Women's stories often get lost because so much of women's
history resides in private places such as diaries, family scrapbooks,
family letters, or papers stored in boxes in family attics. Women
often are hard to find, and once found, can be hard to track over
time as they change their names when they get married. And
sometimes they marry more than once, which increases the
challenge. This was what fourteen Fort Worth women took on
when they agreed to write a chapter each on the history of women
in their city.
From pioneer women to the movers and shakers of the mid-
twentieth century, Grace and Gumption explores the lives and
careers of the prominent and not-so prominent alike, uncovering a
fascinating web of connection to show readers just how bustling
Fort Worth was shaped by the distaff side.
Early in the process of planning the book, certain parameters
were needed: from choosing the themes or categories of women's
endeavors to deciding where to draw the line for inclusion. To
avoid problems of inclusion and omission, the contributors agreed
that they would only write about women who are deceased.
Developing the categories to assign was difficult, because you
can't pigeonhole women. Women always have been multi-taskers
and many were relevant to more than one chapter because their
talents and contributions reached in many directions.
Over the course of a summer, contributors met at monthly
gatherings to discuss their progress. Meetings often concluded
with authors bargaining with one another over who "got" which
multitalented woman.
The goal was not an encyclopedia but to gather as many
women's stories as possible out of the attics and into a public
place, to provide snapshots of women's contributions that others
may one day enlarge upon. In the process contributors learned a
whole lot about the growth of a city and became a small and close-
knit community themselves.
The result—a labor of love by women for women.
_________________________________________________________
KATIE SHERROD is an independent writer, producer and
commentator based in Fort Worth, Texas. She has won several
awards in newspaper, radio and TV, including the Dallas Press
Club Award for her 2001 PBS documentary Freedman's Cemetery
Memorial: A Place of Healing, narrated by Alfre Woodard, and the
Exceptional Media Merit Award from the National Women's Political
Caucus. She was inducted into the Texas Women's Hall of Fame in
1987 for outstanding contributions in the field of communications,
named one of Fort Worth's Outstanding Women in 1988 and Texas
Woman of the Year in 1989.
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