Georgia women honored for work

One peddled chenille bedspreads to New York and mid-Atlantic department stores, turning a local craft tradition into a thriving industry that helped pull northwest Georgia out of the Depression. One escaped slavery by disguising herself as a white man, eventually fleeing to England, where she lectured about the horrors of servitude. Many founded schools still serving today.

They are among the 65 women who have been honored as Georgia Women of Achievement, an esteemed group that will grow by three today during an induction ceremony at Wesleyan College in Macon. This year’s inductees are Mary Ann Rutherford Lipscomb, who founded the Tallulah Falls School in 1909; Celestine Colley Sibley, author and reporter-columnist for The Atlanta Constitution; and Madrid Loyd Williams, the first woman to serve as executive secretary of the State Bar of Georgia.

There are several famous names among the rolls of Georgia Women of Achievement, including authors Flannery O’Connor, Carson McCullers and Margaret Mitchell, blues singer Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Girl Scouts founder Juliette Gordon Low and educator Martha Berry. But most are not well known, especially outside their home communities, including Dicksie Bandy, who helped make chenille bedspreads fashionable beyond Dalton, and Ellen Craft, the light-skinned slave who escaped to Boston by dressing as a white man in 1848. The contributions of many of the honorees might have been lost to the shadows of time had not former first lady Rosalynn Carter suggested the creation of such an organization in 1988.

Carter, who had spoken at the Alabama Women’s Hall of Fame at Judson College in Marion, told a Columbus luncheon group that Georgia should launch a tribute to women. After a few years of researching what form it should take, a volunteer group rejected the bronze plaque display of Alabama and decided to create a traveling exhibit that could go to schools and libraries and an online hall of fame (www.georgiawomen.org) that gives each inductee her own biographical page.

The first induction ceremony was held in March 1992 — fittingly, during Women’s History Month — from nominations made by organizations and individuals. “Some of the women we’ve honored had very little education and some were very privileged,” says one founding committee member, Macon therapist Eleanor Lane, in a video on the Georgia Women of Achievement Web site. “But even some of those without education just had something inside of them that was determined to see that some justice [was done] or some condition was bettered.”

Usually, some 300 attend the annual induction luncheon. “You walk away feeling very inspired after looking at what these women accomplished, some in a very short time,” says the organization’s executive director, Shelli Siebert.

Madrid Loyd Williams (1911–1993) rose from humble beginnings to become the first woman to serve as executive secretary of the State Bar of Georgia. During her tenure, the number of members expanded from 1,389 in 1942 to 9,600 in 1976. She became one of the first women to rise to president of the National Association of Bar Executives.