Secrets of the Greatest Generation: stories our mothers never told us

Secrets of the Greatest Generation: stories our mothers never told us

September 20, 2016 talk at 7:15pm
Doors open at 6:30pm to view the exhibit

When Katherine Joseph died in 1990, her daughter discovered a trove of memorabilia from her mother’s career as a Roosevelt-era photographer for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU). Joseph photographed union leaders and progressive political luminaries as well as men and women at work in union shops and at play in union-sponsored cultural events. She traveled to Mexico in 1941 on an extended photojournalistic grand tour, returned to New York on the cusp of Pearl Harbor, and went on to document labor’s wartime Home Front efforts. Then, as did millions of American women after the war, she married and left her job to become a full-time homemaker. Closing the door firmly on her remarkable career and accomplishments, she rarely spoke of her past, sharing with her daughter only anecdotal snippets and the occasional photograph. Her path from traditional immigrant upbringing to independence, adventure, and professional success remained essentially a secret for the rest of her life.

Hertzberg embarked on archiving her mother’s work and researching her career, a project that bore fruit as Katherine Joseph: Photographing an Era of Social Significance, for her children to appreciate their grandmother’s accomplishments and for the preservation of an important historical legacy. She found the research process enlightening as she came to know her mother as a young woman—talented, accomplished, playful, adventurous, sexy—who kept her own trove of juicy secrets for nearly half a century. Readers often express that Hertzberg’s book made them think about their own mothers in a new light and sparked their own research journeys. “We have much to learn from the ‘Greatest Generation’ women,” Hertzberg notes, “who were raised not to draw attention to themselves or their accomplishments and who succeeded so well in doing so that we risk losing their legacy.” Yet, Hertzberg cautions, we have a responsibility as historians —even amateur/family historians. “As we learn about our mothers, we must resist the temptation to look at the past through the lens of the present, and when we uncover secrets, we need to contemplate and respect the question of who has rightful ownership of our life stories.”