- Collection:
- Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Archives
- Title:
- Walker talks about Weeks v Southern Bell (6:19)
- Creator:
- Walker, Annabelle (Annabelle Hoppe), 1940-
- Contributor to Resource:
- Durand, Joyce Jenkins, 1939-
- Publisher:
- Atlanta, Ga. : Georgia State University Library
- Date of Original:
- 1999-09-24
- 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
United States, Louisiana, 31.00047, -92.0004 - Medium:
- audiocassettes
- Type:
- Sound
- Format:
- audio/mpeg
- Description:
- Annabelle Hoppe Walker was born in 1940 in Pineville, Kentucky. Walker worked as a speech therapist, a first grade teacher, and an early learning teacher before becoming an attorney. She is currently Deputy City Attorney for the City of New Orleans. She holds a B.A. from George Washington University, an M.Ed. from Georgia State University, and a J.D. degree. In addition to teaching and practicing law, Walker was actively involved in women's advocacy in the 1970s. She served as president of the New Orleans NOW chapter from 1972 until 1975 and was the state co-coordinator for the Louisiana ERA Coalition in 1975.
The daughter of a college professor (and later, musician), Walker describes her childhood spent in college towns. She says that although she was highly intelligent, her parents "had in mind that I would be a teacher, or a librarian or a nurse. It just didn't occur to them [for me] to be anything else."" Majoring in speech therapy, Walker describes her experiences in beauty contests while at Louisiana State University. After getting engaged to the president of the student body, Walker says that she finished out her junior year at LSU and transferred to George Washington University in Washington D.C. to be with her finance. After some moving around, Walker and her young family came to Atlanta, where she enrolled in Georgia State University's Early Childhood Education Program. She says that it was through her sociology classes that she first learned about the Women's Movement, and that her consciousness was raised immediately. She says, "At first, I began to notice how much women were put down and discouraged from doing anything. But the constant demeaning of women really began to bother me." She recounts that her marriage did not survive her newly-found feminism. Walker says that while she was studying Early Childhood Education, she became aware of sex-role stereotyping. She and a classmate, Ramona Frasher worked on a research project, and she recounts their work examining the roles of women in children's textbooks. She says that although they had trouble publishing their findings, the findings were in fact very influential in forcing textbook publishers to take sexism out of their books. Walker says that she joined NOW because they had a national structure and they [were] middle-of-the-road enough sort of the NAACP of the Women's Movement. She describes the issues that NOW focused on, such as the Weeks v Southern Bell discrimination case, and the discriminatory practices of the Salvation Army. As a member of NOW, she was asked to speak to various groups, and she recounts her experience at Westminster school in Atlanta, where she spoke about sexism to the entire high school and faculty. Walker describes moving to New Orleans in 1972, shortly after her divorce. She says that within six months of her move, she was president of the local chapter of NOW, and co-coordinator of the Louisiana ERA Coalition. She recounts the many demonstrations and rallies she attended, including the wedding dress incident, which involved her wearing a wedding dress with a hooped skirt to the Louisiana legislature, and carrying a sign that said equal partnership in marriage. The incident was recounted later in a Time magazine article which examined the different approaches taken by northern and southern feminists. Walker says that her activism waned after she started Law School: "I kind of dropped my activism and wasn't active any more. It would take an issue to bring it back to life, I suppose. From then on, you see, you could battle individual cases of discrimination through laws that we had passed, or through organizational efforts. Because once feminism became accepted, it was no longer acceptable to be sexist anymore than it was acceptable to be racist. Because of a movement, we didn't need the movement anymore."
Transcript of this excerpt: JD: What about issues at that time? AW: Oh, good question! I do remember two or three things that happened in those early days when I went to meetings. They tended to focus on -- yes, there were issues of the day that were really strong feminist issues. Big controversies. The first one I remember was the big [legal] case of Weeks vs. Southern Bell. I believe at the time I joined the NOW chapter in Atlanta, that case had just been won. I eventually met the woman lawyer from Baton Rouge, Sylvia Roberts was her name, who had taken on the case of Loreena Weeks. It was a Louisiana woman. In fact, she wanted to be on the [Southern Bell] repair crew, of course. And in those days the highest job a woman could have at Southern Bell, was an operator's job which just happened to pay lower than the lowest paying job in the men's department. Night repairman was the job that came open in the station where she worked, so she applied for the job, but of course it wasn't open to women. They gave all kinds of excuses -- why we had labor laws then that affected women [saying], "Oh, but we have -- you can't carry more than 30 pounds." JD: Safety issues? AW: Safety issues, yeah. They excused it by saying, "But, you'd have to carry a heavy repair kit that weighed over 30 pounds!" And the law then said women couldn't carry anything that weighed over 30 pounds! I said, "But my toddler weighs over 30 pounds! My purse weighs almost 30 pounds." She said, "But when I have to move my typewriter, which weighs 30 pounds -- a big one -- at night to move it aside for the night repairman to come in --" She was a night operator and she did have to lift and carry something heavy. That was one excuse. But, anyway, as we all know, Loreena Weeks won her case and went to the Supreme Court and she won. But then, Southern Bell didn't want to pay any attorney's fees for her and her lawyer had to fight another three or four years to get paid. The Weeks case was in the news at the time I joined NOW and I remember that we went out and picketed on the streets of Atlanta to draw public attention to her case. Then came along this Salvation Army woman. A woman came to our meetings who said she was a member of the Salvation Army. She and her husband had worked together as soldiers for the Salvation Army. It's a big employer. It is. A multi-million dollar budget. And when husbands and wives worked together for the Army, they actually had rules -- a rule that a wife could never hold a position higher than that of her husband. That was one thing. Well, she complained about that, but what she was particularly complaining about was that her husband had died. She was now a widow and she found out [that] she didn't get the same benefits she would have gotten if she had died and he were a widower. He would have gotten a household allowance, so he could have someone come in and clean the house. But guess what? She was expected to do it herself, so she didn't get a household allowance. Things of that kind. She didn't get as much money to repair her car; he would have gotten more. There were various things that, you know, the Army discriminated against women as employees. But the reason that they came -- she and her lawyer came to visit NOW was because he [her lawyer] had tried to sue them on her behalf, under Title VII, which you know had been amended to forbid sex discrimination. The Weeks case was the first case that prevailed under Title IV and created a precedent, but they could not sue the Salvation Army under Title VII, because it was a religious organization -- violation of freedom of religion. So she came to us and we went out and demonstrated on the streets, "Salvation Army discriminates against women." We picketed the Salvation Army on the day that she had to go -- see, she had protested the practices, and they had their own little court. She wasn't allowed to have a lawyer. Oh yeah, they were going to fire her, you see, because she was causing problems. They had their own little kangaroo court, you might say, where they were going to pass judgment on her. But she couldn't bring a lawyer, needless to say, or -- and people couldn't go in. It was private and I don't believe she had the right to bring witnesses or anything. Anyway, we didn't think it was fair, so we all went out and picketed that day, while she was having to go in and face this. We thought that adverse publicity might put some pressure on the Army, even if the law couldn't touch them. But do you know, we got stoned by people! Oh, yes! People, some people threw rocks. People drove by and saw we were picketing the Salvation Army. They were horrified because they, after all, were a religious organization and they helped poor people! What could we possibly have against the Salvation Army? Oh yes, we had rocks thrown at us by certain people. They just thought it was an awful thing to do! "You radical women's libbers! What do you think you are doing?" [laughter] That was a tough one. JD: How did it resolve it[self]? AW: I wish I could say. I think they did -- I understood that they did change their practices. I know she didn't get fired and I think she did get some relief -- they equalized some things, because there was a lot of pressure. The [Salvation] Army, after all, does have to depend upon public opinion. But there wasn't a lot that they did, and I've heard that they still have some discriminatory practices. But that was just one thing, of course, that we did. JD: But you all did feel successful about it? AW: Yes, we felt we had made a difference. We most certainly did. And picketing Southern Bell was -- I think I must have already been doing public speaking by then because I remember people calling me at my house and saying that that wasn't right. Women shouldn't be able to do these [jobs]. I had a woman call me and say, "What are you doing?" And I explained that this woman had just as much right to be a repair person as a man, and she said, "But those are very responsible jobs, why those are dangerous! Why, those guys have to climb poles and do repair work, and that's such a responsible job!" As though a woman couldn't do it. I was amazed to see how women themselves had no confidence, even in other women. - Metadata URL:
- http://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/coles/id/2071
- IIIF manifest:
- https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/iiif/2/coles:2071/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:
- 63 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:
-
