N Y U's Fales Library Receives N Y W C A's Archives; Celebratory Reception Held On 10-21-10

In a private reception on Thursday, October 21, 2010, the New York Women's Culinary Alliance (www.nywca.org) and New York University's Fales Library and Special Collections celebrated the Alliance's donation of its historical archives to New York University's library collections. The archive consists of the records of the organization's founding, its meeting notes, membership directories, newsletters, and reports on activities and events. Among the guests were over 100 Alliance members, including several original members and past presidents, as well as Alliance founders, Sara Moulton and Maria Reuge.

The New York Women's Culinary Alliance was founded in 1981 by Moulton and Reuge, with the encouragement of Julia Child. The Alliance is an organization of professional women in the food and wine industry that encourages cooperation, networking, and education among its members, while helping numerous philanthropic organizations offer programs to the people they serve on such topics as nutrition basics, food buying and healthful meal preparation. Organizations the Alliance has helped include New York Cares, the Ronald McDonald House, Spoons Across America, the Nourishing Kitchen, the Lower East Side Girls Club and the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan.

"The New York Women's Culinary Alliance archives are vital to our understanding of the changing roles of women in the world of food," said Marvin J. Taylor, director of the Fales Library and curator of the Food Studies Collection. "Many people when they think of chefs automatically assume they are male, but this is clearly not the case. In the last half-century, women have played an increasingly important leadership role in the culinary arts, and organizational records like those of the Alliance show just how this change came about."

"The New York Women's Culinary Alliance has been a significant force in the food world for nearly 30 years," said Liz Young, current president of the Alliance. "Our members embody the true leaders in the culinary world. Their work represents a shift to women's full participation and respect in the industry. They've produced dozens of best-selling cookbooks, hosted nationally televised cooking shows, created content for the country's leading magazines and newspapers and more. Their contributions and the Alliance's role in bringing these players together are of real cultural importance, and we are very pleased that New York University will protect our records and make them available to researchers now and for decades to come."

The Fales Library began collecting materials related to American foodways and systems in 2003. Today the collection includes more than 26,000 printed books, 5,000 pamphlets, the libraries of Ladies Home Journal, The James Beard House, and Gourmet magazine, as well as the papers of James Beard, Betty Fussell, Cecily Brownstone, Marion Nestle, and the archives of Les Dames d'Escoffier, Roundtable of Women in Food Service, among many others. Fales has become a major center for the study of American food with a subspecialty in women in the food industry, as our archival holdings show.

"The Alliance's archives are a perfect fit for Fales," said Taylor. "Anyone working on women's food organizations in America will have to visit the library as the collection of record for these organizations."

About Fales Library and Special Collections:
The Fales Library, comprising nearly 200,000 volumes, and over 12,000 linear feet of archive and manuscript materials, houses the Fales Collection of rare books and manuscripts in English and American literature, the Downtown Collection, the Food and Cookery Collection and the general Special Collections of the NYU Libraries. The Fales Collection was given to NYU in 1957 by DeCoursey Fales in memory of his father,