Editor’s Update: Homefront Heroines reached its funding goal on June 29
June 2011—Kathleen M. Ryan, Ph.D., received a CSWS graduate student research grant in 2007 while working on her doctorate in the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication. Her project, “When Flags Flew High: Propaganda, Memory and Oral History for World War II Female Veterans,” was an oral history on the WAVES of World War II.
“The money,” Ryan says, “was used to travel to archives on the east coast for research, which were crucial in the project’s research and development phase.”
Now an associate professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Colorado, Ryan is turning the documentary into a film. The project has received several other grants in addition to the CSWS funding, she reports, including grants from the Schlesinger Library and the Ohio Humanities Council.
“I’m currently in post-production on the documentary (editing) and am also in the midst of a Kickstarter campaign to help raise funds to shoot the last act of the film and digitize some archival material,” Ryan told CSWS director Carol Stabile in a recent e-mail. “We’d like to take one of the WAVES featured (Margaret Thorngate of Florence) to the USS Missouri so that she can show us where one of her key stories took place. The archival material includes interviews with WAVE officers held by the U.S. Navy.”
The project website is www.homefrontheroines.com
