Activist Women's Voices: Oral History Project
Linking Communities and the University

  Polly Thistlethwaite is a long time volunteer at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Polly observes that there was not an awareness about lesbian lives when she was growing up in Decatur, Illinois in the 1970's. She heard about the Archives--the extraordinary college of books, magazines, newspapers and other artifacts of lesbian lives-when she was in library school and joined Deb Edel and Joan Nestle's project. Her continuing work as one of the coordinators of the Archive is informed, she says, by her "history as a lesbian or deviant or unrepresented voice in the world."

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