Interview by Alondra Flores
November 2025

Alondra Flores: What was your first encounter with women’s history?

Paula Hammett: When I was a kid I hung out at the library a lot, and there was a whole series of short biographies of different people in history. And for some reason– I never did quite figure out why– there were several on women. So I would read about Juliette Low and various women who have had an impact on American history, and that developed my initial interest. And then in my undergraduate degree I did a special major in Native American studies, and my focus was on Native women in California from a historical perspective. I read a lot on the genocidal aspect of Spanish, Mexican, and American contact with indigenous people. And particularly the impact on women. So that had always been an interest that I developed in different ways through school.

When I was still in college, I met Molly [Murphy MacGregor] and Betty Morgan and a few other people involved in a women’s history slideshow collective. There was a group of women at Sonoma State, here in Sonoma County, who had taken the first women’s history class that was offered at Sonoma State, taught by Alice Wexler. They had different options they could do for their final project and they decided it would be a whole lot easier to do a slideshow than it would be to do a paper. So they put together a slideshow called “We the Women.” You have to remember this was way before the internet so it wasn’t easy to find images, the stories, you really had to work to find the quotes, and the history, particularly from a multicultural perspective. It was really really hard. 

So the slideshow evolved, to a collection of five carousels of slides. So there were hundreds of slides, there was a script, there was music, quotes, songs–some of them we’d sing– we would go and give this slide show. People kept saying “Wow, I don’t know anything about this.” And so I was still in college and I knew Betty Morgan, and she asked me if I would be interested in joining. She knew particularly my interest in Native American women, and they felt that was an area that they needed some more expertise. So I joined the slide show collective and we went around and gave this slide show all over Sonoma County, we were in San Francisco several times, we went to Sacramento. You know we were all over, whoever would ask, it would be for high school classes or we gave it at labor union meetings or just community meetings where people were interested. We gave the slideshow several hundred times over its lifetime and it always evolved as we would learn new things or find new images. We’d go “Oh no! That was really wrong. We need to change that.”

And it was at one of these presentations when we were at a community meeting in Santa Rosa with Mary Ruthsdotter–who was also one of the co-founders of the NWHP [National Women’s History Project],– it was the first time she saw the slideshow. We had very old equipment, something would always go wrong –the tape would get stuck, or the slides would stick ,so we would always have to stop, and Mary came up to us and she said, “I’m so glad that we had to stop there a few minutes, because I just needed to let it sink in. I graduated from UCLA. Why have I never heard these women’s names?” She had just moved to the area and had lots of time and energy so then she became part of that group, and then was involved in the Commission on the Status of Women, and various things. 

So that’s how I really started to get a much better understanding of women in American history. Our focus on doing the slide show was on the “common woman.” Not just the well educated and rich white woman. But what were the working women doing? What were women of color doing? You know, how did this all fit together? One vivid memory: We were at a nursing home once and it was a crowded room, it was mostly older women. And we were doing the slide show, and about ⅔ of the way through we started talking about a strike in Gastonia, North Carolina, where a strike leader was murdered, Ella Wiggins. And all of a sudden at the very front of the room– the room is dark you know, the slide is projecting up on the screen at the front of the room– all we could see is this very tiny, frail woman sitting in a wheelchair very close to the screen. And all of a sudden she looked up and she pointed and said “I was there.” Immediately we stopped and said “Tell us about it.” And so she told her story about what it was like to be there in that strike in Gastonia, that was so violent and so consequential. She was so grateful to have someone recognize her story as being something important and valid. That always stuck with me, that it was important to tell stories because they are interesting stories, but particularly as you get later on in your life it’s nice to feel like you’ve had some kind of impact on something or that something you’ve done is important. She really illustrated that for us, just how important it was to tell these stories. So that has always been an important aspect of “Oh this is important work, we need to do this.” 

So from there, there were… well depending on who you talk to, everyone has a different genesis on where the history project came from, depending on their perspective. People came in at lots of different places so the story has lots of different beginnings, I think. But for me it was the slideshow and learning more about history– women in history.

There’s a book called History and Feminism. It’s a history of the study of women in history in the US. The first eight chapters are from a very academic perspective. And in the last chapter she writes about the “Popular Feminist Initiative,” and that one is a history of the National Women’s History Project. The chapter tells some of the stories about how some people were involved in the Commission on the Status of Women, others came in when we were organizing a women’s history parade in downtown Santa Rosa, others came in as different supporters in the community, so it was a very vibrant time (the 1970s) in Sonoma County in terms of lots of local initiatives going on. There was a professor at Sonoma State, JJ Wilson, a literary critic and one of her students and good friends Karen Peterson put together the first book on women artists and that was fascinating. Again, this is pre-internet so it’s not just something where you can be like “give me the history of women artists.” You had to really work hard to find the stories, to verify the stories, and things. There were peace and justice centers, environmental issue centers. So it was a very vibrant time in this county, and the different groups working on different things really supported each other as we worked along. One thing about History and Feminism is that it lays out some of that history.

This was all in the late to mid 70s when we were doing the slideshow and then the National Women’s History Project itself started in the 70s or 80s. And part of how it became more codified was in addition to people asking us to show the slideshow–we did a lot of high school classes where we’d go and present the slide show. A lot of the time the teachers would ask us if we had any curriculum materials, and how to find out more, since their students were interested. That’s when we started thinking about how we could organize this material in a way that we could create materials that could be handed out to the teachers. Because it was a big friend group that was involved, this friend group had a lot of new teachers who were wanting to incorporate this into their class but were really lost as to what they should do. They also made it very clear to us that if it was something that we wanted to promote and try and get more people looking at the contributions of women, that we had to make it easy for the teachers. Even back then it was not easy, so the more that we could provide them with the curriculum materials already ready-to-go the more likely they would be able to incorporate it into an already full curriculum.

I remember one of the earliest meetings where we actually came up with the idea of “What if we did a week?” Each day of the week had a different focus, like women in the arts, women in politics, women in science. I forget what the days were but each day of the week had something. And we were actually sitting around my dining room table at the time, and we were trying to figure out how we would do this, and what kind of materials we could provide, what could we do? And that’s where the connection with the Commission on the Status of Women really became important. Mary (Ruthsdotter) was chair of the committee for a while, at the county commission. So it was something that was county-wide. And then Molly started to work at the commission as the director. And so that gave us some resources and more connection. You’d ask what my connection was, and I was a member of the Education Task Force for a while– we’d review books and do things like that, I I didn’t have strong ties to the Commission, but I did have some connection there. So we were  thinking about how  we could pull this together into a week of materials. And you know people always say with any of the weeks or the months (Black History Month, or International Women’s Day, etc.), they say “everyday is women’s day”  so why focus on a single day or week or month? That’s true, but it’s an organizing principle to try and get a foot in the door to say let’s get in there and see if we can focus on this week, then maybe we can get people engaged enough where they can see Marie Curie and understand her contributions, or read about Margaret Sanger and her interesting and controversial history. So Women’s History Week was an organizing tool, and we put together this week by working with teachers and the county education department. We came up with the whole premise, we took it to the county board of supervisors, at a supervisors meeting which was a bit scary. I mean I was 20 or 21 at the time and I was the youngest of the group. And we took the presentation to the board and we had to get up there in the board room, and the Supervisors were sitting there, and you know in their fancy chairs in front of us, and the room was packed. 

We had brought these crayons and put a sticker on them that said “Write Women Back Into History” and we handed those out as we went up to talk. At that point– it was actually quite unusual at the time– we had two of the five board members were women. And one of them ended up being a very strong supporter of the Women’s History Project. So we went up there and gave our presentation, we left the room and kind of went “Phew! Ok we did it.” She later told us that after we went up, gave the presentation, and left the room, the supervisors left the room for a break or something and they went “Phew! That wasn’t as hard as we thought.” The Board did end up endorsing the concept.

We promised the County Department of Education that we would provide curriculum. And then we worked really hard with teachers, who were also our friends, to develop different kinds of curriculum that would work. Mary Ruthsdotter made this beautiful quilt kit for looking at patterns and mathematical issues using quilt blocks. There were Harriet Tubman games, and trading cards, and everybody was just trying to find different ways to give the teachers a head start in introducing women’s history to their students.

Then it kind of snowballed. We organized a parade for a couple years in downtown Santa Rosa where everybody wore costumes or carried placards like you’d see at demonstrations but with pictures or names of their favorite women in history. So that was very fun. We always tried to make everything as inclusive as possible. So not explicitly feminist, because feminism was kind of one of those words you could never really say. We always made sure at the beginning of the parade to have the color guard from the American Legion group in Cloverdale, the Women’s Auxiliary Colorguard were the flag bearers. So we would have them lead the parade. Getting these patriotic symbols in there at the same time having placards talking about all these different people from different walks of American life. But they were really fun parades. We would sell posters, we would sell chocolate chip cookies to raise money, and  then we incorporated as a non-profit called the Women’s Support Network. And so again it’s kind of this extended friend group working on all of these things, and we’d get together on a Friday night, and we were all doing our jobs at other places, but when we’d get together we’d say “Oh but what about this? This would be fun! Oh we should have a parade” And then it wasn’t until ‘78 that we got the first grant with actual money to pay staff .The whole grant making process was interesting. It was a federal grant, which was a big deal. Everyone said there’s no way that  this little group in Sonoma County can get a federal grant. It usually took people multiple times applying before they even came close to getting this federal grant. Molly, Mary, Betty, and I kind of sequestered ourselves at Mary’s house for several days and each of us was responsible for a different section of this grant.We had limited knowledge of grant writing, but we put it all together and sent it in. We were very surprised then to find out we had been funded, I don’t know, maybe $270,000–even then it was a lot of money. And that’s the money that provided the seed funding for the paid staff of the National Women’s History Project and the creation of curriculum materials that were disseminated across the country. 

Once the Project got the federal funding, we had money for four positions. So at that point I was working for another non-profit called the Tribal Sovereignty Program, and I wanted to continue working with that, so I did not take one of the four positions. Molly, Mary, Betty, and Maria were the paid staff members. And I stayed on as a volunteer, coming in and helping as I could, but that’s why you don’t find much about me anywhere in there because I wasn’t closely affiliated at that point. I was there mostly at the beginning. Over the past year I’ve been helping Molly get the National Women’s History Project’s archives ready to hand over to the Library at Sonoma State University.

One thing that you’ll find as you explore your history is that history is a collection of stories, and everybody you ask will have a slightly different perspective on that history and how it started. For me it started with the slide show. Lynn Woolsey was our Congressional Representative for twenty years, representing our district, and she always considered herself the mid wife of the project because she was involved in the Commission on the Status of Women at the time. Other people came into it in different ways. Unfortunately both Betty and Mary are no longer with us so we don’t get a chance to get their perspective. But the author of History and Feminism talked to Betty a lot so she’s mentioned quite a lot. It’s also important to remember over time there may be things where people will go “Let’s not talk about that part” or “That didn’t work” or “People clashed” or “People went their own separate way” There’s always the human drama that goes on in any of this as well, so it’s just important to remember that everyone has their own perspective and story,  so none of it is definitive. 

Flores: How were you involved in campaigning for it to be involved at the national level?

Hammett: The group was working together to develop these curriculum materials, but it was pretty much still just a Sonoma County thing. We worked with Sonoma County teachers, we went and talked to school boards. I still remember talking to a very rural school board and a guy said “Well we all know that if women had done anything important it would have already been in history books.” Molly was invited to a prestigious women’s history conference run by Gerda Lerner back East. I forget what it’s called now. People involved in this growing field of women’s history, the Berkshire Conference I think it was. Molly was invited because someone had heard about what this group in Sonoma County was doing and they invited her. The NWHP staff made up t-shirts and all the curriculum packets, and all kinds of different things and sent them back with Molly to this conference. It was at this conference where people got excited about Women’s History Week as an approach to try and get the study of women legitimized and infused into the curriculum. Attendees of this conference were all excited about Women’s History Week, and they took the materials, ideas, and organizing principles we had come up with and said “Ok, lets take it back to our own home community” and so that seeded all these other organizing efforts around the country.

One of the people attending the conference had connections to President Carter’s staff and presented the idea to his office.President Carter signed the initial proclamations declaring the week of March 8 Women’s History Week. The initial Congressional proclamation was introduced  by Senator Barbara Mikulski, who was one of the most liberal members of Congress at that time, and Senator Orrin Hatch from Utah, who was one of the most conservative members of Congress. So they were able to put it together in a way so that there was bipartisan support for it. And so that’s how it originally got to President Carter and  Congress.

Flores: You mentioned how when planning for the parade you shied away from the word “feminism” because of how controversial it was but still maintaining that essence, and it got bipartisan support when reaching congress. Do you think we’ve come a long way from that stance on feminism?

Hammett: You know it’s heartbreaking that fifty years later to feel like we’re back at the beginning. It’s like at the protests around the county I always see signs held by older women saying “I can’t believe I’m still protesting for this stuff.” Fifty years and we’re back to the beginning. So it’s heartbreaking but I always have to remember that I was voting for probably twenty years before someone I voted for actually got elected, yet I still kind of went back and kept voting. And I still remember the election where everyone I voted for got elected and I was like “Oh my God.” I also remember that the suffrage movement, for all of its joys and flaws, and you know there were many of both, was a long process. There is a quote by Carrie Chapman Catt where she talks about the history of the women’s movement, starting in 1848 and it wasn’t until 1920 that women were granted the right to vote. They weren’t GIVEN the right to vote they won, they worked hard to get that. And they had to convince men to vote for it. So that was 60 or 80 years or struggle to earn that basic right, and it still wasn’t really until the Voting Rights Act it had the kind of widespread impact that they might have hoped for at the beginning. So it was a long process and that is what I have to try and tell myself when I see the political process. It is now like we need to keep the work going and eventually we’ll come back around, but it can be heartbreaking.

Flores: How much do you think education on women’s history will combat ignorance against women and feminism?

Hammett: I would like to think so, but given the political climate right now, I’m not sure. I mean the political climate right now– they’re doing everything they can to gut every women’s studies, Ethnic Studies, anything in schools, high schools, and colleges. They’re doing everything they can to gut that. So I don’t know where that’s going to go. I think the word feminism has been demonized by so many, for so long, and each generation kind of has its own way of demonizing it. “Oh you man haters” (well no, we’re actually not. I happen to love men, been married to one for quite a while now, I have a son, and many good friends). Then “feminism” became “irrelevant.”  “We don’t need feminism because everyone is equal (at least for affluent white women). And then as that equality starts getting chipped away it’s like, oh. Maybe there needs to be a new word, you know the concepts might be the same, but maybe it’s a new word that doesn’t have all the baggage of the word feminism. 

We knew that we would never get anywhere if anybody felt like we had a political agenda. The only reason we got Orrin Hatch, Senator Hatch from Utah involved, was talking about telling women’s stories, he was Mormon and from a state that was heavily Mormon. And telling family stories is an important part of Mormon culture. So he was able to take it from that perspective and go “Oh yeah, we wanna do that. We wanna tell women’s stories!” But we’re talking fifty years ago, it was a very different time, and thirty years ago it was also a very different time, and now it’s a very different time again. So if we were to try to do something now we would never be able to get it off the ground because there are so many people who have the feeling that human rights are a pie, and if I give you a piece of this pie, I have less for me. And it’s like no, just because I want my rights doesn’t mean you have fewer rights

Flores: What would you wish to see young women do?

Hammett: It’s so hard now because it’s such a different time– the internet has changed things. And I’m not saying this because I’m a librarian. I understand the impact of how information gathering and the creation of knowledge has changed  but boy, with the way it’s evolved and there’s so much bad information out there. It’s so easy to get caught up into bubbles of media content without even realizing it. And then you suddenly realize I’ve been seeing one thing, while everyone else has been seeing something different. It’s important to find ways to get other messages out there. Our guiding principle–I don’t think we had a motto– was “people make history” and it’s important to have people like you feel like it’s important to tell these stories. And to take the time and energy to look into it and think “Maybe I’m not the first person to have thought of these ideas. Who else was there? Who else was thinking about these things?” I think that’s always important, it was certainly important for us, we weren’t the first ones to think about feminism. We were already the second or third wave, so it tends to come in waves. And if you’re surfing  the next wave then I give you all the credit in the world. Listen carefully to people’s stories. Find ways to tell people’s stories. When I heard that woman’s story, from Gastonia, North Carolina, that really hit me, and I knew that this is an important story to tell. So as a budding historian I encourage you just to think of ways to find the stories to tell that make your point, to give people that entry into “Oh, this is kinda interesting” or “I didn’t know that.” And help them find ways to explore more.