ABSTRACT
Barbara Egger Lennon's personal and professional evolution occurred alongside the transformation of American culture from nineteenth-century traditional to twentieth-century modern. Her evolution from a deferential student and then teacher with a high school diploma to a college-educated professional educator to union organizer and political activist illustrates women’s changing presence in the public sphere. Barbara's efforts to be a “good” mother, employee, and citizen required the sort of multitasking common for twenty-first-century women, but her story certainly complicates traditional views of women’s lives before the 1970s. Gathering sufficient evidence about the lives of nonfamous women often proves difficult. In truth, however, many women keep daily journals and scrapbooks commemorating what they thought important, but the vast majority of these pieces of history never end up in an archive. For far too long, women’s lives were considered, at best, tangential to history and important only as they connected to men’s stories.
