Woman of the Times

omen of Achievement and Herstory (WOAH), Irene Stuber's daily emails about significant women in history, brings inspiration, motivation, and knowledge to more than 25,000 men and women each day. It's an accomplishment that would have been virtually impossible for the Arkansas grandmother using conventional forms of communication.

Yet with the help of computers, Irene's fascinating collection of items about women who have been largely ignored by conventional (that is, male) historians draws readers from Moscow, Helsinki, Shanghai, and just about every other point on the globe.

Irene had been collecting odd facts and dates about women for a state National Organization for Women newsletter when she realized that some of her younger colleagues -- educated women majoring in women's studies in college -- had never heard of some of the people she was profiling. "I was stunned," says Irene, "until I realized that these foremothers had been strangers to me, too -- an avid student who loves history."

She began by collecting data in hard copy, but once she was exposed to the possibilities of the computer age, she never looked back. She has added a thrice-weekly mailing called Catt's Claws (named for suffragist Carrie Chapman Catt), which she uses to "express the frustrations and growing fury of today's woman. With WOAH, I let the history of fine women stand on its own merits."

The people she has touched are effusive in their praise. One woman wrote to tell her, "It gives me a sense of power as a woman to know what various women have accomplished. Women in the present have a wealth of courageous, inventive, powerful women from the past to guide and encourage them."


	Irene Stuber's cyperproficiency has made her something of a local celebrity in Hot Springs, Arkansas. (Photograph by David Gottschalk)


	Irene Stuber began the Women of Acievement and Herstory project in June 1994. It has grown to a 10,000-item list that Irene hopes to double by the time she passes the reins to someone else. (Photograph by David Gottschalk)

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