Historical Encyclopedia of Chicago Women Project.

The Historical Encyclopedia of Chicago Women Project (1990-2001) was co-sponsored by the Chicago Area Women's History Conference (CAWHC), a non-profit organization that promotes and supports the study of women's history, and the Center for Research on Women and Gender (CRWG) at the University of Illnois at Chicago. In January 1990, CAWHC launched a project to produce a reference book on Chicago women. Jean S. Hunt, the president of CAWHC, and the CAWHC board appointed Rima Lunin Schultz, a CAWHC member and historian of Chicago history, for the project director of the new Chicago women's history project. Later, Adele Hast joined Schultz as co-director. After a meeting in March, 1992, between professional historians, biographers, free-lance writers, graduate students, librarians, archivists, and researchers, guidelines for the book were laid out. The goal was to collect the biographies of women who had died by 1990, to be attentive to issues of race, class, and gender, and to appeal to high school and college students as well as a general audience. In 1993, the editorial board, consisting of Adele Hast, Rima Lunin Schultz, Carolyn De Swarte Gifford, Babette F. Inglehart, Mary Ann Johnson, Cheryl Johnson-Odim, Clarice Stetter, and Margaret Strobel, selected 423 names of Chicago women for the biographical dictionary. The selected women were involved in social movements, correcting the male-dominated narrative of Chicago history and participating in the fields of art, education, medicine, law, and socio-political activities. In spring 2002, Indiana University Press published Women Building Chicago 1790-1990: a Biographical Dictionary.