In 1982, the Georgia Chamber of Commerce planned a seminar that claimed it would help executives “prepare for, or avoid entirely, confrontations with militant feminist organizing groups.” It was called “A Strategy for Managing Today’s White Collar Women.”
In response, the chamber got exactly the kind of confrontation it was looking to avoid. As many as 100 protesters showed up to picket the seminar, which was ultimately held with a “toned-down title and more conciliatory intent” due to the public’s outrage, The Atlanta Constitution reported.
The chamber’s audacious plans and the ensuing protest embodied the climate of the second wave of the women’s movement, a tense and sometimes liberating time that saw activists demanding the end of discrimination against women and the pushback from opponents aggressively trying to shut them down. This phase sprang up to address pressing challenges for women that followed the movement’s first wave, which focused mainly on suffrage and ended in the early 20th century.
For these second-wave activists who were fighting for equal rights, some as basic as being able to secure a credit card without a male relative’s signature or eliminating sex-segregated help wanted columns, electing a woman to the second-highest office in the U.S. seemed a long way off. The election of Kamala Harris, who made history this year when she was sworn in as the first woman and first woman of color to be vice president, marks a significant moment for second-wave feminists who fought to see equal career opportunities for women. There is more to do, Atlanta activists say, still the accomplishment is a sign that many years of grassroots work for women’s issues has made a difference.
‘A woman’s place’
Decades after women were granted the right to vote in 1920, they began organizing again.
In the 1960s and ’70s, feminist ideals began permeating society through literature such as Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” and the first national American feminist magazine, Ms. The materials helped lead to an awakening for moms who realized they wanted more than staying at home with the kids, said Morna Gerrard, archivist of Georgia State University Library’s Women’s Collections.
The Equal Rights Amendment, first proposed as an amendment to the Constitution in the 1920s, gained momentum during the rise of the women’s movement in the ’60s and ’70s. The proposal, which is designed to guarantee equal legal rights for all American citizens regardless of sex, became a major focus of the second-wave movement.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Artifacts supporting and opposing the ERA in Georgia fill display cases in an exhibit created last year at Georgia State’s Special Collections and Archives. Behind the scenes, a temperature-controlled secure room holds rows of boxes that contain the papers, protest accessories, photos, and cassette tape oral histories of unsung feminist “foot soldiers,” such as Margie Hames, Martha Gaines, Lucy Draper, and Margaret Curtis. One box held an old T-shirt with the popular slogan: “A woman’s place is in the House ... and the Senate.”
”I think you’ll find that most of the women who live in these boxes will be really, really happy at this point that we have a woman vice president, and I think most of them will be saying it’s about time,” said Gerrard, who also oversees the Gender and Sexuality Collections. “This should have happened a long time ago.”
Georgia women advocated passionately for and against the ERA.
A League of Women Voters poll in 1981 found that 73% of mid-Georgia residents favored ratification. But although Georgia’s General Assembly approved some legislation aimed at giving women more legal rights in the early ’80s, such as a bill letting women keep or hyphenate their maiden names after marriage, the Georgia House of Representatives overwhelmingly defeated the ERA in 1982.
“Once again, we are denied. A setback yes. But reports of our death are greatly exaggerated,” Linda Hallenborg Kurtz, a feminist activist and founder of the Georgia Women’s Political Caucus, said in The Atlanta Constitution at the time. Georgia would not be one of the states to pass the ERA, and it failed nationally when it was ratified by only 35 of the 38 states it needed to become law by Congress’ final deadline in 1982 — a deadline that a bipartisan group of federal lawmakers are now trying to eliminate.
A renewed attempt by Georgia senators in 2019 to add an Equal Rights Amendment to the U.S. Constitution stalled after it was opposed by anti-abortion activists. Last year, Georgia House Speaker David Ralston said he thought “we’ve done pretty well” in terms of equal opportunities for women without passing the amendment.
In 1975, women held 4.2% of the seats in the state Legislature; today, they hold 32.6%, according to the Center for American Women and Politics. Four of Georgia’s 14 U.S. House members are women; the state has never had a woman governor. Women make up a record-breaking 27% of all members of the U.S. Congress, according to the Pew Research Center.
“Women are 52% of the population,” said lifelong feminist Teri Stewart. “When we hold 52% of the political offices, then I will consider that we’ve reached a point of equality.”
Women of achievement
Stewart, a self-described “wild, crazy, hippie chick out of Austin, Texas” born in 1954, considers herself a war horse of an era that included the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War and the beginning of the AIDS crisis. Aware since childhood that she was a feminist and a lesbian, she discovered Atlanta while hitchhiking. Falling in love with its politically liberal, activistic, diverse, artistic and strong gay community, she moved here permanently in 1973.
Stewart’s political activism as a feminist started with women’s right to control their own body and to exist as independent individuals, but it also gave her a more global overview of discrimination and persecution. Feminism overflows into injustices like wage inequality and the environmental, labor and reproductive rights movements, she said.
Stewart protested causes through marches, speeches and street theater. She also worked for the Feminist Women’s Health Center, which opened in 1976, offering self-help clinics, consciousness-raising groups and free pregnancy tests.
Something rare happened for Stewart when Harris was confirmed as vice president: She shed tears. Though a weight was lifted, she believes there’s still so much further to go.
“At any time, if we cease to be active, and we cease to be diligent, we’ll lose everything,” she said. “And at my age, I’m too old to get out there and pound the pavement and do the kinds of high-energy stuff that we used to do. It’s going to be up to the younger generation to grab the baton and run with it.”
Decades ago, Stewart became the mentor of feminist filmmaker Jennifer Hall Lee, who now lives in California. At Stewart’s behest, Lee started attending clinic defenses at the health center to protect women from anti-abortion protesters. She also started volunteering at a feminist bookstore, Charis Books & More, then in Little Five Points, where she was surrounded by information about women’s history, women’s rights, domestic violence and self-defense.
“Atlanta’s feminists set me off on a path that I have taken with me through my entire life to this day,” Lee said.
That path brought her to create a documentary called “Feminist Stories From Women’s Liberation,” in which she interviews numerous second-wave feminists. It also took her to California, where she initiated a Women’s History Month collaboration for middle schools in Pasadena. The prompt for the 2021 “Women in Leadership” theme asks: “What does having a woman in the second highest office mean to you?”
“A lot of people will say, ‘Oh, you know, girls must love doing that Women’s History Month.’ And I always have to sort of step in there and say, boys, too,” Lee said. “Boys have to be able to see a woman in the top leadership position in our nation.”
Thinking about that popular tee about a woman’s place being in the House and the Senate, like the one now resting in a box at GSU, Lee mentions a glaring omission missing from the slogan: It didn’t end with “and in the Oval Office.”
Nancy Friauf, president and CEO of metro Atlanta’s Partnership Against Domestic Violence, appreciates that it’s not just any woman who became vice president, but it’s one who is an intelligent, strong, confident and “not-afraid-to-be-powerful woman” of different cultures and races.
Friauf, who was pro-ERA while still in high school, began working in the domestic violence field in 1979. She has a framed newspaper photo of her daughter, then 4 years old, holding a “Never Another Battered Woman” sign at a Georgia protest in 1988.
She recognizes the strides women have made in politics, but sees other women’s issues that need more work. Eighty-five percent of intimate partner violence victims are women, many of whom experience economic insecurity. Women are more often victimized by sexual harassment in the workplace. Our culture still sexualizes and portrays women as their physical body instead of honoring them as “very complex human beings.”
She recalls talking about putting on a golf tournament in a professional group setting years ago, when a man said, “Yeah, Nancy, and you could wear little short shorts, and look really cute out there.”
“I was the executive director of a fairly major organization in that county, and a man felt it was appropriate to speak to me that way and to think about portraying me that way in the world,” Friauf said. “So I think we still have a really long way to go in being able to hear and respect women’s experience in the world and let that inform us about how we need to learn and grow and do it better and do it differently.”
‘Time to bake the cake’
In the recently released documentary “9to5: The Story of a Movement,” two women reflected on the early days of 9to5 Atlanta — a women’s workplace advocacy group that spearheaded the Georgia chamber’s seminar protest almost four decades ago.
Activist Renia Clay recalls meeting with the chapter from Boston, where 9to5 was founded in 1973, when they were having issues in recruiting Black women there. Atlanta leader Verna Barksdale asked if the white women socialized with Black women in any manner. The answer was no.
“Well nobody believes that you want to help them when you don’t talk to them anytime, you don’t ask them to lunch, you don’t live near them, their children don’t play with your children,” Clay says in the film. “Atlanta was a little different.”
Had Boston organizers been able to reach state Rep. Kim Schofield, D-Atlanta, when she lived there in the 1980s, she would’ve been all in. She was experiencing discrimination as a Black woman and making a fraction of what her male counterparts were. As it was, the only “9 to 5” she knew about was the 1980 movie that featured Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin and Dolly Parton playing disgruntled secretaries.
“The (‘9to5’) documentary talks about the historical movement in context of where we went to just make that impact, that social impact,” said Schofield, who’s a board member of what is now 9to5 Georgia, with offices in Atlanta, Savannah, Albany and Macon. “But now we see more than ever that these issues are so deep-seated, and that when you start pulling back the layers, for one, it really compounds into something else.”
Schofield finally learned about 9to5 after experiencing discrimination at work because of a health challenge in Atlanta. The company’s human resources director confronted her in the hallway and asked why she was parking in a handicapped spot, despite her having a state-issued hang tag issued in her name. Schofield lives with lupus, a chronic disease that is sometimes painful and fatiguing.
She contacted her senator, Sen. Nan Orrock, D-Atlanta, who directed her to 9to5. The very day Schofield visited the local chapter, she asked how she could join the organization.
“The policies don’t change, they just grow deeper, and if left unchecked, they continue to impact the overall economic value of women, and how much longer are we going to continue to do that and see that and allow for it to happen?” said Schofield, who is also a member of the Atlanta Commission on Women.
Vice President Harris’ election proved that we’re going forward as a country, Schofield said. But 9to5, a nonpartisan organization, is prepared to hold the Biden administration accountable on crucial workplace legislation, including relief from the COVID-19 crisis, said Nasreen Jilani, deputy director of development and communications.
Over the years, the Georgia chapter has evolved to cover the broader issues that intersect and impact Black women, women struggling to make ends meet, women of color, and women who are working multiple jobs, said Jilani. The strategy has shifted from focusing on the issues of individual workplaces to investing in legislative agendas and working for policy change on issues such as voting, utilities and housing at the city, state and federal levels.
The group is currently working on bills for pay equity, paid leave and workplace discrimination, said Mica Whitfield, the nonprofit’s Georgia state director. Many of the core issues have been the same since 9to5′s inception nearly 50 years ago.
“These days, we’re done with these baby steps,” Whitfield said of the local chapter, which was originally called Atlanta Working Women.
Schofield agrees it’s time to speed things up. Giving a baking analogy, she says women in the legislative space used to go for the breadcrumbs and say, “Oh, we want the loaf.” But now they know the recipe.
“So now it’s time to bake the cake,” Schofield said. “It’s time to get this done.”
About the Author
