In honor of Women’s History Month and our Fashion Plates of Northampton County exhibition, we invite you to view a series of oral history interviews with women connected to the textile and needle trades in the Lehigh Valley from the middle of the twentieth century to the late 1980s.
This multi-year project will be brought to you by Professors Susan Clemens-Bruder and Gail Eisenberg of Muhlenberg College.
The presentation will focus on the wives of business owners, who carved out meaningful lives for themselves as wives and mothers, community leaders, career women, and entrepreneurs.
The program is free with museum admission or $5 for the talk only.
About our Speakers:
Susan Clemens-Bruder is a Senior Lecturer and a full-time member of the History Department of Muhlenberg College since 1998. Her first oral history project focused on Bethlehem steelworkers in the early 1990s. Since then, Susan coordinated the oral history interviewing and processing for the Lehigh Valley Black African Heritage History Project. She has presented at numerous conferences on oral history, urban history, and labor history. She teaches Oral History Methods and Practices and Oral History Diversity at Muhlenberg College. She co-published with Judith Ridner “Taking Their Place among the Giants: Performing Oral Histories of Pennsylvania’s Black Freedom Struggle,” published in The Oral History Review (2014). Susan has engaged and mentored student assistants and students in oral history classes on the skills of accurate transcription, and in reading and reviewing mechanically transcribed documents for accuracy.
Gail Eisenberg is a Senior Lecturer in the Accounting, Business, Economics and Finance Department of Muhlenberg College since 1983. Of relevance to this project, Gail teaches Marketing and Research and specializes in conducting in-depth interviewing and leading focus groups. Gail has conducted research projects in the community and on campus with her students, and presented many papers at various professional conferences. She recently co-authored an article on the gender wage-gap that was published in On Campus with Women and another article on this topic that was published in the Journal of Employment Counseling.