In the back gallery of Seton Hill University’s Harlan Gallery there is a room dedicated to the stories of local women and men who were involved in the women’s movement. Their photos hang on the walls accompanied by their personal stories while a movie is projected onto the wall showing their interviews. It is an oral history multimedia project entitled “In Sisterhood: The Women’s Movement in Pittsburgh.”
Charlene Hunt, owner and administrator of Transcribing4You.com, has been listening to the interviews and typing the project verbatim. Eventually the audio files will be archived at the University of Pittsburgh.
By Kayla Sawyer
News Editor
In the back gallery of Seton Hill University’s Harlan Gallery there is a room dedicated to the stories of local women and men who were involved in the women’s movement. Their photos hang on the walls accompanied by their personal stories while a movie is projected onto the wall showing their interviews. It is an oral history multimedia project entitled “In Sisterhood: The Women’s Movement in Pittsburgh.”
Charlene Hunt, owner and administrator of Transcribing4You.com, has been listening to the interviews and typing the project verbatim. Eventually the audio files will be archived at the University of Pittsburgh.
“I’ve learned that so much stuff actually began here in Pittsburgh with the women’s movement and equal rights movement. With the little league, getting little girls involved in the little league, and the teacher who was fired because she was pregnant. It’s been a real eye opener for me,” said Hunt.
“I thought it was interesting that they had a lot of other organizations incorporated like the NAACP, so it added the element that it wasn’t just a white, upper-class movement,” said Sarah Slates, a senior.
One of the women featured, Brenda Frazier, had a story about her first time attending a meeting of The National Organization for Women. Her written testimony said, “Of course, I’d heard all the rumors about what these people were like, but I saw families that were like mine. And I got very interested in the issues, but it really turned me off because it was a very white focus… I said, ‘I can’t stop fighting against racism to fight against sexism.’ So we decided to do it together and give both equal weight.”
Another woman, Jeanne Clarke, had a written testimony about her experience working as a clinic director for the Allegheny Women’s Center. “It was probably the most fulfilling work that I have ever done in my life, in that I was able to go home everyday and know that I had helped a women, no matter what her decision was, I had helped her,” she said.
Gerald Gardner’s transcript also held a story about how he got involved in the women’s movement. A friend encouraged him to pretend he was a woman and to look in the classifieds section of the local newspaper for a job in his field of mathematics.
“It was interesting because at that time, the want ads were separated and they had one section for jobs for women and another section jobs for men,” said Gardner in his transcript.
“They’d advertise the same job and it’d be like $2,000 a year less when it was for women than it was for men. But in mathematics, it was even worse because all the good jobs, like computer analyst and this sort of stuff, they were in the men’s section, and all the keypunch operators and stuff like that, they were in the women’s section… it made me pretty mad and that’s how I got involved in suing the Pittsburgh Press,” said Gardner.
The exhibit gives the oral history of 15 individuals and also tells how many Pittsburgh feminist organizations were formed.
“I think the current exhibit… reflects the many faces of the feminist movement,” said Maureen Vissat, an assistant professor of art. “We know that feminism or being a feminist is not monolithic; these photos and the oral testimonies speak directly to the diversity of the movement as well as highlighting the vibrancy of the Pittsburgh region.”