Linda G. Ford - My Brilliant Career

My Brilliant Career

Hi. I’m Linda Ford, bookseller, former history professor, and historian of women. My latest effort is a feminist history of women's basketball called "Lady Hoopsters." As a child of the 50s in Central New York, I played sports with my brother, helped out on the family farm, and for just about every other waking hour, read everything I could get my hands on. The first thing I remember writing after getting beyond using a pencil that was four inches around, was an essay on "My Antonia", which I did in sixth or seventh grade. My teacher, Mrs. Pettigrew, liked it, but it must have been a really depressing piece, because the one thing I remember from it is the line, "And the look and smell of death were all around." It seems like there was a bear hunt or something. I went away (but not that far) to college at SUNY Albany where I continued to like to hang out in the library and soaked up my college experiences like a sponge. My college writing was uneven to say the least. A Creative Writing teacher told me I was derivative (of Victoria Holt probably) with too many ". . .. . ." and my chosen history paper topics tended toward things like a psychohistorical analysis of folk songs. (They're very gory, violent and misogynistic.) I liked my classes, and I also played on my college softball team, met lots of outlandish people and helped to block the Northway in Albany in May of 1970, after Kent State. Shaped by the idealism of the 60s, I’ve always remained leftist and militantly feminist, not always a comfortable thing. In the late 70s, my feminism took the form of founding and leading a NOW chapter in Saratoga Springs, NY.

Out in the work world I was a waitress, secretary, high school teacher and piano tuner. I also spent a year teaching English and piano in Israel, which is where I met my husband Ira (webmaster extraordinaire--he did this page.) Determined to be doing history again, I got my Ph. D. from Syracuse University in ’84, and was the first ever to petition for and receive a minor in women’s history at Syracuse. After graduate school, I played gypsy academic for four years, teaching at New Mexico State, Cornell, Union College and Moorhead (Minnesota) State, before landing a more or less tenure-track position at Keene (New Hampshire) State, where I taught for seven years---U.S., social, and especially, women’s history. I left greatly disillusioned with "academe" (elitism/sexism/classism and enormous pressures to teach at a low standard—don’t get me started), but a love of women’s history intact. Intact enough so that last spring (2006), I taught a course at Colgate University called "Women's Suffrage, Women's Rights" and that was highly satisfying. So now my husband Ira and I own Half Moon Books, a used and rare book business back in Central New York, near my old high school in Madison. So I can be surrounded by great books, while I continue to try my hand at writing. My favorite writing subject continues to tend toward radical strong women: militant suffragists, farm women, and athletes.

I published a book called Iron-Jawed Angels: The Suffrage Militancy of the National Woman’s Party, 1912-1919, in 1991 (University Press of America) which won a Gustavus Meyers Award for Human Rights. I also contributed a chapter on my militants, "Alice Paul and the Triumph of Militancy" to One Woman, One Vote: Rediscovering the Woman’s Suffrage Movement, edited by Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, published in 1995. I agreed to revisit Alice Paul and the militants for a book which Oxford University Press did--the more press for feminist militancy the better!--called Votes for Women. That was out in the spring of '02. I wrote an article which appeared in Mid America in the Fall of ’95; it’s on women farm activists of the 30s Farmers Holiday movement. I’ve also written on the radical farm women of 1930s New York State (New York History Fall ’94), on the women in William Penn’s life (Quaker History, Fall ’84), and on Syracuse University’s pioneer women doctors (Syracuse, Winter ’84). The latest book as noted, is Lady Hoopsters: A History of Women’s Basketball in America. And the publisher--is us! We decided to do it ourselves, with a little help from a printer in Nebraska. Since "Lady Hoopsters" is one of the only narrative history of women's basketball around, I'm really proud of it. For further descriptions and excerpts, or to order, click below.

Iron-Jawed Angels | Triumph of Militancy | Lady Hoopsters

You can write me at: Linda Ford<lford@usadatanet.net>