Joan Roth Photographs the Women of Baltimore
“Weaving Women’s Words” is a show produced by the Baltimore organization, the Jewish Women’s Archive. Their mission is to discover, to chronicle and the expose the public to the history of not only Jewish women in Baltimore, but strong Jewish women in every city. This non-profit organization was created in 1995 and is devoted to exposing the achievements of , This is an exhibit that honors the lives and the stories of thirty women of Baltimore, their families and their friends. To understand the past is to prepare for the future, and this is one of the goals of the Jewish Women’s Archives.
They have the largest and most inclusive collection of artifacts and materials anywhere in the United States on Jewish women in America, be they female plumbers in Baltimore, artists, chefs, doctors, lawyers, or business owners. All of these archives can be downloaded free of charge. Over a period of two years, the WCA recorded the stories of various Jewish women, women who had lived through economic, political and social upheaval. They come from all walks off life, and different backgrounds but they all shared the struggle of what it is to be a woman, and what it is to be Jewish.
The exhibition illustrates their lives not only through these stories, but through works of visual art and the photography of Joan Roth. Roth has traveled the world over, for the last thirty years, photographing Jewish women in their own countries and environments, ordinary women leading extraordinary lives. Through the years Roth as earned several awards for her photographs, which have been exhibited and published worldwide, and many of which are now part of the permanent collections of museums. Roth has been involved in the women’s movement her years preceding her venture into the world of photography, and she found similarities with her own life and with the subjects of her photos.
Two momentous occasions are what prompted Roth to pick up her camera. One was the march on Washington that was led by Betty Friedan in 1978, where one hundred thousand women dressed in white called for ratifications in the The Equal Rights Amendment. She was also further inspired when the Fourth World Conference was held in 1995 in Beijing. More than thirty thousand women traveled to the country making this the largest United Nations conference in history. These stories and these photos lend themselves to the rest of the world, in a way that shows how far equal rights has come, and how far we still need to go.