- Collection:
- Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Archives
- Title:
- Malavenda talks about the Mormons for Equal Rights (1:28)
- Creator:
- Malavenda, Roberta
- Contributor to Resource:
- Paulk, Janet, 1932-
- Publisher:
- Atlanta, Ga. : Georgia State University Library
- Date of Original:
- 1998-11-22
- Subject:
- Feminism
Social movements
Women's studies - Location:
- United States, Florida, Alachua County, Gainesville, 29.65163, -82.32483
United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018
United States, Illinois, Cook County, Chicago, 41.85003, -87.65005 - Medium:
- audiocassettes
- Type:
- Sound
- Format:
- audio/mpeg
- Description:
- Roberta Malavenda was born in 1944 in Chicago, Illinois. She grew up in a Jewish community, and a very politically-oriented household. Malavenda attended Columbia University and, as a sophomore, she spent four months in Santiago, Chile during the 1964 Chilean presidential election. Politically active during her college years, Malavenda was involved in SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), while also pursuing degrees in political science and Latin American studies. After leaving Columbia, she began working as a community organizer in New York with the Puerto Rican Family Institute. After moving to Atlanta in the early 1970s, Malavenda joined the Georgia Women's Political Caucus, and went on to become involved with the ERA campaign in Georgia. Malavenda has worked as an educator, community consultant, social worker and community organizer advocating for child care and for the rights of people with developmental disabilities. She is currently the Deputy Director of Programs for the Save the Children Child Care Support Center in Atlanta, Georgia, and serves as the president of Parent Services Project, Inc. and as the co-chair of the National Family Support/Child Care Project, PSP, Inc. She was involved with both the National Women's Political Caucus and the Georgia Women's Political Caucus, serving as the ERA state coordinator and president, 1979-1980.
Roberta Malavenda begins by describing her childhood, parents and youthful aspirations. She says that she was always interested in politics and her political ambitions led her to become the vice-president of Hillel during her tenure at Indiana University. She talks about her trip to Santiago, Chile, during her sophomore year of college, and then about attending graduate school at Columbia University. In Gainesville, Florida, Malavenda helped to organize the United Farm Workers movement, with Cesar Chavez and his wife, and she states that it was during her time in Gainesville that she became interested in joining the Women's Movement. Malavenda and her husband moved to Georgia in 1977, and she quickly began working for the ERA campaign as a field coordinator. Malavenda accounts the incredible political battles that were fought in Georgia, the leadership of the Women's Movement, as well as how other major issues, including civil rights and gay rights affected the Women's Movement.
Transcript of this excerpt: ML: But during that time, there were all these women who were -- other women, who were not in the [Women's] Movement, who were struggling [and] who felt like any issue related to women's rights, any changes in the law, would just kill them and make them go to work when they didn't want to go to work. But for those of us who were at work, we needed to have the laws changed to benefit us as single women. And that was difficult -- women who had children, women who were single parents. But what I do remember, those women in the checkered aprons down at the Capitol. They were anti-ERA people. They used to drag all the little babies down there, like the rest of us didn't have children -- but we didn't drag our babies, because we didn't necessarily need to drag our babies; but they would drag all the little babies down. They wore little checkered aprons, big hairdos, you know, as we used to say, the blue hair and the rolls on the head and looking very important, and, you know, praising the Lord, like the rest of us never had any relationship with God Almighty! And, they would bring cookies and other kinds of things. And, this is going on tape, but I must tell you that one day they were all down with their checkered aprons and babies on, and they were passing out cookies. And I think one of the things that I found out at the Capitol -- there were a few of us that were friends. We sort of made our little office on the opposite side of where the shoeshine men were. We stayed on the north side and we let the shoeshine people, and those little corporations and whatever on the other side. And I remember they were passing out cookies and of course, we would never accept any, because we thought that, you know, there was something wrong with them. And I -- Hosea Williams came out and they were handing him something. And Hosea, being a friend of ours -- and I would say, [a friend of] a lot of the black caucus -- we said, "Hosea, if you eat those cookies, you're going to become impotent, because look at these women!" Well, he -- that just sort of put him -- it was one of the funniest things he had heard of and whatever. And it was the way we did things. You needed to do things like that just to survive because you could become so angry about it. I think in later years, we learned a lot of other techniques. - Metadata URL:
- http://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/coles/id/2109
- IIIF manifest:
- https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/iiif/2/coles:2109/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:
- 48 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:
-
