Celebrating Women's History Month
Women's History Month commemorates and encourages the study, observance, and celebration of the vital role of women in American history.
In A Czech Farm in Minnesota, Janet Holasek Worrall traces several generations of her ancestors leaving Bohemia in the 1850s and settling on farmland in Minnesota. It details daily life from the mid-1920s to the 1960s on Richard and Evelyn Holasek’s farm, where the author and her sister Dorothy grew up. For decades, the Holaseks made a living having dairy cows, growing strawberries and raspberries, and raising chickens for eggs. In addition to being a wife and a mother, Evelyn worked side by side with her husband, pitching hay, husking corn, picking berries, and tending her large vegetable garden.
"History often overlooks the arduous labor of farm women who worked in the field, kept an immaculate house, and raised a family. This book details the life of one of these women—my mother—a loving, compassionate woman with a strong work ethic of Czech background. She loved the out of doors, her vegetable garden, and the rustle of falling leaves. She was loved by everyone who met her throughout her nearly 100 years." —Janet Holasek Worrall
Enriched with numerous photos, A Czech Farm in Minnesota is a compelling historical exploration of immigration, women, agriculture, and family.
About the Author
Janet E. Holasek Worrall grew up on a farm in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, then a rural area southwest of the Twin Cities. She received her B.A. from Hamline University and her M.A. and Ph.D. from Indiana University where she specialized in Latin American history. She was a professor of history at the University of Northern Colorado, teaching for over 30 years. Her research and publications focused on Latin America, Immigration, Italian and German Prisoners of War, and Italian immigration in the Denver area.
Janet lived in Fort Collins, Colorado, with her husband Arthur and their three children. In 2015, she and Arthur moved to Parker, Colorado, to be closer to their children and grandchildren. Janet presently volunteers at History Colorado and enjoys working on its Italian American Preservation collection. In her spare time, she participates in two book clubs, a choir, and continues her lifetime hobby of gardening, growing tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and more, and tending her twenty African violets.
