Linda Allen is a songwriter, performer and educator with a passion for telling the stories of women who may have been silenced and for empowering women to raise their own voices. She has released seven original recordings and two Northwest songbook collections, facilitates classes on voice and creativity, and directs two women's choirs. Linda has worked with the Washington Women's History Project, the World YWCA, the Washington Centennial Commission (as Washington's Resident Songwriter), the Cultural Enrichment and Folklife Programs of the State Arts Commission, and the Folklife in the Schools program. Her doctoral dissertation was on The Spirituality of Voice.
Here's to the Women
Both the silencing of women's experience and the empowering of women's voices will be showcased in this 45-minute presentation, featuring songs, stories, readings and images. We meet Spokane's Helga Estby who walked across America in 1896, Emma Smith Devoe and May Arkwright Hutton, suffragists instrumental in winning the vote in 1910, Alice Lord who organized Seattle waitresses in the 1930s, and Rosie, the Riveter, an "icon" from the '40s. Rosalinda Guillen is a contemporary activist whose voice can now be heard because of the suffragists. Linda offers a window into these and many more ordinary and extraordinary lives.
