In this blog post, Sara Janes and Jordyn Curci (Lakehead University) present the work of archiving the Northwestern Ontario International Women’s Decade Co-Ordinating Council oral histories. If you'd like to learn more, make sure to register for the ACA 2026 Virtual Conference to attend the session “Listening to Northwestern Ontario Women’s History”!

1975 was the first year of the United Nations Decade for Women. In Thunder Bay, the Northwestern Ontario International Women’s Decade Co-Ordinating Council was founded, to coordinate and support feminist organizing across the region.

Members of this Council recognized that women’s history in Northwestern Ontario, much like women’s history elsewhere, was under-represented and under-recorded. One of the first projects the Council took on was termed the “Herstory Project,” with goals to collect oral history and archival records, and ultimately to write a book about this under-researched history. The project was funded in 1975, and active collecting began: volunteers and paid researchers visited women across the region, recorded oral histories, and collected documents and photographs.

Funding, and active work on the project, lasted only a few years. But, in that relatively short period of time, over 100 women committed their voices to tape, and shared additional materials with the researchers.

The materials – audio cassette tapes, photographs, news clippings, and project organizing files – were held by members of the Decade Council and then passed to a faculty member with Lakehead’s Department of Women’s Studies. Ultimately, after retirements and faculty turnover, those records were donated to the Archives in late 2024.

Woman feeding farmyard birds. Northwestern Ontario Women’s Decade Council Herstory Project Collection. Photographer unknown.

Herstory, 1975

This was a broad project, and very ambitious. While the Council wasn’t able to complete the work they had initially planned, such as producing a book, the materials that have survived the past 50 years are an incredibly valuable record of women’s experiences in the early 20th century across Northwestern Ontario.

One priority of the interviewers was to speak to older women: some were even born in the 1890s. Another priority of the project was to interview women from across Northwestern Ontario: settler communities around the region were well represented. Most of the women interviewed were working class, and came to these communities because of work: for themselves or for their husbands.

Map showing locations of interviewees, across Northwestern Ontario. Image: Lakehead University Archives.

Another priority was to interview women from various ethnic groups. This is of course difficult to quantify, but in listening to the tapes digitized so far, many of the women interviewed had immigrated to Northwestern Ontario from various European countries in their youth. So far, we have not identified any interviewees who were Indigenous. In some of the interviews, women discuss relationships between the people of their settler communities, and people in local Indigenous communities.

The interviews were unstructured and range in length from roughly 20 minutes, to over two hours. Normally they would begin with the interviewer asking the women to tell them about their life in Northwestern Ontario. The women then speak about their experiences and tell stories, sometimes going in unexpected directions. The questions asked by interviewers tend toward asking about how women were treated differently compared to men in specific scenarios the women experienced. The interviewers were also very interested in any testimony regarding the World Wars or the Depression that the women could provide.

Quote from interviewee Jean Forester, regarding work at Canadian Car & Foundry during the Second World War. Image: Lakehead University Archives.

The Project at Lakehead University’s Archives

Upon receiving the tapes, it quickly became clear that this would be a project with many moving parts. Audio cassette tapes are a nearly obsolete medium, and at 50 years old, we knew it would be important to digitize them for preservation as well as for access. While at Lakehead we do a lot of digitization in-house, because of the age and potential fragility of the tapes, it seemed valuable to outsource the work to access expertise and better-quality equipment. Another challenge we faced in this project was that only a few signed release forms were included in the project records, which means that many of the recordings can’t yet be widely shared.

The Archives has received charitable financial support in the past, and I had for some time been thinking about how we might engage with using Lakehead’s relatively-new crowdfunding platform. This project seemed like one we could communicate effectively around, and which could garner some public interest.

Multiple parts of this project need to happen simultaneously, though. In order to begin digitization, we needed to raise the first bit of money, which meant we needed to get people excited about the project without even having anything available to listen to. Receiving the first few hundred dollars meant we could digitize the first set of tapes – which we made sure all had consent forms available – to begin building online access and better publicity. Since September 2025, Sara was able to speak to the local CBC and to local arts & culture magazine The Walleye; present at the Ontario Library Association Superconference; and plan an event with the local chapter of Ontario Ancestors (OGS); while student workers put together a display for Women’s History Month in the Library.

Photograph of Women’s History Month display at Lakehead University Library. Image: Lakehead University Archives.

All of this work has brought our fundraising total slowly upwards, resulting in 50 tapes digitized, listened to, and given metadata. Because of the lack of signed consent forms, only 11 are freely available online at this time. We hope to increase that number as we search for and reach out to family members and friends.

The women’s stories show a wide range of lived experiences. Within the tapes that have been digitised and made public, each story is incredibly different. For example, Lillian Wolter discusses growing up in Nipigon and becoming a school teacher. She details the difficulty of getting a divorce from her husband, since she was the one who wanted to leave. She describes a conversation she had with her first lawyer where he told her, “You can’t prove adultery on his part, it's pretty difficult to prove that on a man.” She was eventually granted a divorce after her husband had two children and multiple other relationships outside of his marriage to her.

This life experience is different from that of someone like Ksenia Dubinsky, who immigrated from Ukraine to Fort William, and owned a restaurant with her husband during the Great Depression. The story she tells of immigrating to Canada puts focus on the multiple immigrant communities in Northwestern Ontario and how they relate to one another. Each and every story is unique and offers a different perspective on living as a woman during the early 20th century.

There are also commonalities across the stories. Many of the women discuss their active membership in the social and political life of these communities. Women like Caroline Jacobson, who was an active member of the CCF (Co-Operative Commonwealth Federation), and Michalena Stepanik who was a part of The Ukrainian Labour Society and President of the Ukrainian Women’s Association for 12 years, did important community work in Dorion and Kenora, respectively. Additionally, many of these tapes discuss local branches of the Women’s Institute, and challenges in homemaking and raising children.   

Quote from interviewee Michalena Stepanik, regarding raising her children as second-generation Ukrainian immigrants. Image: Lakehead University Archives.

This project successfully illustrates the vast experiences of women and showcases the often hidden part that women play within history. Hearing these experiences in the women’s voices lets them be the narrators of their own stories, correcting misconceptions, and starting new conversations. Those who are interested in this topic can listen to the stories shared above in the voices of those who experienced them.

Stretching Perspectives on Archival Outreach

This project has helped to stretch our definitions of archival outreach. While it has always been something that we found important, the range of activities we’ve been able to take on at Lakehead has been limited by time, resources, and the need to balance many different projects.

But here, we find ourselves working hard not just to share information about one, specific collection – the majority of which is not yet accessible to researchers. Another major goal of this project is to connect with the family members and friends of the women whose voices are preserved on the tapes: to connect them to those recordings, so that they can listen to the voices again.

To date, we have connected with family and friends twice. There is a great deal more work to do: in confirming full names, looking for potential family, and reaching out. We have hopes that our fundraising will support a part-time student position to engage with the recordings more deeply, and to speed up this work.

Young woman on a train. Northwestern Ontario Women’s Decade Council Herstory Project Collection. Photographer unknown.

The Listening to Women’s History project is still very much in progress, but it has already led to meaningful outcomes: reconnecting people with the voices of their family members, providing insight into lives lived across rural Northwestern Ontario, and getting members of the public more interested in our collections and what we do. Archival outreach can feel like a constant uphill battle, but it also creates meaning and support.

And ultimately, these tapes will provide an invaluable historical resource to all those who wish to use them.

Sara Janes is University Archivist at Lakehead University, and has also held volunteer roles with the ACA, AAO, and Thunder Bay Museum. Sara’s work focuses on collection development, digital preservation, and improving access to historical documents through outreach and public engagement.

Jordyn Curci is in the process of completing her Honours Bachelor of Arts in English at Lakehead University. She is currently working in the archives at Lakehead as an Archives Assistant.