(www.nywca.org) and New York University’s Fales Library and Special Collections celebrated the Alliance’s donation of its historical archives to New York University’s library collections. The archive consists of the records of the organization’s founding, its meeting notes, membership directories, newsletters, and reports on activities and events. Among the guests were over 100 Alliance members, including several original members and past presidents, as well as Alliance founders, Sara Moulton and Maria Reuge.
The New York Women’s Culinary Alliance was founded in 1981 by Moulton and Reuge, with the encouragement of Julia Child. The Alliance is an organization of professional women in the food and wine industry that encourages cooperation, networking, and education among its members, while helping numerous philanthropic organizations offer programs to the people they serve on such topics as nutrition basics, food buying and healthful meal preparation. Organizations the Alliance has helped include New York Cares, the Ronald McDonald House, Spoons Across America, the Nourishing Kitchen, the Lower East Side Girls Club and the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan.
“The New York Women’s Culinary Alliance archives are vital to our understanding of the changing roles of women in the world of food,” said Marvin J. Taylor, director of the Fales Library and curator of the Food Studies Collection.
The Fales Library began collecting materials related to American foodways and systems in 2003. Today the collection includes more than 26,000 printed books, 5,000 pamphlets, the libraries of Ladies Home Journal, The James Beard House, and Gourmet magazine, as well as the papers of James Beard, among many others. Fales has become a major center for the study of American food with a subspecialty in women in the food industry, as our archival holdings show.
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