Unfinished Business

  As we work through what may someday be referred to as ‘the unrest of 2020’, a look at a few magazines in the holdings of the Library of Florida History  will remind us of another issue that is taking longer than it should to be settled.

  The magazines are the quarterly The Florida Business Woman (https://floridabusinesswomen.com/) published since 1919 by the Business and Professional Women’s Foundation (https://bpwfoundation.org/ .)  The archives hold issues from 1957 to March 1961.

  Naturally the magazine had articles about the activities of local chapters or districts dealing with community engagement and the expanding role of women in business.

  There are articles such as the one outlined by Archivist Ben DiBiase in Florida Frontiers episode 387 (https://myfloridahistory.org/frontiers/radio/program/387) reminding women of their lingering duties on the home front of the cold war.

    Then there are articles still really relevant today, reminding of us of how much needs to be done a century after this organization began publishing.

  And tucked in among the club notes are stories like the one about Thelma Stone Gordon (1922- 2016) (https://westportnow.com/index.php?/v3/obitjump/thelma_s._gordon_93/) who found a way to do it ‘her way’ in an age when the boys still ran all the banks.  Of course one wonders what she thought of the progress made, or not, since President Eisenhower said in both his 1956 and 1957 State of the Union messages that a Federal equal-pay law was “a matter of simple justice”.