Invaluable Lives

Abstract

Fran Leeper Buss began her career as an historian of poor and working-class women in July 1971 by recording the near homelessness of herself, her close friend, and their combined six children. Working as a founder of an early women’s crisis center, she learned the stories of other poor women. In 1976, she developed a technique for and recorded an oral history of the last of the traditional, licensed, Latina midwives in northern New Mexico. Specializing in lengthy oral histories of activist women, she then collected oral histories from over one hundred working-class women from multiple racial/ethnic groups throughout the country. A feminist, she received a PhD in American history, published the oral histories in six books, and placed them in six archives.