(Host) A memorial service was held today for Deborah Clifford, a writer who specialized in women’s role in history.
VPR’s Jane Lindholm has this remembrance.
(Lindholm) Deborah Clifford loved to document how women helped to shape history.
Last year, Clifford and her husband, Nick – also a historian – collaborated on a history of the Great Flood of 1927 that devastated Vermont.
Judith Irving of the Vermont Women’s History Project, says it was Deborah who uncovered some of the details of how women helped cope with that tragedy.
(Irving) “During the whole process of researching it together, I think she felt that the role she was able to play that really made a difference, was that she kept looking for the stories of women as it related to that whole 1927 flood and how those stories were only to be found deeply embedded in small news clippings in the newspapers.”
(Lindholm) Irving describes Deborah Clifford as one of the “absolute preeminent” historians in Vermont.
Clifford taught history at Middlebury College, the University of Vermont and Vermont College and lectured widely.
A year ago, she told VPR that she often assigned her students homework that would teach them how to gather history. Go home and interview your family, she told students, learn your own history.
Clifford said that’s how she collected history.
(Clifford) “That’s exactly how I got interested in history, is getting interested in particular people, and wanting to know about them and just learning about them.”
(Lindholm) That interest led her to write about some of the pioneers in women’s history, including Vermonter Abby Hemenway, and abolitionists Julia Ward Howe and Lydia Maria Child.
But Judith Irving says Deborah Clifford was a bit of history herself. Clifford was the first woman president of the Henry Sheldon Museum in Middlebury. She also was the first woman to be president of the Vermont Historical Society.
(Irving) “I think a lot of people feel a very deep sense of personal and professional loss at this point. It’s going to be very, very hard to replace her in terms of Vermont and Vermont history.”
(Lindholm) Clifford was 75 when she died after a short illness. She is survived by her husband and four daughters.
For VPR News, I’m Jane Lindholm