A free screening of The Harvey Girls: Opportunity Bound documentary, new Harvey Girl oral histories and a panel discussion will be presented at 1 p.m. on Saturday, April 16, at the Northern Arizona University Cline Library Assembly Hall in Flagstaff.
There were the more than 100,000 young women who, from the 1880s through the 1960s, left their homes and traveled west to work as waitresses in Harvey House restaurants along the Santa Fe Railroad, including in Arizona.
“For women, it was an amazing opportunity to be independent,” said filmmaker Katrina Parks. “You could leave home, explore the American West, and live in protected circumstances while earning enough money to send back to your family.”
Following the original documentary at 1 p.m., there will be a screening of new interviews and a panel discussion with Parks, women’s history expert Dr. Heidi Osselaer, Hopi Harvey Project Manager Colleen Lucero and Old Trails Museum Director Ann-Mary Lutzick at 2 p.m.
The panelists will place the Harvey Girls within a larger women’s history context, and discuss the significant impact the Harvey Girls had on the workplace, the hospitality business and the development of the American West. They will also offer a more diverse perspective on the Harvey Girl experience than has been recorded and shared with the public to date. By continuing to gather oral histories, the public’s understanding of who the Harvey Girls were continues to evolve.
The event takes place in conjunction with the NAU Cline Library’s exhibit, Fred Harvey: Branding the Southwest, and was made possible in part by Arizona Humanities.
