Chicago Area Women's History Council Project
The Personal as the Historical: Documenting the Women's Movement in Chicago, 1960s-1980s
Overview:
In 2008, the Chicago Area Women's History Council launched an ambitious and exciting new project to document the women's movement in the Chicago area over several decades. The project hopes to identify significant personalities, issues, actions, organizations, institutions, and legislative initiatives that contributed to the social, cultural, and political changes of the period. This project embraces feminism in all of its diversity and contradictions including advocates of equal rights, equal opportunity, women's liberation, social feminism, issues of sexuality, racial, and class identity, socialist feminisms, liberal and even conservative feminisms. The geographic area of the project includes Chicago as well as its suburbs.
For additional information please visit the Chicago Area Women's History Council.
Role of the Women & Leadership Archives:
The principal role of the Women & Leadership Archives (WLA) is to serve as one of many archives interested in receiving materials related to the women's movement in the Chicago area and throughout Illinois. Collecting these materials is central to our mission and purpose. As a newer archives, founded just 14 years ago, we have the space and resources to conserve and preserve the records for many generations to come. But, as a participating member of the Chicago Area Women's History Project, we are also ethically bound to assist you or your group in finding the best archives for your material. We hope that is the WLA, but if it is not, we will help identify those repositories best suited to your material.
If you are interested in having a conversation about your materials or those of your organization, please feel free to contact the WLA at emyers@luc.edu or wlarchives@luc.edu. If you are in the Chicago area, we are available to come to you or meet off campus.
Donating Materials to an Archives:
Donating personal or organizational records is often a deeply personal process which can take from a few hours to a few years to complete depending on the concerns and materials involved. It is simply different for everyone. But how to start the process? For most people that's with a general conversation with a professional archivist about what materials they have and what it means to donate records. Very often the donation process is shrouded in mystery which leads to the perception that it is exceptionally complex. This is not true. An archivist will be able to help you along the way, including identifying your rights as a donor, appraising the materials, arranging the pick up or shipment of the materials, and the legal transfer.
But what to deposit? Each archives is very different and are limited by space and resources. Within these limitations, however, there is usually a great deal of diversity in the types of records that are donated. The following are not exclusive lists, but are typical of some of the materials that can be found in an archives. Also listed are some of the typical (and not so typical) formats of material found in archives.
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Personal Papers |
Organization Records |
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Diaries |
Staff Related/Rosters |
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Formats Paper (Regular, Newspaper, Fax paper, tissue, lamentated) |
RECENT & UPCOMING CAWHC EVENTS
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Preserving and Sharing the Sources Join the CAWHC in exploring new scholarship in the field of women's movement history and learn about donating your own materials to and archives! |
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Kathryn DeGraff, DePaul University Archivist & CAWHC Board Member |
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Meeting of Archival Minds Beth Myers emyers@luc.edu |
