Biography

Jennifer Abraham Cramer is the director of Louisiana State University's T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History. She has a bachelor's degree in history and a master's degree in anthropology. She is responsible for managing an oral history collection of nearly 5,000 interviews and cultivates partnerships with like-minded organizations, individuals and community groups. Cramer produces What Endures, a podcast featuring content from the center's collections, and serves as the media review editor for The Oral History Review.

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Women Pioneers of the Louisiana Environmental Movement

Compelling accounts from early champions of Louisiana's struggle to save natural resources

Women Pioneers of the Louisiana Environmental Movement provides a window into the passion and significance of 38 committed individuals who led a grassroots movement in a socially conservative state. The book is comprised of oral history narratives in which women activists share their motivation, struggles, accomplishments and hard-won wisdom. Additionally, interviews with eight men, all leaders who worked with or against the women, provide more insight into this rich — and also gendered — history.

The book sheds light on Louisiana’s and America's social and political history, as well as the national environmental movement in which women often emerged to speak for human rights, decent health care and environmental protection. By illuminating a crucial period in Louisiana history, the women tell how environmentalism emerged within a state already struggling with the dual challenges of adjusting to the civil rights movement and the growing oil boom.

Peggy Frankland, an environmental activist since 1982, worked with a team of interviewers, especially those trained at Louisiana State University's T. Harry Williams Center for Oral History. Together they interviewed 40 women pioneers of the state environmental movement. Frankland's work was aided by a grant from the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities. In this compilation, she allows the women's voices to provide a clear picture of how their smallest actions affected their communities, their families and their ways of life. Some experiences were frightening, some were demeaning — and many women were deeply affected by the individual persecution, ridicule and scorn their activities brought. But their shared victories reveal the positive influence their activism had on the lives of loved ones and fellow residents.