- Collection:
- Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Archives
- Title:
- Simpson talks about organizing the ""Women's Fair"" and A Woman's Place (13:06)
- Creator:
- Simpson, Polly Brooks, 1939-
- Contributor to Resource:
- Van Tilborg, Dana
- Publisher:
- Atlanta, Ga. : Georgia State University Library
- Date of Original:
- 1996-10-21
- Subject:
- Feminism
Social movements
Women's studies - Location:
- United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018
- Medium:
- audiocassettes
- Type:
- Sound
- Format:
- audio/mpeg
- Description:
- Polly Brooks Simpson, civic activist and businesswoman, was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1939. After graduating from high school in Sparta, GA, she attended Agnes Scott College (1957-1958) and earned a psychology degree (B.A., 1962) from Georgia State University. She later received a masters degree in social work from Atlanta University (1978). Simpson has been involved in the Georgia Council on Child Abuse since 1979, serving as board president for two terms. In 1988, the Council named its Polly B. Simpson Distinguished Service Award after her, and she became its first recipient. She also organized and chaired Georgia Voices for Children (1989-1990), an advocacy group whose efforts resulted in the change of state child abuse laws. Other organizations that Simpson has been active with are the National Committee to Prevent Child Abuse (1989-1995), Georgians for Children (1991-), and the Fulton County Child Abuse Protocol Committee (1995-). In 1996, Simpson opened Vermillion, an Atlanta gallery. She married Charlie Simpson in 1960 and has two daughters. In 1980. Simpson and others developed A Woman's Place, a clearinghouse for women's resources as well as an organization for women. The organization began producing a newsletter, A Woman's Place, in 1981. In September 1983 the first issue of Femme was produced, which was issued as an insert to Atlanta's Creative Loafing newspaper. When A Woman's Place closed its offices on September 30, 1983, the Georgia Women's Consortium, a statewide alliance of 32 organizations, took over the clearinghouse concept of the older organization. Simpson continued to co-edit Femme, and when the name was changed to Atlanta Woman in December 1983, she remained as co-editor.
Simpson talks about her childhood around Georgia, and recounts that her grandmother, a classic steel magnolia, was a very important influence in her later work with the Women's Movement. Simpson believes that her active involvement in the Women's Movement began through her experiences at the Unitarian Church, which strongly emphasized the importance of human rights and human potential. She states that it was through one of her church's women's groups that plans for a women's fair were developed, and that A Women's Place was a natural progression from that fair. Simpson discusses the successes of A Women's Place -- most notably in bringing women and women's groups together, and in creating and editing the Creative Loafing insert, Femme (later Atlanta Woman). She also talks about the organization's problems, including lack of financial support, and the personal burden of time and energy that was required to keep A Woman's Place going. Simpson ends by discussing the Women's Movement and how it has benefited younger generations -- particularly in the field of sports. She also discusses the problems of the Women's Movement, citing its non-inclusiveness as a major fault, particularly in relation to lesbians and black women.
Transcript of this excerpt: PS: But out of a lot of these women's groups that I was talking about that I lead, there were a group of us at the Unitarian Church that decided that we were going to have a "women's fair." I chaired the committee to put that on. And so what we did was, we had an all day event [May 31, 1980]. It was kind of the first time that anything like that had happened [in Atlanta]. It was supposed to be informational. One of the things that I have always been really big on is giving information about whatever -- I mean, you know, that in order to make things happen and to really live the way I want to live, I need to be informed about things. I need to always, kind of -- I'm just really big on that. I need to research things, I need to know everything that there is to know about things. So, we had this big "women's fair" and we were doing everything from having speakers come and talk about different kinds of jobs and careers [to --] we had women's art. Rosemary Daniel was an author at that time who was from Atlanta -- grew up in Atlanta, that had just written a book about the South and Southern women called Fatal Flowers. She was a big draw, and we got her to come and speak to [the] women that day. It really was, if you can just fantasize any of the festivals that you have today, that is the kind of thing that we did except absolutely everything was focused on women. We really had -- it was very successful. We got a lot of publicity, because it was kind of like one of the first times that anything like that had happened here just -- particularly out of a church, you know, that -- So, out of that, there were several of us that talked [and thought] that if this many women came and they were that interested, then there surely was a need for something to be done; and that there were clubs -- there were various -- but there weren't even very many. I think I just named the Women's Political Caucus and the Feminist Action Alliance. I imagine there were a couple of business and professional women's groups that were going on at that time. But that wasn't an area -- I was a housewife, so that wasn't available to me and all the other women that I kind of knew that were really interested in doing things. So that's how, actually, kind of the "seeds" for A Woman's Place began -- is out of that Women's Fair, when we just had so much response to that. Two other women and I sat down and kind of started talking about this and thought -- we had a lot of ideas but that maybe what we should do is just have a meeting and see what other people thought. So, we sent out an invitation to just as many people as we knew and we had it [the meeting] in my backyard. We just said, you know, "come and talk about ideas for women." We had like, over a hundred women that showed up! It was one of those amazing things where all we had done is said come talk about ideas for women and all these women appeared. So, we generated a lot of interest and enthusiasm in just doing something for women, but we weren't sure what. So, we tried to go the way -- a corporate way, or something. Do things the right way, I guess. So we sent out a survey asking people what they wanted and what they would be interested in -- that sort of thing. What we came up with was that what people really wanted was a place of their own that just had a wide range of things [available]. Simultaneously with that -- we ended up reading about a place in Toronto [for women] and then one later in Minneapolis -- that there were groups of women that were doing this [same thing] at the same time. We talked with them, we got information from them. We were trying to do something a little bit different, which was trying to figure out a way to have this [organization] fully financed by women. You know, women didn't have money, or didn't spend money, I will say, in the early -- even fifteen years ago -- the way they do now. It was interesting: it was hard to find women with money to back us. We did work at that and we did find some. But what we decided to do was to try to actually form a business, and sell shares of stock and form a limited partnership that would purchase a piece of property and have a house on it; and really have a facility where women could come and have a drink, women could come to have lunch, they could exercise, they could find a book, they could find -- we wanted to have a job bank -- they could hang art, they could have support groups. You name it, and it could be something that could happen for women. This was a little bit of a grandiose idea, but it sounded like a fun thing to do. We got a lot of good response from that. Unfortunately the dollars weren't there. We raised enough money to put kind of a down payment down on the property, and to allow us to spend six months trying to raise the money to get it. But we really never did quite make it, so we had to let the property go. We existed for the next three years in rented space. We did have small dollar memberships. I think the membership was twenty-five dollars a year, or something like that. That provided the rent for a place that we had in a shopping center [Broadview Plaza], so we really did have a facility and place where women could come. We really did have art shows, and we had a newsletter that went out every month. We did a calendar of events for women, which was the first time that anything like that had ever happened in the city [of Atlanta]. The other thing that I am a really big believer in is trying to not duplicate services. So one of my goals during that period of time was to try to get the women's groups to be different from other [existing] groups, and to not have turf battles, and to work together, and to not duplicate their services. So, we formed a consortium -- women's consortium -- what was it called? -- the Georgia Consortium of Women, or something -- I have forgotten exactly what the name of it was. But it tried to get all of the women's groups together to come and have monthly meetings and share [ideas]. Then, that is actually when we had them come in -- a lot of them had their offices with us -- ERA Georgia moved their office into A Woman's Place office, because we just felt there were so few of us out there doing things that it made more sense if what you could do is share a typewriter. We are talking about your real basic kinds of things here. None of these groups had any money. And, that -- you know, it really did work for a while. It didn't work as well as I would [have] liked [it] to, and I think that is just a fantasy that I have -- that probably people don't fight turf battles because no matter how hard -- how much women are supportive of each other, they somehow still want their own identity, [want] their groups to have their own identity and to see them as being different. But we really did try to do a lot of the beginnings kinds of networking for women -- not just among individual women, but among the women's groups. That is something that I consider fairly significant, that I had a hand in, in helping happen, along with -- and that was kind of the way our calendar group [worked] -- is because what we did was -- we'd have all these groups then to give us the information about what they were doing. And we'd put it on this one calendar, and they would distribute it to their members and we would distribute it. Then, ultimately, it became a part of Creative Loafing -- that it was distributed all over the city free, and that women could pick it up. It would list events that were of particular interest to women. It was -- I'm trying to think, I've just lost my train of thought there for a minute. But, that's kind of what I think A Woman's Place was about. [It] was just for women to learn about opportunities that were available to share with other women -- their experiences -- and to get support from each other, and to just do as much networking as we possibly could. It was a great group of women, it was a great experience for me. What we really never did, was figure out a way to get the funding. I think that part of that [problem] was just -- a lot of us that were involved were doing so many other things in our lives that it was hard to focus. We were having so much fun and enjoying doing the day-to-day kinds of things with A Woman's Place, that it was really hard to focus on keeping the kind of funding [needed] in place. I mean, I think we did the typical things that agencies and organizations [do] if you are not real savvy about what is going on. Now, having done a lot more -- been involved in a lot more organizations, I can go back and be a lot more critical about how we should have had different kinds of funding in place to go on. I worked as kind of the unpaid director for three years. I just really, at the end of three years, burned out, because it was -- I was working, you know, eighty and ninety hours a week or more. Again, there wasn't anybody else, obviously, that was willing to commit that kind of time, and shouldn't have committed that kind of time. So, there was a group that kept it on, [kept it] alive for about another six or eight months, and then it slowly faded after about a three and half years' existence. But there are a lot of pieces that are left [of it] today. I think a couple of women's newspapers started as a result -- of a lot of what we saw. The Atlanta Women's Network now does a lot of the job networking and that kind of thing that we did. So it is fun for me to look [at that now] and see, so I don't have very many regrets because I end up thinking that it was something that had a great -- fulfilled a great need in a particular way, and that a lot of the things that needed to live on did, in other forms, somewhere along the way. I met -- had just incredible experiences with a number of women, and I still run into people almost every day of my life who will say, "Aren't you -- do you remember me?" - Metadata URL:
- http://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/coles/id/2044
- IIIF manifest:
- https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/iiif/2/coles:2044/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:
- 26 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:
-
