- Collection:
- Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Archives
- Title:
- Hlass talks about working with Mary Hartman (1:28)
- Creator:
- Hlass, Cynthia W. (Cynthia Welch), 1944-2003
- Contributor to Resource:
- Durand, Joyce Jenkins, 1939-
- Publisher:
- Atlanta, Ga. : Georgia State University Library
- Date of Original:
- 1997-04-30
- 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:
- Cynthia Welch Hlass, a real estate broker and former Atlanta NOW president, was born in Kansas City, Missouri in 1944. She attended Northwestern University (Chicago, Illinois) for two years during the early 1960s, then left to become an airline attendant. Hlass graduated from Mercer University (Atlanta, Georgia) in 1977 with a dual major in psychology and sociology. It was while she was finishing her degree at Mercer that she served as Atlanta NOW president (1973-1974) and as legislative coordinator (1974-1975) for Georgia NOW. Hlass was a real estate broker for over 20 years. She died in 2003.
Hlass describes her childhood in great detail, including her parent's expectations for her. She talks about attending Northwestern University for two years, and then training to be an airline attendant with Trans World (TWA). Hlass eventually received a degree in sociology and psychology from Mercer University in Atlanta in 1977. She discusses her personal life, her children, her parents, and interestingly weaves that in with a discussion about her parents inability to understand why she was involved in the Women's Movement, or her affiliation with NOW. Hlass explains that after she became a member of NOW in Atlanta, she immersed herself within the movement -- eventually becoming the president of her local chapter. Hlass describes how, in 1975, she was nominated to travel to the Soviet Union to represent NOW and to personify the women's liberation movement. She says that in order to raise money for the trip she had to avoid using terms like "feminist", or "Women's Movement", or "Women's Liberation". She recalls that during her tenure as president of Atlanta NOW, the organization filed suit against Atlanta Magazine for unequal pay amongst their women employees. Spending many hours at the state Capitol lobbying for the Equal Rights Amendment and for rape-related issues, particularly spousal rape, Hlass repeatedly utilized the media to help transmit the NOW's message to the public. She discusses her encounters with powerful Georgian politicians, the issues that are still a concern for her, and the legacy of the Women's Movement.
Transcript of this excerpt: JD: Thinking about some other people in the Movement, tell me about Mary Hartman. CH: Oh gosh, well -- Mary has probably the best sense of humor of anybody that I have ever met. She’s totally uninhibited and will say just about anything to anyone anywhere. She was the vice president when I was the president of NOW Atlanta, and -- JD: I was secretary at the time. CH: That’s right, that’s right. Gosh, who was the treasurer? Did we have one? JD: I think so, I don’t remember. CH: I think the thing that sticks out with me, with Mary, she’s so bright and articulate, for one thing. And I loved her slant when we were picketing Sears: We’d do a lot of picketing in those days, [and] we had to be real careful with Sears. Mary came up with the idea of “ Sears hates kids”. And it didn’t have anything to do with what [slogans] we were picketing with, but it certainly got their attention. So, until we got kicked out of Sears, we were walking around Sears with huge balloons that said, “Sears hates kids”. Of course, we were promptly escorted off the property. [laughs] As it turned out however, we had, gosh, ten or twelve people who had filed a sex discrimination case. The -- all the women were working in small item retail, and all the guys were working in expensive, you know, furniture and washing machines or whatever. [We filed a law suit.] And Sears did -- they worked on quitting the suit. They did do back pay for these women. It changed the way Sears operates. I’m sure it scared the hell out of most any other stores because it got a lot of press -- really a lot of press. Sometimes we did things on our own -- on our own because we just couldn’t find volunteers. I lived in Gwinnett County, right on the Dekalb county line. Mary lived in town. We would go to an office that we had that was right across from the Fox Theater where we had our “press,” quote. This press stayed broken ninety-nine percent of the time. We had to operate it manually and load it with ink, and you know, just on and on and on. We’d do the newsletters. And I do not type well, but occasionally, I was pressed into that. So when they came out, it was kind of embarrassing. It looked like an illiterate person did it. But we would do them, print them together, staple them together, label them by zip [code], and we had a bulk postage rate. Mary Hartman, who was about nine and half months pregnant, at least -- at that point would take these to the post office and mail them in Decatur. And here she is, just absolutely huge, and she’s carrying this box with all of these things and I think one of the rubber bands broke, or something -- something happened, and the box just was a real mess. She was going to have to sort it all over again. The guy [at the post office] said he couldn’t help her, you know, and she said that there was nobody else in the post office. Finally, she said she just stood there and cried. She just said, "I can’t do this." And there were two or three people in the back, and they all came out and helped her. [laughing] So all our newsletters went out. Mary just thought it was the last thing, and I’m going to use it – I’ll cry! We did have a lot of fun. She also went on a lot debates with me, and like I said, she just would do anything or say anything to anybody, and just is a really, really neat friend; she’s a good person to know. JD: It did a lot for our image, we felt, to have someone so pregnant, [and] so obviously -- CH: Absolutely. Well we were all moms! JD: [We were] little, petite, pretty, little -- little pregnant mother; everything but barefoot and submissive! - Metadata URL:
- http://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/coles/id/2075
- IIIF manifest:
- https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/iiif/2/coles:2075/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:
-
