- Collection:
- Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Archives
- Title:
- Riddle talks about white women's relationship with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (3:45)
- Creator:
- Riddle, Mary, 1949-
- Contributor to Resource:
- Paulk, Janet, 1932-
- Publisher:
- Atlanta, Ga. : Georgia State University Library
- Date of Original:
- 2004-07-24
- Subject:
- Feminism
Social movements
Women's studies - Location:
- United States, Georgia, Fulton County, 33.79025, -84.46702
United States, Georgia, Fulton County, Atlanta, 33.749, -84.38798 - Medium:
- audiocassettes
- Type:
- Sound
- Format:
- audio/mpeg
- Description:
- Mary Riddle was born in 1949 in Etowah, Tennessee. Her family later settled in Dalton, Georgia. She attended Mercer University in Macon and, after moving to Atlanta in 1970, attended Georgia State University on a part-time basis. She received her BA in English in 1975, and her Law degree in 1988. Riddle has been a proofreader for the Office of General Counsel (1973-1974), served on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (1976-1985), and since 1990, has been an attorney, drafting bills for the Office of Legislative Counsel. Riddle began her involvement in the Women's Movement by joining Georgians for the Equal Rights Amendment (GERA). She then joined NOW, which she served in a number of ways: She was executive vice president of Atlanta NOW and member of DeKalb NOW, and recorder/archivist for Georgia NOW after the defeat of the ERA. In 1983 she was voted Feminist of the Year by Atlanta NOW. Along with Janet Paulk, she was co-coordinator for ERA for the Universalist Unitarian Congregation of Atlanta.
Riddle recounts a childhood in which she and her family moved around a great deal. She says that her earliest feminist activity was to run for a high school office, with the slogan, "Not the best man for the job, the best candidate." She remembers becoming very interested in feminism in the early 1970s, at which time, while working and studying in Atlanta, she read Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique, and the newly circulating Ms magazine. Riddle states that her work proofreading for the Legislative Council whetted her appetite for the study of law, and that when she became involved in the Equal Rights Amendment, it was the legal aspects of amendment that interested her. She recounts that she first became involved with the ERA when she read a Creative Loafing ad for a Georgians for the Equal Rights meeting. She says, "ERA was this funny little group mostly made up of Socialist Workers Party people. And there were times when I thought that a lot of the women at GERA were more interested in the Socialist Workers Party than the ERA." Riddle goes on to describe the efforts of the "Bathroom Caucus" of GERA -- members who wanted to make GERA more ERA-focused. After those efforts failed, she became more involved with NOW, UUCA and ERA Georgia, Inc. She describes a number of the marches, debates and events that she attended as part of those groups. Riddle discusses the women in Women's Movement that she most admired, and cites Martha Gaines as being important because she could "focus on the goals and continue to keep moving towards the goals, even past the irritations, and the rivalries and the disagreements about tactics." Finally, Riddle talks about issues that are important to women today, the most important of which is reproductive rights.
Transcript of this excerpt: MR: It was interesting to me -- while I worked for the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, I was always very straight forward about -- that I was a feminist and I got a variety of responses to that. I remember -- you probably remember the LIFE issue that had all the women in it. It came out I guess, I don't know, late '70's early '80's, and it had pictures of everybody from Bella Abzug to Alice Paul and everybody. And I remember at one point, in my office I had made a collage of those pictures. And one of the lawyers said something to me -- this was when I was a paralegal -- said something to me about it. And I said -- he was kind of a smart ass, and he thought that EEOC was mostly for black folk, and that women had really no business in it. But I said, "You know, at least half of black people are women." And the -- there were folks -- I mean, I was well known as a feminist, and there were folks who would occasionally say things to me that indicated that they thought -- these were mostly black males who, you know, who indicated that they thought that white women had really nothing to complain about. But it was interesting, some of the connections I made with black women working at EEOC, who were most surprised to learn that battered women's shelters, which were a feminist initiative served so many black women, and that the woman in California who killed the man who raped her -- Inez Garcia I think was her name -- this was in the early '70's. I remember discussing her with a lot of folks and people saying, "Well why are feminists interested in her?" Because they associated it as a primarily white middle class Women's Movement. And I remember talking to folks about that, and trying to make the point that all women share some oppression. It rests more lightly on middle class folks than on the truly poor, but all women are excluded from things; all women are considered unsuitable for things. But it has been interesting to me, and I'm always interested when I see a black women's organization making feminist statements. And it's of interest to me to see global feminism and how the Movement -- the Movement is different and yet the same in different parts of the world. - Metadata URL:
- http://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/coles/id/2039
- IIIF manifest:
- https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/iiif/2/coles:2039/manifest.json
- Language:
- eng
- Additional Rights Information:
- Copyright to this item is owned by Georgia State University Library. Georgia State University Library has made this item available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
- Extent:
- 45 pages (two audio cassettes)
- Original Collection:
- Georgia Women's Movement Project Collection
Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Archives - Holding Institution:
- Georgia State University. Special Collections
- Rights:
-
