Delta-Kappa-Gamma

THE WOMEN'S BOOK PROJECT

Nancy Bielik, our Legislation chairman, arranged for Elizabeth Homer to speak to us about her project, "Crossing the Millennium, the Women's Book Project" in October. Ms. Homer's project is a grassroots effort to increase the number of books about women and women's history in our school libraries and media centers. The project, that will continue until the year 2000, will simply encourage groups to buy books about women and women's history and give them to schools.

Ms. Homer proved to be a wonderful speaker and gave us many interesting facts.

81% of schools' autobiographies were about men.

70% of the books about sports were about men.

15% of the nation's schools currently invest anything at all in teaching women's history. Among those that do, the average purchase is only $40 for the entire school population.

Prentice Hall's 1992 High school American history books found that less than 3% of its pages were devoted to women.

Gamma Alpha formed an Ad Hoc Committee (Library) for the purpose of contributing $150 worth of books libraries represented by members of our society. We will start with high school libraries and work our way through the schools in years to come. This will be an on-going project. Ms. Homer has piqued our collective consciousness. Members volunteering to be on this committee are Ruth Everett, Nancy Bielik, Celestine Sanders and Judy Handley. A suggestion was made that a book plate be designed to indicate our contribution and that the books should be presented at a School Board Meeting to publicize our society.

Ms. Elizabeth Homer hopes the Book Project
will continue beyond the millenium.