history sources was just beginning. 09:52:50 And the participants in the essay section, were attempting to raise awareness in the archival profession of many of the issues that Hennings compilation was meant to help with in her presentation titled documenting the history of women in America. 09:53:09 Eva Mosley who was the creator, I mean the curator of manuscripts at this lessons your library urged archivists to overcome their long standing biases about women's papers that they simply weren't important, and to do a much better job of highlighting 09:53:25 the Women's History materials they had in their collections. 09:53:29 But she also challenged them to be proactive in identifying and acquiring new collections. 09:53:37 She argued that women activists, especially at the grassroots level. 09:53:56 standing importance. She believed curators and archivists needed to be assertive and reach out to leaders of these organizations and all women's groups to encourage them to keep their papers and donate them to a repository where they could be saved as 09:54:12 a permanent record. 09:54:14 This is something archivists do routinely now, but it was not common practice 40 years ago, particularly when it came to women's activities Mosley's rather radical notion probably raised some eyebrows, among other Saa members, mostly was also skeptical 09:54:34 about how quickly a traditional archives might change. And while she expressed the hope that one day specialized collections and repositories focused just on women would not be needed. 09:54:47 With things as they were in the 1970s. She saw archives dedicated to women's history as the only sure way to preserve women's accomplishments and contributions. 09:55:01 She also wrestled with the question of how best to classify women's collections in library and Special Collections catalogs. 09:55:11 It bothered her greatly, that the Library of Congress, for example, use subject headings such as woman as women is educator women is reformer for women and women in nursing women in science, because they were know comparable entries for men. 09:55:29 No madness artists or men in public life. 09:55:34 Perhaps one day, the sex of a violinist or a botanist will be of no interest, because a specialist or artists will as likely be female as male she wrote. 09:55:46 But for the time being, we must consider the existence of women's repositories and a unified listing of women's records as desirable steps forward. Despite their as she put it discriminatory overtones. 09:56:03 Miriam Crawford who was curator of Temple University's archives gave the final presentation at the SAA women in archives session that year, called a program for action. 09:56:16 While most of our recommendations addressed equal opportunity for women in the archival profession, such as establishing an essay a committee on the status of women. 09:56:26 She also asked archivist to do their part in advancing the study of women's history. 09:56:33 She asserted that to serve women, and other neglected groups properly archivists had to join historians in asking different questions of the past, asking the right question she said could improve how manuscript collections are described, and how records 09:56:50 are inventoried and indexed to learn the proper questions that historians will ask Crawford stated, We need to develop a long range cross current with the women and related professions, and those concerned with women's study in her view cross fertilization 09:57:09 across professions is what would lead to new research and related techniques to the benefit of all. 09:57:18 Even mostly was right. The change was hard, and that would come slowly historians and archivists in Virginia though we're very fortunate that a catalyst for change came from a very unexpected direction. 09:57:32 Linda, Johnson Rob, who became Virginia's First Lady when her husband Chuck Rob was elected governor in 1982 sought to undertake a project for which she could make a difference. 09:57:46 And shortly after moving into Virginia's Executive Mansion, she launched the Virginia, women's cultural history project. 09:58:03 This was a pathbreaking effort to uncover and document the history of Virginia women across four centuries, the project hired Rutgers historian Suzanne lead sock, who was working on a book about 19th century Virginia women then she knew the archives and 09:58:11 the state very well, and museum curator Kim rice who was asked to find art and artifacts to illustrate the story of women for an exhibition that was to be the projects signature product. 09:58:28 Left sock and rice search museum collections and manuscript repositories and scour journals unpublished theses and dissertations memoirs, and a small body of published work about Virginia that mentioned women to build a narrative of Virginia women's lives, 09:58:47 and experiences, but they also appeal directly to the public for help in locating letters, diaries images artifacts that still might be in private hands. 09:58:59 The project was successful, the public responded, and the team engaged community groups, civic clubs historical societies churches libraries universities in lively discussions about women's role in Virginia's economy, civic and political life for two 09:59:20 years, interest in women's history came alive in every corner of the state with the cultural history project holding scores of public programs regional symposia. 09:59:31 And, as I said earlier, mounting its most ambitious undertaking an exhibition at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts called a share of honor. Virginia women from 1600 to 1945. 09:59:46 It opened in 1984, and it drew larger audiences than any other exhibit had at that time, to the Virginia Museum, the catalog that accompany the exhibit contained a lengthy essay by Suzanne website which the Library of Virginia. 10:00:04 Later reprinted as a standalone title, as it was, there was great demand for the content, the essay provided a rich narrative of Virginia women's experiences black, as well as white detailing their involvement in significant historical events like the 10:00:22 American Revolution and the Civil War, but paying equal attention to women's daily activities as wives, mothers laborers business owners educators nurses community builders reformers and volunteers. 10:00:40 Livestock share of honor represented a major step forward in our understanding of Virginia women's contributions to every aspect of Virginia life, but it also revealed how much we still didn't know, because the research hadn't yet been done in Virginia 10:01:09 And all it would take would be purposeful, research, and the project did an excellent job of explaining why it matters. 10:01:17 Simply put, Virginia, and American history, looked very different when women were included in the narrative. 10:01:25 Thanks to the women's cultural history project archives libraries and museums across Virginia made highlighting their Women's History Collections a top priority. 10:01:39 By the late 1819 1980s excuse me, the historical profession had become more receptive to the study of women's history, and universities began hiring faculty. 10:01:53 With that specialty who were ready to teach and serve as mentors for a new generation of scholars, Southern universities were a little slower than higher ed, and other parts of the country to add women's history to their curriculum, but the efforts of 10:02:07 Southern Association for women historians help to move this along the demographics of the history profession was also changing with the 1980 seeing a large increase in the number of women in the United States, pursuing doctoral degrees in history. 10:02:25 Women earned about 16% of the doctoral degrees in history awarded in 1970 by 1988 that was up to 37%, and by 1996 41%. 10:02:37 Now certainly not all women doctoral students wanted to study women's history, but many did. And they were either to fill the gaps in the historiography, and they began showing up at archives, looking for material. 10:02:53 Historian Catherine Clinton who was among that first wave of graduate students, recently recalled her early forays into women's history research. 10:03:03 And she expressed sympathy for the archivists that she met, saying that they, and these are her words felt the pressure from the invading hordes of researchers, many of them hell bent on breaking down the barriers that kept women's issues, women's lives 10:03:21 and women's records buried in the past that undervalued female experience. 10:03:28 And I think for many in the archives and manuscript repositories, it did feel a bit overwhelming, as these budding historians arrived on their doorsteps. 10:03:39 Perhaps an example will help illustrate the challenges that both historians and archivists faced. 10:03:46 One day in 1991. I received a call from our archives research room, telling me that a graduate student from Yale University was at the library, researching her dissertation, and she wondered if she could talk with me. 10:04:01 Her major professor suggested she called me and she had hit a brick wall. 10:04:07 She was hoping to write a dissertation on women in public life in antebellum Virginia, but was having trouble finding source material. 10:04:17 And after she described her research topic to the archivist that helped her in the reading room that day, 10:04:25 she was told that we probably didn't have anything that could help her, because she used the word public and political and the archivist explained to her that women couldn't vote in the 19th century. 10:04:41 And therefore, we just simply wouldn't have records that would help her. 10:04:46 Well certainly women couldn't vote or hold office in the antebellum period. But this graduate student and read enough to really believe that antebellum women cared about the important issues of the day, and her instincts were correct. 10:05:01 Historians were beginning to uncover the activities of Northern women in the period, but the prevailing view was at Southern women didn't have an interest in, and we're left out in public life. 10:05:11 So this just this young student was just seeking some help finding the evidence, not long before her visit, I had come across an intriguing newspaper article from the 1840s about Lucy Johnson Barbour, the widow of one of Virginia's early governors who 10:05:30 was trying to enlist women in a fundraising effort to build a statue to Henry Clay, and place it in Virginia's capital square. 10:05:49 She could not vote. But erecting a statue to a political figure and placing it right at the seat of government was both public and a political statement if there ever was one. 10:06:00 And I was certain there was an important story here. So I suggested that as a starting place. 10:06:08 I also mentioned the library's collection of petitions, sent to the General Assembly by Virginia citizens, seeking assistance or redress that only the legislature could provide. 10:06:20 I had seen many legislative petitions from women among the thousands filed in the antebellum period, and suspected they might serve as windows into women's thoughts and activities as well. 10:06:32 And they have proven to be a gold mine, not only on women's history but on a myriad of topics. 10:06:40 I'm really proud to say that a few years later that young student won the prize from the Organization of American historians for the best dissertation, completed in 1995, and she went on to write a book to change our understanding of white women's involvement 10:06:56 in Virginia's antebellum political life. 10:07:00 Now I take no credit at all. For this, but I use this as an example to illustrate how interdependent. And vitally important. The relationship between those who care for collections and those who use them is, in order to help this student I had to let 10:07:20 go of any preconceived notions I had about women's place in 19th century Virginia. 10:07:28 I had to listen carefully to the question she was asking, and just find a way to get her started on her quest. Like any good librarian curator or archivist. 10:07:38 I just opened the door, she took it completely from there. 10:07:43 Well, like most repositories at the time the Library of Virginia had a lot of work to do to make the information about women in our collections, much more accessible. 10:07:54 But we were eager to dive in and we started at the most logical place with the rich equal suffrage lead collection that collection had been assembled by Ida may Thompson, who in the 19 teens and 20s was the executive secretary and office manager for the 10:08:12 equal suffrage League, and then went on to fill the same role for the League of Women Voters in the late 1930 she was working with the Virginia historical records survey project, which was a New Deal programs sponsored by the Works Progress Administration. 10:08:30 And she was encouraged by UVA archivist Lester captain who headed up the survey project to see what she could do to find records, documenting the Woman Suffrage Movement in Virginia. 10:08:43 She had access to the central office files for the suffrage League, and she started with those. But she also wrote to everyone she could remember, or identify who had been active in the movement, especially women affiliated with local chapters of the 10:08:59 suffrage league wasn't even 20 years since the end of suffrage, or the accomplishment of suffrage, but many records, didn't survive any longer, but she did receive an enthusiastic response from women who still retained correspondence and printed materials 10:09:17 as well as artifacts, like suffrage buttons and sashes. So she pulled together quite an impressive amount of material, and then handed it over to the library in 1942. 10:09:32 Although a preliminary inventory of the collection was made in the 1950s, there was no question that this collection deserted to be deserve to be fully processed. 10:09:43 Jennifer McDade a young archivists done our staff with a strong interest in women's history took the task on and by 1993. She had completed the work and produced an extremely thorough finding aid. 10:09:56 Several years later that finding aid was converted to an end guide, and we placed it on Virginia heritage, the consolidated database of finding aids that provides information about manuscript collections and archival materials in Virginia and West Virginia 10:10:12 repositories are work on the suffrage exhibit, and the book last year also led us to update and expand our online resource guide that places the Virginia suffragists in the context of the national suffrage movement. 10:10:30 So on our website you'll find a guide that includes books and articles from our printed collection, as well as suffrage related archival material, and a wide array of online resources, and in the very near future we will be adding to those online resources, 10:10:46 the equal suffrage lead papers themselves, which we scanned as part of last year Centennial processing the equal suffrage lead collection made its contents fully accessible to researchers, but it also revealed some significant gaps in the documentary 10:11:05 record and it's important to acknowledge them as large as the collection is it doesn't tell the whole story. 10:11:13 The collection contains almost nothing relating to black women's contributions to the suffrage cause in the segregated Society of early 20th century Virginia black women could not be members of the equal suffrage league and Thompson did not reach out 10:11:28 to their organizations in her collecting effort. 10:11:32 Black women discussed the importance of securing the right to vote in their clubs their sororities their professional associations and church groups, but those records are still scattered and not easily accessible. 10:11:45 That said, the correspondence and Memorandum of the suffrage leads leadership is very revealing of how the issue of race factored into the thinking and strategy of most wise suffragists, and how those who oppose women's suffrage used the race card in 10:12:03 arguing against women's suffrage. 10:12:16 Thompson also seems to have ignored, former suffragist to let the equal suffered lead to join the congressional union which was a more militant wing of the suffrage movement, their perspective is also woefully underrepresented in the collection in planning 10:12:24 our exhibition we did try to find sources that would remedy that and shed light on the divisions within the suffrage movement as the tension between the more lady like moderate suffragists and those willing to use more radical tactics, was an important 10:12:39 part of the suffrage story, and the effort paid off. Barbara Batson our exhibit curator located a direct descendant of Sophie Meredith who had been president of the Virginia congressional union branch and her family had carefully preserved all those records, 10:12:59 so that enabled us to have a floor account of the fault lines within the suffrage campaign. 10:13:07 Even though the centennial is now over we will continue to look for similar kinds of material that may not have surfaced yet. 10:13:15 In addition to the resource guide on the suffrage movement on our website. We have several other guides that have helped our users who are interested in. 10:13:26 Oops. 10:13:29 My Excuse me for a second my teleprompter has just stopped working. So I'm going to 10:13:40 I'm going to get out of that and I'll have to revert to my, My, my page. 10:13:48 So we have mounted resource guides to our women's collections for World War One, and World War Two. 10:13:57 And those have been heavily used because both of those wars celebrated recent anniversaries. 10:14:04 And probably the most important guide that we have mounted for the general researcher is one that talks about using women's history resources in the archives and surfacing everything we possibly have. 10:14:18 So, it talks about our census records Confederate pension records legislative petitions church records, our letters to the governor, any collection we have than might indeed contain records, that would shed light on women's lives. 10:14:39 Now, it's just an entry point, it can point us to everything that a researcher might want to know, but it is a place to get started. 10:14:48 And I know that many of you are doing this kind of work as well. And you're doing it very well because in preparing for this talk, I went out and looked at many of your sites, the larger your archives, and historical collections are though of course, 10:15:02 the heart of the job is to just focus in and pinpoint on women's collections. 10:15:13 We can't always anticipate everything that a researcher might want to access. But I saw a really nice statement on the Historical Society of Pennsylvania's website that I thought summarize what we've really tried to do women's voices and actions can be 10:15:31 found throughout the society's guide, I mean the society's collections, and the guide to women's history resources. Just scratches the surface, it's intended to help researchers delve deeper into materials, or subjects that are rich resources for women's 10:15:49 history. 10:15:50 And it's a starting place, and I thought that's what that's what we try to do. And it's really, I think being done very well. I'm all of your repositories. 10:16:01 Well we've learned that the Library of Virginia, is that to do this work well though, we have to do more than focus on our collections, we really have to branch, a build bridges and relationships with all those who have been neglected so not just our 10:16:19 women's history resources, but marginalized and underrepresented groups that are included in our collections as well. 10:16:28 And we have to have ongoing conversations with historians curators, educators, people who are using that research. So we encourage our archivists to attend history conferences and to immerse themselves in what historians are asking, so they come back 10:16:49 and work more effectively with the collections, and Virginia has a wonderful organization called the Virginia forum. 10:17:00 That brings together archivists educators historians teachers curators, in a conference every year to share that information and do that cross fertilization that Miriam Crawford had talked about much earlier. 10:17:15 We also know that the Library of Virginia has been a leader in Virginia women's history. And when we looked at maybe republishing Suzanne let socks earlier sa a share of honor. 10:17:29 We found out by talking to women's historians, that while that was a pathbreaking work at the time. 10:17:39 It needed to be completely redone because so much new resource research based in archives like yours had happened. And so several years ago, we published a new book called changing history, Virginia women across four centuries. 10:17:55 And as you can see, it's not a light, a light volume and it's filled with new information that has come to light. 10:18:05 As a result of this work done in women's archives. 10:18:10 So today I focused on my talk on, on what the library has done in terms of women's history. 10:18:16 But I want to affirm that we are committed to addressing and doing the same to surface the stories of other aspects of our collection collections that relate to indigenous Virginians black, Hispanic, Asian and Pacific Islanders. 10:18:34 All of these stories, and all of these materials, need to be brought forward. And we are committed to being proactive in doing that into building relationships with members of these communities to connect them to our holdings, and to learn more about 10:18:51 what new collecting, we should be doing, 10:18:56 you're engaged in this effort to as the program to this exciting conference shows, looking back I am heartened to see how far we've come. In the past 50 years, but I'm also daunted by what remains on done. 10:19:12 I have no doubt that each and every one of you is up to that task. 10:19:16 I look forward to attending many of the conference sessions the rest of today and tomorrow, and to learning what you're up to. 10:19:25 But also to watching how you continue to transform our archival holdings and access to them in the years to come. 10:19:35 So thanks so much for letting me reminisce and share with you work that that I've done the library's done to promote an advanced women's history. And please enjoy the rest of your conference. 10:19:57 Thank you so much Sandy for that wonderful and enlightening presentation that ties in so well to our conference theme. 10:20:05 I would like to open it up, if anyone has questions, please post in the q amp a, or in the chat, and we will we will get back to you. 10:20:18 Right now I'm not seeing any. 10:20:21 I guess I was wondering, um, you mentioned outreach to current communities. Do you have example. 10:20:31 Yes, probably, well you do examples, we have. 10:20:37 We know that our collections or a gold mine of information about African American history. 10:20:44 And one of the things we've, we've worked very closely with the African American genealogy community, and they have always expressed frustration that if their ancestors go back before 1865 and they were enslaved, there's kind of an archival brick wall 10:21:00 that they they hit, and we've been working closely with that community, to show them ways that they can still find information, and we have, we launched a few years ago a project called Virginia untold. 10:21:15 The African American narrative, and we are actually 10:21:21 adding images of collections and transcriptions of original material that we have the documents, the history of of African Americans, a lot of them are coming from court cases, and newspapers, but that one can go in and search this database and hopefully 10:21:40 find information that will move you forward. 10:21:43 And the other area that's very exciting, is we have a young staff member who has gathered a group of people with from Asian and Pacific Island and and Desi backgrounds and created a kind of a stakeholders group to talk with them about their experiences 10:22:05 the things that they would like to see from us. 10:22:09 We have an archivist also working to to identify materials related to those communities in our collections and we have put several guides on our website to those resources. 10:22:22 So that's those are two examples but I know this is going on across the field and and to me it is it is the most exciting because it's only by listening to those communities and learning from them, that we can do a better job in our surfacing materials 10:22:41 but also collecting new archival content. 10:22:46 Thank you. 10:22:47 So I have a related question here in the chat. Have you ever received pushback regarding your focus on uncovering women, and other underrepresented people in our local elections. 10:23:00 I'm probably not strong push back which I'm pleased to say, but every once in a while. 10:23:10 Someone asked a question that I remember being asked a number of years ago when I was speaking about women's history and the importance of of surfacing women's materials and writing this history, somebody raised their hand in the back of the room and 10:23:24 said, So what you're saying is we need now to teach history, as if it were just women's history and leave out all the other stuff. And that's what's been the hardest thing I think is to get some people to really understand that no by adding the stories 10:23:42 of women and, you know, our African Americans and all our new communities new immigrant communities. We're just telling a more accurate story, we're telling a fuller story. 10:23:57 And we may be changing perhaps that the focus in the orientation of the narrative, but it's not taking away it's not changing history. 10:24:06 So, there would be some periods in our history when that maybe we've described as being extremely progressive but if you look at the African American experience. 10:24:18 It would have been anything but so just making sure that we reflect both of that both of those perspectives. And when we talk about it, but that's where most of the pushback has come, is just a sense that if you are adding new voices and new stories. 10:24:34 You're, you're pushing away or somehow downgrading, the more traditional narrative. 10:24:46 Okay, another question. 10:24:48 Could you comment on the impact of activists activist archivists, an essay in the 1970s on this topic, and I believe you spoke a little bit on that, and while it was it was still, it was still a little bit controversial too strong but still a little bit 10:25:10 unorthodox for the mainstream of the archival community to actually go out and knock on doors and reach out to organizations and individuals to solicit collections, or as happened with the equal suffrage League, to actually assemble, you know what we 10:25:32 would today's call an artificial collection. 10:25:35 You know just pulling together what you can get into a hole, and I was a little surprised by that. 10:25:42 But apparently that's what I saw, at least in relating to women's history. 10:25:48 You know somebody like Eva Mosley had to say you got to go out and do this. This is important to do, because we will lose it, and that's certainly true of underrepresented marginalized groups there were there were literally a lot of women who through 10:26:04 stuff away, because they thought nobody wants this it's not important. 10:26:10 away, because they thought nobody wants this it's not important. And so the only way to counter that was to be much more active. 10:26:15 But again, as we all know, We have limited budgets limited staffs backlogs of of material that need work so i think i think it has to today be a commitment and a conscious decision that this work is important and we need to do it. 10:26:35 But it was, it was not taken as a given. 10:26:40 Back then, by any means. 10:26:43 So we have a lot of questions I don't know if we're gonna have time to get to all of these. 10:26:49 And, um, so let's see Ben, Ben Blake hi Ben, send in several questions. I'm going to ask one of them just because of time constraints. 10:27:00 So today, how do you see current efforts to accelerate documentation of women in the archives fitting into the new trend towards social justice activist archives. 10:27:12 Yes, and that's that's absolutely critically important, because there is so much going on in that arena. 10:27:24 But a lot of the work is not necessarily being reflected in traditional paper records. I was recently having a conversation with the, 10:27:41 the leadership of a group called ratify era Virginia ratify era. That was planning to go out of business because Virginia actually did last year, ratify the Equal Rights Amendment very late in the game but but it did. 10:27:57 And in talking with her about her holdings, she said, Oh, well I got emails and I got, you know, a lot of it was like just grassroots conversations and so forth. 10:28:09 So, what that has told us, is you know we haven't we have not yet traditionally been heavy practices of oral history, but that is likely for for groups such as this. 10:28:24 The way to do this. So figuring to capture what what they're doing and their perspectives, because they're not. 10:28:35 They're tweeting they're texting, but they're not they're not writing it down so. So, there are certainly have to be new approaches to capturing this, the record of this work but it is it is something that's very, very important to do 10:28:54 things. And so I have a couple questions about books, and what is the title of the book that you showed us near the end, the one that you held up to show us. 10:29:03 Yes, it's, it's called changing history, Virginia, women through for centuries. And it is the library published it it's a, it's available I know it's on Amazon it's available through our shop. 10:29:19 And interestingly, you know that that earlier work done in the 1980s really had one author. 10:29:25 And she was able to do this in a month. This took us several years, and we had full three authors, because no one person could specialize anymore. in the amount of secondary literature that's out there.