The Fred Harvey Company, in reaction to growing tensions between staff and customers, decided to bring out women from the East and Midwest to stay in dormitories and work in their restaurants on an initial 6-month contract. The Harvey Girls were an instant hit, and many women stayed on, requesting further employment and marrying locals. Ultimately, this workforce spanned almost 100 years and involved over 100,000 women … many of the Fred Harvey Company’s most prominent restaurants and buildings which were designed by their chief building designer, Mary Colter. Colter was way ahead of her time, not only in her chosen profession, but also in her unique aesthetic which fused Native American and Hispanic Southwestern traditions. Colter’s work is still in evidence at The Grand Canyon in Arizona, La Fonda Hotel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, La Posada Hotel in Winslow, Arizona and at Union Station in Los Angeles, California.
Category: Blog
The Women’s History Network blog
On the Strength of Invisible Hands
The struggle for equal pay dates from way before the nineteenth century. Women have campaigned rarely knowing of the women who have gone before. The identities of many are lost in the past, although reinstatement has sometimes come through…
No More Rights to be Won?
Youthful arrogance is not limited to eras, individuals or generations. It permeates political movements, particularly where past oppression and greater disadvantage colour the work and its record. History reflects this for women in all periods, all battles. Conventional history, ways of working, and recording herstory colour women’s demands through centuries and how women’s campaigns are see.
Forgotten Heroes
Why do some women receive publicity and public recognition of their achievements and others remain completely ignored? This is the case of Ellen Wilkinson MP, discussed in an earlier blog, and also her friends the birth control pioneers. There was an…
Saving Women’s History : The Employment Tribunal Archive – Pt 2
How a strategic approach to discrimination claims has shaped what is in the Employment Tribunal Archive Most early cases of sex discrimination involved recruitment or access to promotion. Recruitment cases were comparatively straightforward: was the claimant better qualified than the other candidates;…
Saving Women’s History : The Employment Tribunal Archive – Pt 1
Derby has much to do to set up the Archive in a way which enables its richness to be fully explored but it will be worth it. On some matters it may be possible to set information from the Archive alongside contemporaneous research and to discover, for example, whether early case decisions back up research findings that women who experienced sexual harassment tended to be those who were about to break into a male preserve – in other words, the harassment was not about sex, it was about power.
Cultures of Exclusion: Illicit worlds of Indian dance – Pt 2
In today’s India, classical performers are counted amongst the respectable middle classes, and usually belong to upper castes. However, before modern reforms, being married and performing in public or in front of men were entirely mutually exclusive social roles…
Cultures of Exclusion: Illicit worlds of Indian dance – Pt 1
From the 1990s, dance bars in Mumbai and other parts of the state of Maharashtra mushroomed into prominence. In these bars, girls dressed in glitzy though traditional clothes, danced to Bollywood songs and entertained almost exclusively male audience members.…
MARY QUAILE – Activist, Agitator, Trade Unionist
Mary Quaile Early in the 1900s, Mary Quaile arrived with her family in Manchester. They had come from Dublin, and Mary became a stalwart in the labour movement in Manchester. She led a café waitresses’ strike, going on to work…