Creator: Oral histories of low income and minority women, 1970s-1992.
Collection number: 4608
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Abstract: Transcriptions of interviews in the Oral Histories of Low Income and Minority Women project of the Southwest Institute for Research on Women at the University of Arizona in collaboration with the Schlesinger Library on the History of American Women at Radcliffe College with funding from the Ford Foundation. The fifty-six interviews, with transcriptions ranging in length from 17 to over 2,000 pages, were conducted by Fran Leeper Buss during the 1970s and 1980s. Interviewees, some of whom chose to remain anonymous, include three Asian-Americans, twelve African-Americans, and six Native-Americans. The women resided in fourteen states: Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, and Texas in the South; Arizona, California, New Mexico, and Wyoming in the West; Illinois, Minnesota, and Wisconsin in the Midwest. Appalachia is represented by women from Kentucky and Tennessee. The subjects covered document all aspects of these women’s lives–their personal lives, their attitudes and interactions with members of their families and others in their communities, and their feelings about their status at the time of the interview and about their prospects for the future. An extensive subject index is provided. The Library of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill is one of seven depositories for this material; the original tapes and other materials are housed at the Schlesinger Library.
Repository: Southern Historical Collection