During Women’s History Month, this Local History Guild program will focus on the underexplored histories of women of the South Coast, specifically in New Bedford and Fairhaven.

Three speakers will explore how women actively shaped and improved their communities during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jan da Silva is Program Manager of Visitor Experience & Resource Stewardship at the New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park. She will explore the experience of African American women in the abolitionist center of New Bedford in the 1800s. Lee Blake, President of the New Bedford Historical Society and historian, will speak on the commitment to education New Bedford’s Black and White women engaged in the wake of the Civil War. Author and historian Beth Luey will speak on women’s civic organizations in Fairhaven, such as the Mothers’ Club and the Colonial Club.

The conversation will be moderated by Marina Dawn Wells, Assistant Curator of History & Culture. All are invited to listen, learn, and engage with the speakers during a Q&A session to follow.

Jan da Silva serves as the Program Manager of Visitor Experience & Resource Stewardship for New Bedford Whaling National Historical Park. She heads park operations and programming, as well as being the park’s cultural resource expert, focusing not only on architectural history but also its local history. She is co-author, with Kathryn Grover, of a Historic Resource Study of the Boston African American National Historic Site prepared for the National Park Service. Jan graduated from Princeton University with a degree in History and from Roger Williams University with a degree in Historic Preservation.

Lee Blake is a public historian who has received several awards for her work as a historic preservationist preserving local history and creating public spaces that celebrate people of color. These include the Robert G. Stanton Award for her work promoting and preserving the history of the Underground Railroad by the National Park Service in 2018, a MA Cultural Council Commonwealth Award for her work in the Humanities and the MA Humanities Governor’s Award in the Humanities both in 2019 and a Baystate Legacy Award in 2022 for her work in African American History and Women of the Year for the City of New Bedford for her work reclaiming Black History. In 2023 she was awarded an Honorary Doctorate in African American Studies and Social Justice by the University of MA Dartmouth.

Beth Luey was director of the Scholarly Publishing Program at Arizona State University for twenty-five years before retiring to the South Coast. Since then, she has worked as an editor at the Adams Family Papers at the Massachusetts Historical Society, where she is now chair of the publications program. Her main retirement project has been books about historic houses and the families who lived in them.