Harvey Girls Documentary – Heard Museum

Explore the Harvey Girls Documentary, New Interviews and Discussion Program at the Heard Museum, April 17, 1:30 PM in the Steele Auditorium

Remember the Harvey Girls? They 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. The Harvey Girls: Opportunity Bound, a documentary film and new oral histories will be shown in conjunction with the Heard’s exhibit Over the Edge: Fred Harvey at the Grand Canyon and in the Great Southwest.

“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 Opportunity Bound at 1:30 PM, there will be a screening of new interviews and a panel discussion with filmmaker Katrina Parks, editor and producer Thaddeus Homan, women’s history expert Dr. Heidi Osselaer, project manager Colleen Lucero of the Hopi Harvey Project and museum director Ann-Mary Lutzick of the Old Trails Museum at 2:30 PM. Original Harvey Girl JoAn Fuller will also be present.

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.

This program is made possible in part by a grant from Arizona Humanities.