Friends of the Library to Host Launch
of a New History of Pennsylvania Women

In celebration of Women's History Month, the Friends of the Bryn Mawr College Library will host a book launch for Women of Industry and Reform: Shaping the History of Pennsylvania, 1865-1940, published by the Pennsylvania Historical Association. Author Marion W. Roydhouse, dean of the school of liberal arts and a professor of history at Philadelphia University, will speak and sign books at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, March 21, in the Rare Book Room of Mariam Coffin Canaday Library.

Women of Industry and Reform brings together stories of women who worked in factories, walked picket lines, fought for the vote, managed life and negotiated urban conditions in Pennsylvania cities in the years between the Civil War and World War II. The book follows women through the development of Pennsylvania's industrial economy, beginning with farming and examining women's roles in coal-mining towns in the Lebanon Valley, at the Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876, in the urban-reform movement in the immigrant neighborhoods of Pittsburgh and Philadelphia, and in the battle for suffrage in Harrisburg and across the state.

The story continues with the organized labor movement, where women struggled for workers' rights in the coal mines of Westmoreland County, the silk mills of Carbondale and the textile factories in Philadelphia, among other sites of strikes. The Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers in Industry, which brought industrial workers to the College for summer classes beginning in 1921, figures prominently in the book's discussion of the cooperation between labor organizers and reformers.

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