- Collection:
- Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Archives
- Title:
- Millen talks about her experiences as a young female writer (3:15)
- Creator:
- Millen, Susan A. (Susan Ann), 1951-
- Contributor to Resource:
- Paulk, Janet, 1932-
- Publisher:
- Atlanta, Ga. : Georgia State University Library
- Date of Original:
- 1999-07-07
1999-07-09 - 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, North Carolina, New Hanover County, Wilmington, 34.22573, -77.94471 - Medium:
- audiocassettes
- Type:
- Sound
- Format:
- audio/mpeg
- Description:
- Susan Ann Millen, activist, journalist, and producer, was born in Aurora, Illinois in 1951. She attended Southern Illinois University in Carbondale (journalism; BS, 1972), and Columbia College in Chicago (photography; BFA, 1978), after which she moved to Atlanta. Millen has been an editor (Journal of Labor, 1979-1985), journalist, photographer, public relations specialist and communications consultant as well as a special education teacher and has been very active in organizations involving women's politics. She was president of the Georgia chapter and a board member of the National Woman's Party (1981-1984), an organizing member and first vice-president of the Atlanta chapter of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (1983-1985), and an officer of the Georgia Women's Political Caucus (1986-1990). In addition, she coordinated a Political Skills Workshop (1987) and the Georgia Women and the Law Conference (1987) for the GWPC; she produced a GWPC television series on prime cable that began in 1987; was a National Women's Political Caucus officer (1989); and was a board member of ERA Georgia, Inc. as well as editor of its Newsletter. Millen continues to be a community activist and teaches at Tucker High School in Dekalb County, Georgia. In 2004, she and her class were selected as an AT&T CARES Youth Service Action Award.
Growing up one of 14 children in a traditional Catholic household, Millen describes herself as a very responsible child, who knew from an early age exactly what she wanted for herself in terms of her education and career. She recounts that after graduating in three years from Southern Illinois University with a degree in journalism, she took a job as the women's assistant editor at the Wilmington Star News, in Wilmington, North Carolina. She describes how, in the course of her job, she reported that the local school board was not complying with the U.S. Supreme Court ruling that allowed pregnant teenage girls to attend public school. Parts of her report were quashed by the chief editor of the newspaper. Continuing with her experiences at the Wilmington Star News, Millen describes her efforts to challenge pay inequity at the newspaper, and her move to Atlanta shortly thereafter. Once in Atlanta, Millen says she joined NOW and became involved in the movement to ratify the Equal Rights Amendment, serving as editor of the ERA Georgia Newsletter and helping to organize the Georgia chapter of the National Women's Party. Millen provides a detailed account of the divisions within the ERA Georgia campaign, and describes the resulting rift, and consequent establishment of the Georgia Women's Party -- a group that went on to build an effective lobbying mechanism, often seeking out the wives of legislators who opposed the Equal Rights Amendment. A long-time union member and supporter of labor, Millen describes her work with the Georgia AFL-CIO and as editor of the Journal of Labor. She believes that the AFL-CIO played an instrumental role in supporting efforts to pass the ERA, as they not only provided money and legislative support, they also gave advice about organizing and spread the message of the ERA to union members across the state. Millen was a founding member of the Coalition of Labor Union Women (CLUW), which, she asserts, was a natural outgrowth for women workers and women labor leaders. For Millen, the Women's Movement was central in allowing women to make choices regarding sexuality, work and life.
Transcript of this excerpt: JP: Did you run into any difficulty, being a woman trying to be a writer? SM: Sometimes I did. It's interesting because the first job that I had -- one of the reasons that I left the job and accepted this position in New York is -- it was right at the time when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that teenage girls who are pregnant can't be allowed to be suspended from school; they have to be allowed to continue their education. The Wilmington school board was just blatantly ignoring that ruling, and girls were still not allowed to attend school. And I did a story on this. I did a story on that and on unwed mothers, and the editor came and actually changed the words in the story. It was very unusual for this [to happen]. He was not the managing editor but the editor of the whole -- like the publisher in essence. And it was very unusual for him to come in, but the school board people had called him and said, "You need to stop this story," because basically the story said the school board was in violation of the law. And he changed it, and the women's editor that I was with changed some of it back after he left. The story ran, and they ended up having to change their school board policy because of the story. After that, I was not a -- they were not happy with me. Plus I had worked with a young man and we were dating when I was in Wilmington, and he had a lot less experience than I did and he was being paid five dollars a week more. Which doesn't sound like a lot -- five dollars a week more, but it was a lot. And there was a woman on the newspaper who actually had tons of experience, and she was being paid even less than me. And so I brought that to the editor's attention, and he said, "Well, you know, men take more -- We have to pay them more because they have a family." And I said that this woman had a family, she was a single parent. I said "If you're using that logic, then at the very least, she should be paid more than me." And their response was to fire the young man that I was dating. [laughs] Rather than raise our salary they fired the young man I was dating, for telling me what his income was! So I reported that to the Labor Department because it was a violation of the labor laws, and they had to change their entire hiring policy. Needless to say, they didn't fire me. They couldn't fire me. That would have been just -- I mean, the Labor Department really would have been on their back then. But you know, they made it pretty miserable. I just went out and put out resumes, and I was hired almost immediately at this newspaper in upstate New York, which was a wonderful newspaper. The editor of that paper was just the opposite of this editor. He was notorious, he was well known around the country because he had gone to the White House and challenged the president at an editors' dinner on the war in Vietnam. And they had physically thrown him out of the dinner that night. [laughs] So it was just a different kind of flavor. - Metadata URL:
- http://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/coles/id/2081
- IIIF manifest:
- https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/iiif/2/coles:2081/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:
-
