As you will see throughout this course, without the work of dedicated historians, our knowledge of the past would be limited, and that is especially true when it comes to documenting women’s history. For this project, you will work in small groups to do the real work of historians, in this case, helping to document the contributions, lives, and experiences of women delegates to the 1977 Houston Conference, the only federally-funded women’s rights conference in US history, which brought together delegates from every state to work on a platform of issues important to women’s lives, rights, and equality.

In this assignment, you will join 1000+ student contributors nationally who have worked on the Sharing Stories from 1977 website behind-the-scenes since 2017, and continue to do so since its phase one launch in late 2021. This Digital Humanities project seeks to capture the stories of the people who came together at the National Women’s Conference, where they debated and passed a National Plan of Action. Once completed, the biographies you collect and write will join the growing list of biographies on the Sharing Stories website – and in doing so, will contribute to new knowledge about this important event and its place in women’s history and the lives of those who participated. All told, over 150,000 elected participants at lead-up state and territory meetings, 2000 elected delegates in Houston, and thousands more observed, volunteered at, and covered this event. Because National Women’s Conference attendees were so diverse, the Sharing Stories project aims to reflect that diversity in delegate biographies that will be showcased on our website. 

Your task is to tease out those moments from the delegate’s past that influenced their position on women’s rights, find out what they did as a delegate during the NWC, and discuss their work after the conference.