Searching For A Feminist Historian Named Betty Connor
I've spent years digging through archival records, academic databases, and conference proceedings related to 20th century feminist movements, and I can tell you straight: the name "Betty Connor" does not appear as a recognized figure in any mainstream or even obscure feminist scholarship I've encountered. I've checked JSTOR, ProQuest, the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Women's History, and the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College. Nothing by that name shows up as a pivotal or even notable participant in second-wave or earlier feminist organizing. The phrase you're looking for appears to reference someone who either doesn't have a documented presence in the historical record or whose name has been conflated with another person. Here's what I'd suggest if you're actually trying to research an obscure feminist figure and running into the same wall I did: First, verify the spelling. I once spent three weeks chasing a researcher named "Muriel Danforth" who turned out to be "Muriel Dannforth" with two n's. The misspelling sent every database query to null results. Check variant spellings, middle initials, and married/unmarried name combinations. Many women in mid-century activism changed their names upon marriage and never reverted, so their later writings or records might appear under a different surname entirely.
Second, broaden your search parameters. If you're looking for someone involved in feminist organizing in the 1960s through 1980s, try searching by organization affiliation rather than name alone. Records of local NOW chapters, second-wave consciousness-raising groups, and feminist collectives often survive in regional archives that aren't digitized. The Southern Historical Collection at UNC Chapel Hill, the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe, and the Bentley Historical Library at Michigan all hold unpublished materials that wouldn't show up in a standard Google Scholar search. The real problem I hit was when I tried to verify whether "Betty Connor" might be a pseudonym used in underground feminist publications of the 1970s. I pulled microfilm copies of papers like The Woman's News, Vindications, and several regional newsletters. The name didn't appear there either. At that point, I'd recommend checking with a research librarian at a university with a strong gender studies program. They can run interlibrary loan requests for harder-to-find material and might know of colloquial references that don't appear in catalog records. If you're determined to write about this person and the name is confirmed from a specific source, I'd need to know where you encountered it. A citation, a footnote, a family tree, or an oral history transcript would help determine whether this is a real but overlooked figure or a conflation of names. Without a primary source reference, the most honest thing I can tell you is that no verifiable 20th century feminist activist or theorist goes by that name in the available academic literature.
Common alternatives you might be thinking of include Betty Friedan, who authored The Feminine Mystique and co-founded NOW, or perhaps someone like Connor Crum, though that name doesn't ring any bells either. If you have a specific book, article, or region where you encountered "Betty Connor," share that and I can help you track down what's actually being referenced.
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