FROM THE
Greater Grand Rapids Women’s History Council The Women’s Angle uring its 25th anniversary year in 2013, the Greater Grand Rapids Women’s History Council (GGRWHC) is highlighting the research underlying its more visible work sponsoring programs and publishing to address the under-representation of women in accounts of Grand Rapids history. Since 1988 GGRWHC has studied local women and broadcast the news that they were important partners in the creation of our city. Data unearthed in West Michigan has in turn found uses far beyond local boundaries. Even before recent digitizing projects began, academic historians were using GGRWHC hardcopy materials to alter the incomplete national picture of American women. Recently, two more books have appeared featuring material from the GGRWHC collection of oral history interviews housed in the Grand Rapids Public Library. Todd Robinson’s A City within a City: The Black Freedom Struggle in Grand Rapids, Michigan, uses several sources liberally, especially an interview with the late Ella Sims. For her 2009 book about domestic workers of the Second Great Migration, Making a Way Out of No Way, historian Lisa Krissoff Boehm adds original interviews, but she also relies on GGRWHC interviews, among them Ella Sims’s. In a comment about the importance of women’s oral testimony, Boehm both explains the mission of the GGRWHC and inspires more local work: “Existing archival collections feature few stories of the Second Great Migration, and only rarely has the movement been considered from the female viewpoint in oral histories. Of the resources that exist, few could rival the specificity and wrenching emotion of [Ella] Sims’s memories” (92). On May 2nd, 1994, the GGRWHC’s Jane Idema and Bunny Voss interviewed Mrs. Sims, after which transcribers created a manuscript version of the audio for the use of researchers like Boehm. Today, the GGRWHC continues interviewing living women at the same time it has been digitizing audio and transcripts of 50+ interviews. As the history of Grand Rapids women becomes more and more available worldwide, the GGRWHC hopes its local significance will be more readily understood. — Jo Ellyn Clarey, Greater Grand Rapids Women’s History Council
Ella Sims, Grand Rapids History & Special Collections Department, Grand Rapids Public Library
2012 / Grand River Valley History
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