Stories of unsung women in Riverside are focus of history book

Riverside’s better half is stepping into the spotlight.

Women’s contributions over a century to Riverside’s civic fabric (and not with needle and thread) are the subject of a newly published book. Its launch is Sunday — at the Local History Book Fair , about which I’ll tell you more in a moment — with a public presentation on some of the women whose stories are told within its pages.

One is Louise Harvey Clarke, a doctor who opened her practice in 1898 in the Loring Building and who in 1915 proposed a book about Southern California women.

As editor Debbie Quick Newton highlights in her introduction, Clarke told a gathering of women journalists that such a book had been undertaken by their counterparts in New York.

The East Coasters did so because “in schools, pupils were taught to st