In memory of Gretchen and all those women who have come before whose history was erased and lives were forgotten because they were born female.

My aunt passed away. She was very complex person; she was positive, kind, intelligent, devoted and passionate. She was always there for you with a kind word or an uplifting thought, she was sincere. She loved her children, her grandchildren, and her husband David and could not be more proud of everyone.

Gretchen was part of the generation that spoke up for women, she was part of the generation that gave rise to the Women’s Right Movement. She made her voice heard on the importance of every women. Gretchen first worked for other women, through films, working tirelessly for those whose voices needed to be heard. Then she found her own voice in her writings. And she dedicated herself to it. She worked to record women’s histories, the women in her family and others who had been forgotten. She had an amazing way of weaving stories through time and milestones in history, imagining what it was like for them, how their lives must have been and what their stories were. She was able to provide a picture to our past as women, that history tried to ignore. She gave a new voice to many who would had been voiceless and forgotten by time.

Now it is Gretchen’s time. It is time to hear her story, as she wanted it to be heard. Gretchen left behind the pieces, the stories, the memories and the hard work of interviewing, researching, and writing. Now it is our turn to put her pieces together to organize it just a little, to make her story known to you, her history. This is Gretchen’s story, in as close to her words as possible.

• GES on Writing
• Poetry
• Timeline

“–it’s the power of women—because they have been taught to be still—to nurture a rich inner life of dreams and emotions that can sustain them while hardly making a ripple in the passage of time.”

GES