Dr. Aura Wharton-Beck, associate professor in the School of Education at the University of St. Thomas, was mentioned in an EntertainDC video on Wednesday, Feb. 12. The video described Wharton-Beck’s dissertation on “government girls,” who were African American women working for the federal government during World War II.
“The purpose of my research is to not only amplify the voices, but also to allow people to realize that Black women are multidimensional, that we're not just one narrative,” Wharton-Beck said in an earlier episode of St. Thomas' The Professor Podcast. These women were required to pass a civil service exam in order to receive these federal jobs such as typewriting work, tasks in the Treasury Department, and other types of office work.
Wharton-Beck’s mother's yearbook, Whirl-i-gig: A Pictorial Story of Midway Hall for Government Girls 1946, inspired her interest in research and kickstarted Wharton-Beck’s interest in researching and creating “Indelible Narratives,” an in-progress film project that features the stories of six women working as “government girls.”
"This was the first time that I actually saw African American women who were not domestics," Wharton-Beck said in the podcast regarding her mother's pictorial. "These were African American, young women who lived in a segregated dorm, and they were in professional roles," she said.
Ella Swain ’28 contributed additional reporting to this story.
