Weatherford, Doris 1943-

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Weatherford, Doris 1943-

PERSONAL:

Born September 20, 1943, in Jasper, MN; daughter of Harry D. (a mechanic) and Leona (a housewife) Barge; married Roy C. Weatherford (a professor of philosophy), February 8, 1966; children: Margaret Marie. Ethnicity: "Scandinavian." Education: Attended Arkansas Technical University, Brandeis University, and Harvard University. Politics: Democrat. Hobbies and other interests: Flower gardening, volunteer work.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Seffner, FL. Agent—Fran Collin, Collin Literary Agency, P.O. Box 33, Wayne, PA 19087; Valerie Tomaselli, 445 W. 23rd St., Ste. 1-D, New York, NY 10011.

CAREER:

University of South Florida, Tampa, adjunct professor, 1995—. Board member, National Women's History Project and National Women's History Museum; Florida Women's Hall of Fame, chair; Florida Commission on the Status of Women, historian; Hillsborough Community College, member of board of trustees.

MEMBER:

Authors Guild, Authors League of America, League of Women Voters.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Honor Book citation, International Society of School Librarians, 1998, for A History of the American Suffragist Movement.

WRITINGS:

Foreign and Female: Immigrant Women in America, 1840-1930, Schocken (New York, NY), 1986, reprinted with new foreword, 1996.

American Women and World War II, Facts on File (New York, NY), 1990.

American Women's History: An A to Z of People, Organizations, Issues and Events, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1994.

Milestones: A Chronology of American Women's History, Facts on File (New York, NY), 1997.

A History of the American Suffragist Movement, American Bibliographic Center-Clio Press (Santa Barbara, CA), 1998.

(Editor) The Women's Almanac, Oryx Press (Phoenix, AZ), 2000.

(Executive editor and contributor) A History of Women in the United States: State-by-State Reference, Grolier Academic Reference (Danbury, CT), 2004.

Real Women: Of Tampa and Hillsborough County from Prehistory to the Millenium, University of Tampa Press (Tampa, FL), 2004.

American Women during World War II: An Encyclopedia, Routledge (New York, NY), 2007.

Author of "Standing on Their Shoulders," a column in WE—Women's Enterprise.

SIDELIGHTS:

Doris Weatherford ascribes the inspiration for her first book, Foreign and Female: Immigrant Women in America, 1840-1930 to her discovery during graduate school at Harvard that there were no general books on the experience of female immigrants. Books on the immigrant experience offered only a few mentions of women, and women's history books made very little mention of immigrants. The author's work in general can be characterized by the offering up of heretofore unknown facts and stories about women within historical context.

Weatherford's goal with Foreign and Female, as defined in her foreword to a 1996 reprint, is to "provide a glimpse into the lives of these women and to encourage the asking of new questions." Weatherford assembles a topically organized survey of the lives of immigrant women, including their views on life, death, sex, work, family and more. Drawing extensively on journals, letters, and stories of women from almost all the European ethnic groups, Weatherford has the women themselves "speak clearly of their lives," reported Barbara Scotto in the Wilson Library Bulletin, "and in doing so, they enrich our knowledge of women's social history."

Continuing her exploration into women's history, Weatherford published American Women and World War II. Her focus this time is on the many roles of women during the war, whether on the home front, in the work force, or in the military.

In American Women's History: An A to Z of People, Organizations, Issues and Events, Weatherford expands her scope in an encyclopedic effort that includes famous women side by side with the not so famous. This reference, according to James Rettig in Wilson Library Bulletin, "compensates for the substantive omissions of standard sources and, thereby, itself becomes a standard source."

The subject of Milestones: A Chronology of Women's History is women in history from 1492 to 1995 through brief, chronological entries on women and their achievements as well as events affecting them, all toward placing women in the context of American history in general. Weatherford returns to more specific ground in A History of the American Suffragist Movement, in which she "provides a coherent and accessible narrative history as it was viewed by the suffragists themselves," according to J.K. Boles in Choice.

Weatherford once told CA: "My favorite part of writing is the research and analysis. I love learning new things and putting them into the context of their times. There is so much information available on women that unfortunately has been forgotten, and I enjoy making it available."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Weatherford, Doris, Foreign and Female: Immigrant Women in America, 1840-1930, Facts on File (New York, NY), 1995.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, June 1, 1994, review of American Women's History: An A to Z of People, Organizations, Issues, and Events, p. 1863; June 1, 1997, review of Milestones: A Chronology of American Women's History, p. 1763.

Choice, May, 1987, J. Sochen, review of Foreign and Female, p. 1479; November, 1998, J.K. Boles, review of A History of the American Suffragist Movement, p. 605.

Kliatt, July, 1994, Ruth R. Woodman, review of American Women's History, p. 35.

Library Journal, January, 1987, Cynthia Harrison, review of Foreign and Female, p. 87; September 1, 1990, Marie Marmo, review of American Women and World War II, p. 236; April 1, 1997, Elaine M. Kuhn, review of Milestones, p. 86.

School Library Journal, March, 1999, Linda A. Vretos, review of A History of the American Suffragist Movement, p. 233.

Wilson Library Bulletin, May, 1987, Barbara Scotto, review of Foreign and Female, pp. 70-71; September, 1994, James Rettig, review of American Women's History, p. 77.