The Lancaster Virginia Historical Society (LVHS) will host “Black Voices: Recollections of Working Women in mid-20th-century Lancaster and Northumberland” at 3 p.m. Thursday, February 4.
The virtual program is the next installment in the “Zooming In On Lancaster County History” series.
“The presentation will feature audio clips and information selected from our ‘Closing the Gap’ Collection of oral history interviews, which were conducted about 20 years ago with elderly African Americans who were then looking back on their lives and local experiences during the 1930s to 1970s, including times of segregation,” said LVHS president Frank Kober.
“For this program, we will focus on sharing the voices of a few women telling about their work in and out of the home,” said Kober.
The oral history selections and transcriptions for this program have been compiled by LVHS volunteer Katherine Cassidy and board member Lois Williams. Board members Rev. Tyron Williams and Denise Pope Mazyck will lead the online presentation with introductions and comments about each interview segment.
The program will include quotes from Kathryn Norris Laws, who was a domestic worker for the Cornwell family in Lancaster, in the home that is now the LVHS museum; Margaret Dobyns Holden, who taught at Holley Graded School in Northumberland; Catherine Scott, who was a beautician in White Stone; Jean Campbell, who was a bookkeeper in an area clothing factory; and Brenda Campbell Phillips, who was the first woman to be a licensed embalmer and funeral director in the Northern Neck.
Recordings from Cedra Yerby Jones and Felicia Carter will tell about the work of their mothers taking in laundry in the 1930s. Interviews from Claudine Curry Smith, a midwife, and Beatrice Flint, a teacher and county extension home demonstration agent, will provide memories of jobs outside of their main careers, including picking tomatoes and other farming and fishing work.
The program will take place via Zoom webinar and is free for LVHS members and $5 for others. All viewers must register at www.mkt.com/maryball or 462-7280 and provide their email address. Registration to view the live broadcast closes at noon on the day of the program. Afterwards, people can register to watch the online video recording.
