- Collection:
- Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Archives
- Title:
- Hannon talks about becoming involved in ERA activities in Athens, GA. (8:28)
- Creator:
- Hannon, Sharron
- Contributor to Resource:
- Graves, Mary Vick, 1925-
- Publisher:
- Atlanta, Ga. : Georgia State University Library
- Date of Original:
- 1998-10-23
- Subject:
- Feminism
Social movements
Women's studies - Location:
- United States, Georgia, Clarke County, 33.95117, -83.36733
United States, Georgia, Clarke County, Athens, 33.96095, -83.37794 - Medium:
- audiocassettes
- Type:
- Sound
- Format:
- audio/mpeg
- Description:
- Sharron Hannon was born in St. Louis, Missouri. She received her BA from Purdue University. After graduating from college, she went to work for a daily newspaper in northern Indiana, as a general assignment reporter -- the first in the newspaper’s history. Once married, Hannon lived in Chicago and New York before moving to Athens, Georgia in 1979. In 1981 Hannon became involved with efforts to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, starting the ERA Athens group. She also joined the National Organization for Women. After efforts to pass the ERA failed, Hannon continued to work for NOW, starting a local chapter, and going on to run the Georgia NOW Project -- an initiative to organize local chapters around the state. In 1984 Hannon launched a women’s rights newspaper, the Southern Feminist, which ran until 1988. Hannon is currently the Director of Public Relations in Academic Affairs at the University of Georgia. [Shown in the photo, left to right: Sharron Hannon, Sherry [Shulman] Sutton]
Hannon states that from an early age, she knew that she wanted to be a writer, and was editor of her school newspapers from the fourth grade through University. A college student during the Vietnam War era, she recalls writing about contentious issues, and subsequently being threatened with closure by the campus administration. After stints in Chicago and New York, and after the birth of her second child, Hannon describes her and her husband�s decision to move to Athens, Georgia, where her father was a faculty member at University of Georgia. She describes how, in 1981, she went to Atlanta to hear Sonya Johnson speak, and how inspiring the experience was. After attending an ERA lobby day at the Capitol, she began discussing the possibility of starting an ERA group in Athens. She describes her first awareness-raising event, a Susan B. Anthony birthday party, which 200 people attended. Hannon talks about anti-ERA activities in Georgia, and in particular an event at which Beverley LeHay (president of Concerned Women of America) and her husband came to speak. Hannon discusses the work she did as a member of NOW and as director of the Georgia NOW Project. She goes on to talk about her decision in 1984, to establish the feminist newsletter, Southern Feminist. She says that financial pressures led to its closure in 1988. Today, she lists her main concerns for women as being workplace-centered; that employers need to define their best workers not by their willingness to give all of their time to their jobs, but by their ability to lead a balanced life, and be productive.
Transcript of this excerpt: SH: When we came here, I had a four-week-old baby and a book contract, and so for the first, actually probably almost two years that we were in Georgia, I was writing and nursing my baby and had a four-year-old besides. I mean, I hardly ever even got out of the house. I mean, we knew our immediate neighbors, but that was about it. I was really under the gun to finish this book that I was doing, which was about pregnancy and childbirth, and it was -- it had been late getting done because I had gotten pregnant in the course of writing the book, for the second time, and was going through all of this, which I think helped the research aspects. But it also slowed things down a lot. So that was all I’d done for a couple of years. And then the book had finally gotten done, gotten sent off to the publisher, and I was just completely stir-crazy. I mean, it’s like, I am tired of looking at the walls of my kitchen and my house and so forth, and I had seen in the [Atlanta] Journal-Constitution, I suppose it was, a notice that Sonya Johnson was going to be giving a talk that was presented by either ERA Georgia or it might have been People of Faith for ERA – I’m not sure which, and that that was going to be at a hotel in Atlanta. And for some reason, that caught my eye, and I said to Kent, “I really want to go hear this woman speak. Let’s go to Atlanta. Let’s leave the kids with the grandparents, and let’s go to Atlanta and hear this woman,” and he was agreeable, as he is. He’ll come along with me on these adventures. So we went and we heard Sonya Johnson speak, and I was just mesmerized by her as a speaker. It really was -- this in some respects – it’s probably a little too strong to say “life-changing,” but I mean, it -- I really connected with what she had to say and I really felt inspired to do something. I just didn’t know what. I mean, as I say, I didn’t even know people in my own community in Athens, much less in Atlanta or anything else. So I remember there was an ERAmerica organizer, Jane -- what was her name? Do you recall? Do you remember Jane? VG: No, I don’t. I remember her, but I don’t remember the name. SH: She came to -- well, she came -- I was going to say, I just can’t remember her last name. I know somebody would be able to think of it. But she was -- she came to Georgia periodically. She, I think, was going around to the various states where there was the potential to have a vote [on ERA]. And I guess I saw her the next day -- because Sonya had encouraged people or other speakers had encouraged people to go to the Capitol. The next day was a lobby day -- an ERA lobby day, and I’m trying to think whether this was ’80 or ’81. It may have been ’81, like January of ’81, a year before the deadline was going to run out on ERA. So again, we trotted down. I’d never been to the Capitol. I’d never done any of this. [We] talked to this organizer and [I] said, ”You know, I would really like to do something, but I don’t even know where to start. What should I do?” And she said, well, in some places where she had been traveling, they would organize an event around some date, and she said, “For example, Susan B. Anthony’s birthday comes up in February, and sometimes people will do some sort of event around her birthday, tying the first fight for women’s rights to the current fight.” And that made sense to me, and it was about the right timing. This was January, and that was -- February was about a month away, and I thought, “Well, we could probably organize something around that back in Athens.” So again, not even really having a clue what I was doing, I got a couple of friends and said, “Let’s have this Susan B. Anthony birthday party and say that we want to bring people together who want to be involved in working to try to get passage of the ERA.” And we made some flyers. Somebody said, “Oh, I can dress up like Susan B. Anthony, and I can do one of her speeches.” I said, “Oh, that would be great, let’s do that. We’ll take names – we’ll just write down names of people who want to do something, and maybe if they want to collect some money, then we could have -- start having some money that then we could use to do some mailings to people and do some organizing and this and that.” So, I did know how to get stuff in the newspaper and so forth, and so we got the word out [and] put flyers up. At that point, some people in Athens who had in the past worked on ERA said -- approached us and said, “Well, this is all well and good. We’re glad to see you here with all this enthusiasm, but guess what? We’ve been trying to organize stuff here for a long time, and there isn’t much interest, and it’s too late. There’s only a year left,” and they weren’t trying to be discouraging, they were just trying to be realistic, and they were saying, “Don’t be disappointed if nobody shows up. That’s just the way it is, and we’re just preparing you for this possibility” But I was thinking, “No, no, we’ve got to try, and surely with just a year left, there are people who care about this.” And 200 people showed up at the -- We had this at the YWCA, and 200 people showed up. They wrote their names down, they were [saying] “Well, here’s $2.00,” or whatever. So that’s where we started -- decided we would start this organization called ERA Athens to tie in with ERA Georgia, and that was the start of it, and it just took off like crazy from there. VG: Did you have a lot of local people, plus students in it, or was there a mix of people? SH: There were some -- there weren’t so many students. It was more people in the community, and it was primarily women, but not exclusively women. Again, it was -- it wasn’t any set group in the community because I didn’t really know -- to work through channels or to go through the League of Women Voters or one of the political groups. I mean, this was truly just like, “Let’s spring up this grassroots group, and anyone who wants to be involved can be involved.” So we really had people who were community activists from various groups, but also people who had never -- more like me, who had never done any of this before, but just felt very compelled to do whatever they could in that remaining year. And part of it, I think, when you have a deadline and when people know, well you’re not signing on necessarily for a lifetime commitment -- although I think for a lot of people it in fact did become a lifetime commitment -- but when you can see the sort of finite period, and people recognizing that Georgia was one of the states where there could potentially be a vote, that that galvanized a lot of people. They said, “Well, okay, let me see what I can do right now at this point in time, at this moment in history.” - Metadata URL:
- http://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/coles/id/2042
- IIIF manifest:
- https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/iiif/2/coles:2042/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:
- 30 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:
-
