CLASSICAL WYOMING - Month of March

Celebrate women in classical music in March with the Women's History Month stream online at www.classicalwyoming.org
Discover how women composers and performers have helped shape the classical music genre with Jillene Kahn. You’ll hear music and more throughout the month of March.

 
WYOMING PUBLIC RADIO - March 14- 11 am / March 15 8 pm

The Kitchen Sisters- Lost and Found Sound: WHER: 1000 Beautiful Watts

WHER, the first all-girl radio station in the nation, went on the air in Memphis on October 29, 1955. It was the brainchild of sound legend Sam Phillips, who created the groundbreaking format with money he raised from selling Elvis Presley's Sun Studios contract. Women almost exclusively ran WHER. On the air they read the news, interviewed local celebrities, and spun popular records. Behind the scenes, they sold and created commercials, produced and directed programming, and sat at the station's control boards.

Monumental- The Suffragist in the Basement - March 21- 3 pm / March 23- 12 pm

When it comes to women and monuments in the U.S., we seem to prefer mythical or allegorical women – think a lady in robes holding the scales of justice in front of a courthouse. It’s rare to see real women being honored for their actual accomplishments. But for decades, there was one statue in Wyoming that was an exception. Wyoming is known as the “equality state” because it was the first in the nation to pass women’s suffrage. It recognized that history with a statue of Wyoming’s first Justice of the Peace and suffragist, Esther Hobart Morris, which stood outside the state Capitol building for 60 years. But today, that statue of Morris now lives underground in the Capitol basement. In this episode, we look at what the story of this one monument reveals about how women are mythologized and erased.