Dear Woman of My Dreams

About the Book

Dear Woman of My Dreams is Kathryn’s 1923 diary, covering her nineteenth year. This coming-of-age story is told in her own words as she goes about her daily life at college with her friends and with her mother and grandmother at home. She writes to the woman that she sees as herself in later years, and the book closes with a brief chapter based on letters and the diary Kathryn wrote when she was one hundred years old. All this has been creatively edited by her daughter to include enough material for the reader to follow both the cross-country train trip that Kathryn and her grandmother took in the summer of 1923 and the various details of time and place that one would not necessarily find in a diary. Illustrations and references link four generations of strong women, and the work is based on an extensive family archive. This is the first in a series of stories based on the women of this family.

About the Author

World-traveled but deeply rooted in Pennsylvania, Lois Kathryn Herr documents the lives of real people. In 2009, she published Dear Coach: Letters Home from World War II about her father and his athletes. Currently she is working on real-life fiction based on letters, journals, pictures, and other memorabilia from her mother’s family. Dear Woman of My Dreams is the first in this series. Herr majored in English at Elizabethtown College and the University of Pennsylvania then received an MBA from Fordham. She forged a successful twenty-six-year business career with Bell Laboratories, AT&T, New York Telephone, and NYNEX. In 2003, based on her experiences in telecommunications, Herr published Women, Power, and AT&T: Winning Rights in the Workplace, documenting the 1970 EEOC case against AT&T. That case established affirmative action in corporate America, and her book describes the individuals and the adventures that went into making it happen.