“Telling the Story of a Few Good Women,” a talk by Lee Stout, will be presented on Thursday March 26, in the Downsbrough Community Room of Schlow Centre Region Library, 21 S. Allen St. A light supper will be served at 5:30 p.m., followed by the presentation, which will end by 7:30 p.m. Please RSVP by March 23, to Christine Bishop at cbishop@ccysb.com.

Stout, Librarian Emeritus, Penn State’s University Libraries, is the author of “A Simple Matter of Justice,” a book based on an oral history project created by Barbara Franklin and the Penn State University Archives that recorded interviews with more than fifty of the women and men who participated in an extraordinary undertaking, beginning in 1971. Stout, the initiator of the project, will recount the history of the recruitment project, tell some of the stories of these “few good women” and assess the impact and the lessons we have learned from this pioneering effort.

The program, which is free and open to the public, is sponsored by the American Association of University Women (AAUW) State College, Penn State’s University Libraries and Penn State student groups, including AAUW of Penn State and Women in Business.

By the 1969 inauguration of Richard M. Nixon as the 37th President of the United States, there had been only two women cabinet members, one appointed by Franklin Roosevelt and one by Dwight D. Eisenhower. There were no women on the Supreme Court and only a relative handful of women serving as members of Congress. There were no women generals or admirals in the armed forces, and very few women in the senior ranks of the civil service or among other presidential appointees in the Executive branch.

“A Matter of Simple Justice,” tells the story of how this began to change in the early 1970s. In hindsight Richard Nixon seems perhaps the least likely person to have started this particular ball rolling during the second feminist revolution. It didn’t happen immediately, and the program was not fully supported among his administration, but in 1971, he appointed Barbara Hackman Franklin as the nation’s first recruiter of women for executive positions in the government.

Schlow Library offers free parking for library users and the Pugh Street Parking Garage is a block from the library.