Hagley Museum and Library Opens Records of Equal Rights Activist Lois Herr

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Hagley Museum and Library Opens Records of Equal Rights Activist Lois Herr

                Wilmington, Delaware – June 2013 – Hagley Museum and Library announces the papers of Lois Herr are available for research. Herr’s papers document the anti-discrimination case brought against AT&T and its aftermath. When AT&T applied for a rate increase in 1970, the National Organization for Women asked the Equal Economic Opportunity Commission to intervene and deny the rate increase as long as the company discriminated against women. Proceedings began in December 1970 and were settled by agreement on January 18, 1973. Access to the collection is permitted on site. Researchers may view the finding aid online: http://findingaids.hagley.org/xtf/docs/2462.pdf.

                Lois Herr was a founder of the women’s rights committee at Bell Telephone Laboratories, founding member of the AT&T Women’s Alliance, and a member of the National Organization of Women’s AT&T task force. Her papers provide a detailed description about the process by which Herr and other leaders of the women’s rights movement and the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) influenced changes in corporate policy to create more equal opportunities for women in the work place. Herr describes this action in her 2003 book, Women, Power and AT&T: Winning Rights in the Work Place.

Hagley’s Library is the nation’s leading business history library, archives, and research center. Current holdings comprise 37,000 linear feet in the Manuscripts and Archives Department, 290,000 printed volumes in the Imprints Department, 2 million visual items in the Pictorial Department, and more than 300,000 digital images and pages in the Digital Archives Department.  Hagley’s Center for the History of Business, Technology, and Society organizes conferences, research seminars, and a public lecture series; it also operates a research grants-in-aid program.

Hagley Museum and Library

                At Hagley, we invite people of all ages to investigate and experience the unfolding history of American business, technology, and innovation, and its impact on the world, from our home at the historic DuPont powder yards on the banks of the Brandywine.

For more information, call 302-685-2400 weekdays or visit www.hagley.org.

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