After earning a doctorate in women’s history at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Joyce Follet served the university as a public historian, working in community education, oral history, and documentary film. She produced the public television documentary Step by Step: Building a Feminist Movement, 1941-1977, which traces the roots of contemporary US feminism to earlier labor, civil rights, religious and political activism. As Coordinator of Collection Development at the Sophia Smith Collection, she directed the Voices of Feminism Project to preserve the stories of women of color, sexual minorities, and low-income women. She co-directed the Steinem Initiative, which explored the potential of women’s and gender history as an organizing tool. She currently directs the Reproductive Justice History in Action Project at Smith College, which is producing a toolkit that puts the 500-year history of U.S. women of color, queer women, and low-income women organizing for sexual and reproductive health, rights, and justice in the hands of activists for use in movement building today.
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