Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Leah Leach of Gal’s Guide to the Galaxy
As is the case with so many of my friends in Women’s History World, I met Leah Leach of Gal’s Guide to the Galaxy on Twitter. (Don’t let anyone tell you social media has no value.)
Gal’s Guide to the Galaxy is an in-the-trenches grassroots organization dedicated to spreading the word about women’s history. Here’s the official statement:
Gal’s Guide is a 501(c)3 nonprofit that provides multimedia resources and education about amazing women of history.
Gal’s Guide mission is to build an independent women’s history library and research center in the United States to preserve, collect, share and champion women’s achievements and lessons learned. We will act as a catalyst to creators who utilize our resources to guide others to these amazing role models who have been waiting in the shadows of history for too long.
All of which is true. But it doesn’t begin to describe the attitude, sparkle, and sheer grit that Leah and her team bring to the endeavor.
As you will see in the interview below, when I started talking to Leah about this back in January, the organization’s goal was to raise enough money to fund a pop-up library during Women’s History Month. Since then, Gal’s Guide has raised enough money to fund the library for a year. With the help of a thirteen-member volunteer book brigade they moved more than 1300 books that had been stored in Leah’s house to their new location in Noblesville, Indiana. They opened their doors on March 6. Personally, I’m hoping to make a pilgrimage.
Now I’ll let Leah tell you her story. Take it away Leah!
The Gal’s Guide to the Galaxy has a lot of cool parts: podcasts, education elements, events, etc. But the one that caught my imagination is your biggest goal: building a woman’s history library and research center. What inspired you to start this project? And how are you going about it?
My inspiration for the library came from the research that I was doing for the Gal’s Guide podcast called Your Gal Friday. It was our 44th episode and we were covering the bullfighter Conchita Cintrón and I was struggling to find out not only information about her but the handful of books written about her were out of print and out of circulation. This wasn’t the first (or the last time) I was frustrated with access to information but it was the first time I asked so who is making sure these out of print books are being preserved somewhere? Who is watching out for women’s history?
Because of my years since founding Gal’s Guide, I was already aware of how little women’s history was known to most Americans. I thought a podcast would be a lovely way to showcase history in an easily digestible way, but what happens when we (as creators of content) run out of credible sources? What happens when we keep hitting dead ends?
So I researched women’s history libraries and discovered there is not a women’s history library in the United States where you can browse the stacks and check out a book. I was shocked. Libraries have been a constant in my life. I can’t live without my local library. I’ve lived in 4 states in nearly every corner of this country and in each state my local library was my life-line. So I asked the team at Gal’s Guide if it was crazy to start a women’s history library and fill a void. Somehow they didn’t think I was crazy and we got to work researching women’s history libraries around the world and developed a plan to get the Gal’s Guide Library & Research Center built. We announced our plans to the public in 2019 and streamlined a lot of our programs to put the focus on building the library.
How we are going about getting the library built is first we are collecting materials. In our first year, we bought 818 books and we had another 552 donated thanks to wonderful organizations and people who support our mission. We also were able to add the Conchita Cintron book to our collection. (I attached a picture).
Our goal is to add at least 1,000 books to the collection each year. Our next step, now that there are 1,300+ books sitting in my living room, is to find a public location. We are asking various cities for in-kind spaces. We are applying for grants. We are partnering with various organizations and businesses likes Barnes & Noble. We have started a fundraiser to raise money for a pop-up location during Women’s History Month.
We are looking for a small but mighty space and then growing from there. The Glasgow Women’s Library did the same thing moving from space to space until there was enough capital to build their own space. Once we get the Gal’s Guide Library & Research Center in our first location we’ll set our sites on building an online women’s history database.
How can people help if they want to support the library project?
To support the library there are 3 wonderful ways to get involved and make a difference.
#1 Volunteer your time. We are a 100% volunteer staff, no one at Gal’s Guide is getting paid. We have a variety of people with special skills to help our mission plus you don’t even need to be local. Here is the link to what special skills we are looking for. https://galsguide.org/2019/12/11/volunteer-at-gals-guide/
#2 Donate Funds. We’ve been doing a lot with a little bit of money but it’s not free to build a library. It will take money. We are a 501(c)3 so in many ways, your donation is tax-deductible. We have a donation button on our website and a Patreon page for monthly donations. We are also a charity listed and supported on Facebook, Amazon Smile and Kroger. Learn more ways to donate at https://galsguide.org/supporters/
#3 Donate Books. We are seeking books that are written by women or about women. We accept fiction, nonfiction, cookbooks, children’s books, magazines, newspapers, DVD’s, CD’s. If it’s about women we want to preserve it and share it with our patrons. We very much love recycling books and giving them a new home. Info on where you can send your book donations: https://galsguide.org/womens-history-library/
If you could pick one woman from history to put in every high school history textbook, who would it be?
This is a really hard question because there are so many! Personally I want to say Sister Rosetta Tharpe because I think she’s amazing and needs WAY more credit as the inventor of Rock n’ Roll.
However, because I go into schools and visit organizations giving presentations about women of history this particular gal really captures the imagination of so many…Hedy Lamarr. I think Hedy’s story should be in every high school history textbook. Hedy was an actress and was sold as “The most beautiful woman in the world” what the world didn’t know until decades later is that Hedy was the co-inventor of Frequency Hopping, a patent that would make wifi and cordless technology like cell phones, GPS, and BlueTooth possible. When she gave this tech to the United States Army they didn’t understand it, they told her she was too pretty for inventing things and she should go sell war bonds. So she did, millions of dollars worth.
For decades the world only cared about her looks and not her brains. When a reporter broke the story of Hedy’s invention she was still alive but she worried that people still only cared about her looks that she never accepted in person an award for her invention.
But now there isn’t a day that goes by that we don’t use her invention. Her story is a warning cry that we need to encourage people to value brains over beauty. Also, she said this to her children near the end of her life:
“People are unreasonable, illogical and so obsessive
Love them anyway.
If you do good people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives
Do good anyway.
The biggest people with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest people with the smallest minds
Think big anyway.
What you spent years building maybe destroyed overnight
Build anyway.
Give the world the best you have and you’ll be kicked into the sea
Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.”
My question to you lovely Pamela, if you had a time machine and could travel to any time and place in history, where would you go and what would you hope to learn or see?
That’s a no-brainer for me: I’d go to 1920, so I could celebrate the passage of the 19th Amendment. And I’d like to stay long enough for the first national election in which women could vote. Can you imagine how thrilling that would be? (Of course, as a time traveler I probably couldn’t vote. But I could be there!)
To learn more about Gal’s Guide visit: galsguide.org
Twitter @GalsGuideGalaxy
Facebook @GalsGuideToTheGalaxy
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Come back on Monday for three questions and an answer with the women behind the Twitter feed @OnThisDayShe, which provides bite-sized bits of women’s history.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer from Marlene Trestman
I’ve met the most amazing women hanging out on the Internet. Case in point: Marlene Trestman.
For the last decade of her thirty-year career with the Maryland Attorney General’s Office, from which she retired in 2013, Marlene Trestman served as Special Assistant to the Attorney General. Recognized for her enforcement of laws governing consumer protection and public health, Trestman twice received the Attorney General’s Exceptional Service Award. A Phi Beta Kappa graduate and former trustee of Goucher College, Trestman earned her law degree from George Washington University and her MBA from Loyola University of Maryland, where she has taught law. For her writing, Trestman has received research funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Supreme Court Historical Society, Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, American Jewish Archives, and Texas Jewish Historical Society.
Trestman’s biography of her mentor, Fair Labor Lawyer: The Remarkable Life of New Deal Attorney and Supreme Court Advocate Bessie Margolin (LSU Press, 2016), explores Margolin’s inspiring and improbable journey from the New Orleans Jewish orphanage in which she was raised, through the New Deal and the Nazi war crimes trials at Nuremberg, to the United States Supreme Court in which she championed the Fair Labor Standards Act.
A New Orleans native, Trestman lives in Baltimore where she is writing her second book, Most Fortunate Unfortunates: New Orleans’s Jewish Orphans’ Home, 1855-1946 (LSU Press, forthcoming).
Take it away, Marlene:
What led you to write your biography of Bessie Margolin?
Bessie Margolin and I are products of Southern Jewish benevolence, and our stories are interwined. Following the death of her mother, Bessie Margolin spent her childhood in New Orleans’s Jewish Orphans’ Home. In 1903, a decade before Bessie was admitted, the orphanage’s trustees founded the Isidore Newman Manual Training School to provide its wards a rigorous secular education that would equip them with practical skills and academic knowledge for a self-sufficient life. The School’s most unique feature was that it also admitted children from the broader community, regardless of religion or gender, whose parents paid tuition. The school quickly became what it remains today, a prestigious college prep school.
In 1967, two decades after the Home closed and Newman School became an independent entity, I was orphaned and placed in foster care under the supervision of the orphanage’s successor, today known as the Jewish Children’s Regional Service. At JCRS’s request, Newman School admitted me on a full scholarship, honoring the school’s founding mission to educate Jewish orphans.
In 1974, as I was about to graduate from Newman to attend Goucher College, the school’s guidance counselor wrote a letter introducing me to Bessie Margolin, who had recently retired from her remarkable career as Associate Solicitor of the U.S. Department of Labor, where for more than three decades she had championed the Fair Labor Standards Act and the Equal Pay Act in courts across the nation, including the United State Supreme Court. In the letter, the counselor suggested that Margolin might like to get to know me as Margolin and I shared childhood experiences as wards of the Home and as Newman graduates. Soon after I arrived in Baltimore, Margolin graciously began inviting me for weekend visits to her lovely home in Washington, D.C., and our wonderful relationship continued through my years in college, law school, and into the start of my own career as a government attorney.
Margolin, the first woman lawyer I ever met, was elegant, worldly, and kind. She provided helpful advice, captivating recollections of her career, important contacts in the legal community, and was a powerful role model for me. After she died at age 87 in 1996, and after my repeated and unsuccessful efforts to find a “real author” to tell her remarkable story, I slowly realized there was no one else to do the job. Margolin deserved to be rescued from obscurity. Fortunately, LSU Press and the National Endowment for the Humanities agreed. And so with a publishing contract, prompted by grants from NEH and other funders, and a literary award from the Supreme Court Historical Society, I retired from my thirty-year law practice to become Bessie Margolin’s reluctant biographer.
Tell us about a woman or a group of women who inspired your writing.
The Feminist Legal Biography Workshop is a small but amazing group of writers, all of whom happen to be women academics in the field of legal history, who graciously welcomed me into their highly specialized fold and offered priceless feedback and expertise. We’ve met in person only once a year over the past 7-8 years, supplemented with occasional email. When we meet, there are usually six or seven of us in attendance, and each of us has one hour to present what we’re working on and seek input from the group. Each of us has written or is writing a book about a female jurist or lawyer: Barbara Babcock, biographer of Clara Folz, the first woman lawyer in the West and the first public defender; Constance Backhouse, biographer of Judge Claire L’Heureux-Dubé, Canada’s second female Supreme Court justice; Jane DeHart, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s biographer; Tomiko Brown-Nagin, biographer of Constance Baker Motley, first female African American federal judge; Leandra Zarnow, biographer of Bella Abzug; and Pnina Lahav, biographer of Golda Meir.
And, yes, feminist legal biography is a real “thing.” Several of us gave a panel presentation on the subject at the 2019 conference of the American Society of Legal History and will also be on a panel at the upcoming Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. I feel so fortunate to be part of this inspirational group of women. As the only non-academic in the group, I am certain that Bessie Margolin’s importance paved the way for my participation.
What’s your next book and when will we see it?
I’m thrilled that LSU Press has decided to release Fair Labor Lawyer in paperback, so look for that in September 2020. I’m particularly excited to have gotten some new and enthusiastic “blurbs” for the paperback, including from Julie Cohen (award-winning director of the documentary, RBG), Evan Thomas (Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s biographer), and Elaine Weiss (author of The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote).
My next new book, still very much a work in progress, is Most Fortunate Unfortunates: New Orleans’s Jewish Orphans’ Home, 1855-1946. I became so enthralled with learning about Bessie Margolin’s childhood in the orphanage, coupled with the knowledge that I would have lived there if it had not closed, that this was another book I was reluctantly compelled to write. There are days I feel I have bitten off far more than I can chew; over its 90 years, through the Civil War and WWII, the Home — which was the first purpose-built Jewish orphanage in the country — sheltered 1623 Jewish orphans and other dependent children (and 24 widows) from throughout the South. To date, with funding from the American Jewish Archives and the Texas Jewish Historical Society, I have conducted extensive archival research and have interviewed more than 60 Home alumni or their descendants, many of whom contacted me through my website, www.marlenetrestman.com. My manuscript is due to LSU Press in June 2020, and so the pressure is on!
Question for Pamela: What’s the most surprising thing you’ve learned while running Non-Fiction Fans? *
I think the thing that has surprised me most is how little running it actually requires. We went in expecting to have to nudge conversation along. In fact, the conversations happen without much intervention on our part. Non-fiction fans are a lively, opinionated and interesting group.
Want to know more about Marlene and her work?
Check out her website: www.marlenetrestman.com
Follow her on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MarleneTrestman
*For those of you who aren’t in the know, Non-Fiction Fans is a Facebook group that Theresa Kaminski and I run together. As you may have guessed, the purpose of the group is to readers (and writers) of mainstream narrative nonfiction to fabulous books (history, biography, literary studies, cultural studies)s and spark conversations about them. If you’re not already a member, drop on by: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1760137804315990/ (You will have to answer a few questions before we accepted you. We draw a large number of would-be members who can best be described as fruitcakes.)
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Leah Leach of the Gal’s Guide to the Galaxy, an organization that is reaching for the women’s history stars.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Kimberly Sherman
Dr. Kimberly B. Sherman is a member of the next wave of women’s historians. She is a historian, writer, and educator living in Wilmington, NC. She received her Ph.D. in Modern History from the University of St. Andrews. Her current book project is titled Intimate Worlds: Scottish families in early North Carolina and the Atlantic World.
You heard about her here first, folks. Take it away, Kimberly!
When did you first become interested in women’s history? What sparked that interest?
I think a lot of my interest in women’s history came right from my family. I’ve always said that spending time in my grandmother’s kitchen when I was little inspired my trajectory toward the field of history. She’d tell me stories about growing up in southeastern North Carolina as we made biscuits or cornbread together. Later on, when I actually got into studying history at university, I shied away from women’s history because I had been brainwashed with the idea that women were expected to do women’s history — so I resisted. In the end, I realized how distorted that mentality was and I fell headfirst into loving the field.
[Pamela butting in here: This statement tells me how far we have come in the last forty years: “ I had been brainwashed with the idea that women were expected to do women’s history.” I was blown away when I read that sentence. When I first began studying history, women’s history was brand new and controversial. Not only were women expected to do women’s history, but women were often warned away from it on the grounds that it might damage their careers. (I know of one woman whose dissertation committee asked “Isn’t that a little–soft?” when presented with her proposed topic.*) We have made more progress than we sometimes realize. Carry on.]
What do you find most challenging or most exciting about researching historical women?
One of the most challenging aspects is often the lack of sources written directly by women, especially from the eighteenth century and previous. So many women did not have the privilege of literacy or their personal documents have not been preserved in the same manner as the “great men” of history. So I guess that would be the silences of the archives and the challenge of sometimes having to read between the lines. At the same time, it can be incredibly thrilling when you find something you don’t expect!
What was the most surprising thing you’ve found doing historical research for your work?
Last summer I was conducting research as a fellow at the Winterthur Museum and Library in Delaware for a new project. After I had exhausted most of the collections I was interested in, I called up a volume that looked like it might be loosely related to my research on Scottish families in revolutionary North Carolina. It turned out to be a cyphering book (or mathematics exercise book) kept by a teenage girl from northeastern North Carolina in 1776. Every page of exercises was embellished with elaborate doodles and penmanship revealing a very political stance in support of revolution. It is a breathtaking volume and I can’t wait to uncover more about this young woman and her community!
And a question from Kimberly for Pamela: What do you think is the most under-researched topic or era in women’s history? What needs to be done?
The real answer is all of it! But if I have to chose: the most under researched topics are those related to women of color and non-elite women. I tiptoed into this area in Women Warriors because I wanted my global history to be truly global. It is challenging because even fewer traditional sources are available. But people are producing some exciting work in this field. Two recent examples I ‘m eager to get my hands on are A Black Women’s History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross and Rebel Cinderella: From Rags to Riches to Radical, the Epic Journey of Rose Pastor Stokes by Adam Hochschild. Exciting stuff!
Want to know more about Kimberly Sherman? Her writing may be found at www.kimberlybsherman.com .
*Feel free to growl, curse, or throw something.
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with attorney turned biographer Marlene Trestman.