Brigid O'Farrell Tradeswomen Collection

Brigid O’Farrell has served as an independent scholar and women’s rights researcher since the early 1970s, where she has been dedicated to uplifting women in nontraditional jobs and the organizations and unions that support them. After obtaining her master in Sociology from Harvard Graduate School of Education in 1973, O’Farrell became more involved with labor history and education. She was invited to attend the Union Women’s Regional Summer School in Connecticut as a student. Barbara Mayer Wertheimer, a professor at the New York State School of Industrial and Labor Relations, Cornell University, invited O’Farrell to co-teach in the second school at the University of Pennsylvania in 1977. Later, she co-directed the third school, in 1978, at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with Harvey Friedman, long-time labor activist and director of the University of Massachusetts Labor Relations and Research Center. O’Farrell stayed a part of the program, which set up workshops and informational classes that taught women within nontraditional labor jobs their rights as workers and as women, until her move to Washington D.C. in 1968, but she would return to the program in 2011, where she published reports on her findings within the institution. After moving to California, in 2001, she attended the National Trades Women Conference in Denver, CO. The first Women Building California State Conference was held in 2002. There, O’Farrell presented her first Women's Labor History Workshop for tradeswomen at the third state conference in 2004 and began developing a working relationship with tradeswomen organizations in California through 2010. From 2011 to 2019 O’Farrell was involved in the National Tradeswomen Conference, now Tradeswomen Build Nations (TWBN) Conference, in several different roles. First, O’Farrell developed an Eleanor Roosevelt Leadership Workshop for tradeswomen that was presented at several conferences with enthusiastic attendance. Second, working with Carolyn Jacobson and the Berger Marks Foundation, they attended TWBN and provided foundation materials for union women, especially around mentoring and women's committees. Third, she served as a researcher working with Ariane Hegewisch, in which they conducted a focus group for a survey on tradeswomen issues (Institute for Women's Policy Research) in 2012, distributed surveys in 2013, and presented results at a workshop in 2014 and 2015. At that time, they helped establish a Research Committee as part of the Task Force on Tradeswomen's Issues which met as a caucus group at the TWBN conference with the goal of attracting more scholars to address tradeswomen’s issues. O’Farrell’s interest in women’s labor history and education is what lead her to begin her research on Eleanor Roosevelt for her successful book, She Was One of Us. Throughout her career, she has served as a successful researcher and writer that has been cited multiple times in different academic and scholarly articles.