The Present

As we begin to build this community and resource we are starting with writers because that’s where the name comes from, see The Past below. We expect this to grow and flourish to be a resource for all women doing all things and for those who need those things to be able to find them. Search engines are great, and are being overtaken with corporate sponsorships and AI nonsense. This space is for serious people looking for people to do business with; buy, sell, connect, collaborate, learn, teach and whatever else we come up with to make our worlds better. C’mon along, we’ll have a good time.

The Past

At the end of the last century a friend of mine started a group and called it Women of Words. Her name is Connie Anderson. WOW has always been fairly loosey goosey, no dues, no rosters, very informal. At its height I think there were 5 or 6 groups, women meeting monthly to talk about what they were up to and get support to write. Connie is a professional editor and this was her marketing.

I met her in 1998 at a BNI meeting in Bloomington, MN. There were just 22 of us, only 43 members in the state of Minnesota and we were there. I did 17 websites that first year after meeting Connie, as it was the beginnings of the world wide web and my skills were in need.

Over the years the WOW women have come and gone, showed up and dropped off, still keeping a core of itself in place, mainly organized via a private Facebook group. I moved away in 2004 and maybe attended another 5 since then. I bought the domain name on October 30, 2000. And it has remained mine. At some point Connie told me she didn’t want a website with it and I could keep the name so I did. And now, 25 years later, I am here to see that women have the means to amplify their voices. It’s time. It’s more than time.

Behind the Site

My name is Beth M. Anderson and I’m the creator of this extraordinary place. This idea has been running around in the back of my brain for many years, and now is the time to step in and step up. I’ve been in tech since I went to Brown Institute in Minneapolis in 1980 to learn programming. My mother had died and Social Security gave me $160 a month for up to two years as long as I was in school full time. I had left my mother’s home when I was 17, moving from small town Minnesota to the big city of Minneapolis. My aunt provided me with a safe place to live while I finished high school. I didn’t finish high school, eventually getting my GED so I could go to Brown.

Six months and I was free and ready for a real job. Although there were no jobs in my field (tech was a mess in the ’80s and ’90s) so I became a nanny for a year. Eventually I got hired as a receptionist in the IT department where a classmate was working. It was such a low level job HR hired me while the manager was on vacation! When she got back she walked up to my cube and asked me “What are you doing here?” “Um, I work here?” was my reply. She then said “You’re obviously overqualified, why are you here?” So I explained it was a job and I needed one. She left and came back a few hours later to tell me that she was promoting me to programmer which also took my salary from $11,000 to $18,000. I was thrilled!

Here I am, 45 years later, a self-employed website designer (since 1998) and the geek my clients depend upon to keep them up and running. I’ve done hundreds of websites in the last however-many years and have a fairly good handle on how all of this stuff works. Now let’s make it easy for you to find who you want to hire, and amplify women’s voices worldwide.