Pacifica Radio Archives Grant Preserves Women in History

The voices and historical speeches of women from Betty Friedan and Shirley Chisholm to Gloria Steinem and Bella Abzug will now be preserved forever by the Pacifica Radio Archives, thanks to a generous matching grant of $128,000 by the National Historical Publications and Records Commission in the National Archives.

"It is gratifying to know these fragile reel-to-reel tapes, silent [for] decades, will be rescued from deterioration and treated with the highest standards our National Archives demands," said Brian DeShazor, Director of the PRA.

The collection, titled "American Women Making History and Culture, 1963-1982," includes Pacifica Radio Archives' holdings from the five Pacifica radio stations (KPFA- Berkeley, CA; KPFK, Los Angeles, CA; WBAI, New York, NY; WPFW, Washington, D.C.; and KPFT, Houston, TX) pertaining to the Women's movement, or the period popularly known as "Second Wave Feminism" in the United States; from the publication of "The Feminine Mystique" (Betty Friedan, 1963) through the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment in 1982.

The American Women collection will document the emergence and evolution of the Women's movement in cities across the United States during that time. It will also look at the unique role Pacifica Radio played by providing a place for women to create and air programming that communicated the movement and expressed their struggles, philosophies and victories.

"We just want to be treated as human beings," said famed African American visionary Fannie Lou Hamer in a Pacifica recording made in 1961. "I'm fighting for human rights, not equal rights."

And long before Hillary Clinton, Madeleine K. Albright, Congresswoman Diane Feinstein and other women secured leadership roles in Washington, D.C., you can hear trailblazer Bella Abzug's no-nonsense New York accent as she addresses an audience in 1981, saying, "And now we have the 'decade' of women... from '75- '85 is the 'decade' of women. I mean, who knows; if we behave, they may let us into the whole thing!"

Featured women include Kay Lindsay, Betty Friedan, Angela Davis, Rita Mae Brown, Adrienne Rich, Ana�s Nin, Jane Fonda, Sylvia Plath, Flo Kennedy, Eleanor Norton, Dolores Huerta, Alice B. Toklas, Shirley Chisolm and thousands more.

The project is expected to run from Oct. 2013-September 2015, and will include the digitization of nearly 1,700 reel-to-reel tapes, and the updating of legacy catalog records through two levels of cataloging: Edited item-level descriptions with standardized metadata, and a searchable online directory available on the UC Berkeley Library.

The recordings from this two-year project will be available for schools, museums, libraries and other non-profit educational organizations free of charge. This is the largest grant ever made to public radio for preservation of historic recordings.

"These audio recordings have become a part of American history, and it is important that Pacifica be given the necessary resources to ensure access to these valuable pieces of our history," said Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York, in her letter supporting the grant application.