WESTFORD — A Westford Academy student capstone project celebrates the 11 trailblazing women who have served on the Westford Select Board since 1972. Through podcast interviews, many of the women shared their experiences with WA students.
Women make up about 50% of the U.S. population, but in the highest levels of government and in towns across the country, including in Westford, they have been historically underrepresented in elected positions.
For the “Women Who Changed Westford” podcast project, the students planned and researched for their interviews with former select board members with Linda Greene, director of the Westford Museum. They looked up newspaper articles online and combed through town annual reports to see what issues the elected officials worked on.
Then, they conducted the interviews and worked on post-production with WestfordCAT video staff. For five weeks, students spent up to 30 hours each week to create the podcasts. Capstone projects encourage students to learn outside the classroom through hands-on experience in community service, research or internships.
(Pictured in the image at the top of the page, left to right, WA students Gayathri Anju, Veronica Vidoli, Elitsa Koleva and Deepa Gautam).
Women Winning Elections
Greene says the project is a contribution to the community that will resonate in the years to come. The interviews will become part of the Westford Museum’s preserved history and published on the museum’s website and on the WestfordCAT website, likely beginning in June.
“I’ve learned a lot about the 11 amazing women,” said Gayathri Anju, a WA student who worked on the capstone project, “If you look at politics, I feel, it is a male-dominated field, like a lot of fields … I think it’s important to show that (women) can go into these male-dominated fields and do anything and your gender shouldn’t pull you back or stop you from doing these things.”
One of the former select board members interviewed, Elizabeth Almeida, who served from 2017 to 2020, said she believes for democracy to work there needs to be representation for everyone. It was President Donald Trump’s first election in 2016 when he defeated candidate Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College, but not the popular vote, that spurred Almeida to run for office.
“After Trump’s first election, I wasn’t happy,” Almeida said. “(I thought) ‘if you’re not happy, run for office.’ I thought, ‘I have an education. I have no excuse to not serve the community.'”
Looking back on those experiences, Almeida recalls how select board members welcomed her children to come along to meetings and how it positively affected her family life. “I think (women) have an obligation to show our kids that we can sit at the table and make these big decisions,” she said.
Today, Almeida is involved in Westford Women’s Voices, a group that supports and empowers women in running for elected positions and volunteering for appointed roles on the town’s boards, committees and commissions.
In fact, it was Almeida who encouraged Anita Tonakarn-Nguyen to run for the Westford Select Board.
Tonakarn-Nguyen did run for the select board and she won. Her term from 2020 to 2023 was during the COVID-19 pandemic shutdowns. She said the required online meetings actually made it easier for her to attend and still do everything that she needed to do to care for her small children on meeting nights.
As the first person of color to serve on the board—Tonakarn-Nguyen is Thai and she also uses her husband’s Vietnamese surname—she said she felt a lot of pressure from the community and internally. But she said other Westford women in politics really lifted her up.
“(My election) was bigger than me and the town was really hungry for that,” she said. “Election night people were calling me and telling me to do this or that.”
She said the WA students’ work is so important because the project recognizes women’s contributions to Westford, adding she hopes, in the future, other students add on to the project.
Preserving History
Veronica Vidoli, also a WA student working on the capstone project, said learning more about politics, is helpful as she approaches 18 and prepares to vote for the first time. Vidoli said she plans to major in history at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. For Vidoli, history is a teacher to current generations and provides guidance for avoiding making past mistakes.
It’s important to keep in mind discrimination that happened in the past, said WA student Louie Casale, who is also working on this project. For Casale, learning about past discrimination is an important part of history and a lesson to take with him into the future.
As the students are wrapping up their project, Greene said they have worked hard. “I was really impressed. I think they’ve captured the stories. If we don’t take the time to capture these stories, we will lose them,” she said.
WestfordCAT will post the podcasts when they are ready. Below is a list of the women who have served on the Westford Select Board. Not all women were available for a podcast interview.
1972-1974 Ellen S. Harde – the first woman elected to
1974-1978 none on the board
1978-1981 Marjorie Cook
1981-1982 none
1982-1985 Avis S. (Knight) Hooper (deceased)
1985-1992 none
1992-1998 Madonna McKenzie – the first woman to serve two terms; first woman to serve as chairman, 1994
1996-2008 Dini Healy-Coffin, the first woman to serve four terms; the first time two women were on the board was in 1996
1999-2002 Elaine McKenna
2005-2014 Valerie Wormell
2007-2010 Nancy Rosinski (2007: first-year three-women majority on the board)
2010-2025 Andrea Peraner-Sweet
2017-2020 Elizabeth Almeida
2020 -2023 Anita Tonakarn-Nguyen
