Mayor's Council for Women
History Committee
Telling Herstories, it's not just history.
The subcommittee hopes to inspire and empower future generations of women by highlighting the past. In 2016 the Telling Herstories workgroup was established with the mission to recover, archive, publish, and celebrate an inclusive historical repository of women's accomplishments, activism, and experiences as leaders, advocates, educators, and community builders from 1920 to 2020.
Accomplishments:
To date, Telling Herstories has accomplished the following:
- Collected more than 80 interviews with a diverse group women in greater Chattanooga area;
- Attracted nearly $10,000 in grant funding from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga Office of Research and Sponsored Programs and Ruth S. Homberg Grant for Faculty Excellence program to support equipment and transcription;
- Published 74 interviews online in the Chattanooga Women's Oral Histories digital collection.
Goals for the next year:
By Fall 2018, the Telling Herstories Subcommittee hopes to:
- Conduct a total of 200 interviews with a diverse range of Chattanooga women
- Tell at least 10 stories of Chattanooga women derived from these oral histories and other historic sources in various scholarly and social media outlets, including articles in the Times Free Press, Chattanooga Area Historical Journal, and Nooga.com;
- Work closely with the Suffragette Monument - History Workgroup to inform the design of structure.
Resources
Telling Herstories works with community volunteers and students at Southern Adventist University, Covenant College, and the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga to record interviews. We also partner with the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga for recording equipment, technical support, and long term preservation of these invaluable recordings.
If you would like to volunteer to record an interview for inclusion in the Chattanooga Women's Oral Histories digital collection, please read the Interview Guidelines on the right and contact Telling Herstories Co-Chair, Susan-Eckelmann Berghel, at Susan-Eckelmann@utc.edu to get started.
Listen to our interview with Councilwoman Demetrus Coonrod, the City of Chattanooga City Council, representative for District 9.
We have some incredible women who are passionate about telling herstory, not just history. Click below to see if you know someone!
I enjoy rights as a woman that I take for granted. And I wish I knew more about the people who helped me get them. I think it would be useful to maybe have a little more gratitude to know about that struggle.
Melissa Hefferlin, 2016 March 22
Community Partners
