The Greater Grand Rapids Women's History Council (GGRWHC) is a non-profit organization in Grand Rapids, Michigan that advocates for women's history. The GGRWHC is dedicated to educating the community and celebrating the legacies of local women, preserving knowledge of their past and inspiring visions for their future.The GGRWHC came together in a moment when women, motivated by the effects of second-wave feminism, began to question traditionally held historical narratives. A new awareness of women’s importance in the present prompted a reexamination of women and their impact throughout history.

One such milestone of that moment was the 1987 designation of March as Women’s History Month. That same year, Twink Frey began research for a paper on women’s history intended to mark the newly designated Women’s History Month at a Grand Rapids Collectors Club meeting. To her disappointment, Frey found little to no materials on women’s history. Even as women’s history had been given an official month of recognition, the sources with which to celebrate it had not yet been discovered and made accessible.

With this need in mind, Frey took formal steps in 1988 to create an organization that could do the work of recovering and celebrating women’s history in the Grand Rapids area. To do this she pulled together a steering committee and together they planned a conference on women’s history entitled “An Ear to the Past, an Eye to the Future.” In 1990 the steering committee officially incorporated as the nonprofit Greater Grand Rapids Women’s History Council with the “purpose to promote the educational and historical study of women with emphasis on the greater Grand Rapids area...and other Western Michigan communities.”

With so little attention given to women’s history in Grand Rapids, the GGRWHC lost no time in correcting incomplete historical narratives. Some of their first projects included researching and submitting applications to the Michigan Women’s Hall of Fame, creating a bibliography of women’s history resources in the Grand Rapids Public Library (GRPL), creating traveling women’s history exhibits, staging a centennial reenactment of the historic 1899 national convention of the National American Woman Suffrage Association held in Grand Rapids at the St. Cecilia Society (now the St. Cecilia Music Center), and instituting a local triennial celebration of Women’s History Month known as Legacy. The GGRWHC also took on an instrumental role in identifying and advocating for the acquisition of vital women’s historical materials into the GRPL’s archival collections.

Since 2000, the GGRWHC has maintained a commitment to community-based programming by presenting at events like History Detectives at the GRPL, while also developing a presence with scholarly audiences through exhibits and presentations at academic conferences. These include the Great Lakes History conference, the Women and Gender Historians of the Midwest conference, the Midwestern History Association, the National Genealogical Society, and the Historical Society of Michigan. The recent popularity of digital history projects and methods has offered the GGRWHC new ways of doing women’s history. In 2010 they digitized 60 previously recorded oral history transcripts and audiotapes, and in 2017 they reached out to Her Hat Was in the Ring, a national crowdsourcing project listing American women who ran for office prior to the 19th amendment’s ratification in 1920. The GGRWHC began researching and uncovering women’s elective history in Grand Rapids in the 1990s. To date they have identified 47 women who ran in 82 campaigns before 1920, all of whom will be listed on Her Hat’s online database by the end of 2018.

Starting with little to no women’s historical materials, the GGRWHC has become an authority and primary mover for women’s history in Grand Rapids and in Michigan generally. An active organization today, the GGRWHC is busy planning future women’s history presentations and events including programming for the centennial celebration of the 19th amendment in 2020.