Hear WILPF oral histories online

By Judy Adams, Palo Alto WILPF Branch

Don’t let your WILPF Centennial celebration end just yet!  You can now hear for yourself the inspiring stories and voices of more than 90 of our WILPF (and Women Strike for Peace) sisters, interviewed in the 1980s by the Women’s Peace Oral History project, by streaming (or downloading) them to your computer.  I started the project in 1979, with a cassette tape recorder on my lap in the old Peace Center in Palo Alto, CA, and the project grew over the next 10 years to include interviews by my students at Stanford and San Jose State, and other WILPF volunteers across the country, to complete this wonderful collection.

All the materials – recordings, photos, slides, books, biographical information, and other materials have been archived at Stanford since the project’s book, Peacework: Oral Histories of Women Peace Activists was published in 1991. In recent years the collection (ARS 056) was moved to the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound, where funding was made available to catalog the collection, and in time for our April 28 Centennial this year, to make all sound files (including the WILPF Asilomar conference of 1967) digitally available to the public.  It is a treasure-trove of information and inspiration and I hope that your branch will be moved to start (or continue) your own project to capture the peace work of your members for our next WILPF centennial.

Contacts:

Judy Adams for details about using the collection guide and about how to stream or download MP3 files of the interviews themselves. In the future, you will be able to access transcripts of the interviews as well. 

Of course, you can also arrange to visit the collection by contacting Stanford’s ARS.  For guidelines on how to start your own oral history project, contact Judy, or go here or contact Wendy Chmielewski at Swarthmore. 

Photo: Palo Alto WILPFers Mary Clark , Helen Hildreth and Ann Peabody Brown lead protest against the Vietnam War in the 1960s. From Peninsula WILPF archives