Students in the WST 3522: First and Second Wave Feminism course led by Dr. M.C. Santana won a Social Justice Special Recognition Award at the UCF Service-Learning Showcase. Their project included documenting items from the Judith and Warren Kaplan Collection in the UCF Library. The team “Santana’s Chickens” include students Olivia Zokan, Mary Crivelli, Juliana Snowden, and Sarah Kwilecki.<\/p>\n
“The class that has allowed me to participate in service-learning at UCF has been my First and Second Wave Feminism class. Everyone in our class has the privilege of learning to do MegaData by documenting items from the Judith and Warren Kaplan Collection in the Special Collection in the library. The process of documenting MegaData includes describing and placing documents into categories, genre, resource type, etc. The objects and documents that we have the honor of reading and cataloging give us a better perspective of the years before and after suffrage causing us to fully understand how life was for women back in these days.<\/p>\n
Of the pieces I have documented, the one that has stood out to me has been a postcard from the First Day Issue. This particular postcard is from 1970 documenting the 50th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment and it is signed by women in government at the time like Julia Butler Hansen, Florence P. Dwyer, and many more.\n<\/p>\n
The struggles these women went through to gain equality greatly impacted the future of our country. Everyone deserves to have their story told and the women of the first and second wave who fought for their basic human rights should not be left out of history. By making this collection accessible to the general public we have expanded our way of thinking of the past and hope to keep this information alive as history marches on.”<\/p>\n