‘History Shock’ for Women Activists

Coretta Scott King sat on the piano bench singing “This Little Light of Mine,” a spiritual that helped stoke the civil-rights movement. Bella Abzug, red hat marking her presence wherever she stood, joined in with more spirit than sonority. Other veterans of the civil-rights, anti-war and women’s movements sipped wine and socialized while the wives of the men who had been objects of some of their protests--Lady Bird Johnson and Rosalynn Carter--stood before a warming fire. The former First Ladies were greeting this eclectic assortment of guests in the parlor at Lovejoy, the plantation home outside Atlanta where one-time segregationist Gov. Herman Talmadge had lived.

The occasion was a dinner thrown by Talmadge’s ex-wife Betty (she got the house) for several dozen of the women who had come to Atlanta at Carter’s invitation to discuss women and the Constitution.

The conference made news not so much for what was said but for the fact that it happened. It exposed hundreds of mainstream women to what had once been considered radical speakers, under the aegis of four former First Ladies--Carter and Johnson, who were there, and Betty Ford and Pat Nixon, who weren’t.

There was, on this evening at Lovejoy, a certain amount of history shock. Two of the dinner guests, old enough to remember the fights involving the women present and young enough to stand in some awe of their elders, exchanged glances that said, “What are we doing here? There must be some point to all this.”

First of all, the history. The place. You have to remember that former governor and then Sen. Herman Talmadge first took office in 1946 when his daddy, Gov. Eugene Talmadge, died. Young “Hummon,” as he was called, had no problem saying “never” to integration and railed against the “mongrelization of the races.” He was a shrewd politician, though, and later became friends with Martin Luther King Sr.

So it was no surprise that Eleanor Holmes Norton, the razor-sharp attorney who had picketed to desegregate barbershops and restaurants while in college at Antioch and later headed the Equal Employment Opportunities Commission, should shake her head a bit over where she found herself. Never, she said, would she have suspected she’d be having dinner at what was once Herman Talmadge’s house.

But the people chatting at Lovejoy plantation provided just as much history shock. Bella Abzug had led anti-war protests against Lyndon Johnson’s policies in Vietnam. And there was Johnson’s widow on the same stage with Abzug at the conference and later together in the Lovejoy parlor. Abzug had been fired in 1979 from her post as an unpaid White House adviser on women’s issues by Jimmy Carter after disagreeing with the boss’ economic policies. At the time, Rosalynn Carter said, “I supported Jimmy’s decision.”

And there was Eleanor Smeal, former National Organization for Women president, who had adamantly insisted that Carter wasn’t doing enough to try to push the equal-rights amendment and other items on feminists’ agenda.

Also thinking back in time was Mary King, one of the few whites who had worked with the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in its Atlanta office. Those young people thought that Lyndon Johnson never adequately protected civil-rights workers trying to register Southern black voters. And that Martin Luther King Jr. was too cautious.

Mary King also remembered her first reaction to Rosalynn’s husband, for whose Administration she later went to work. Told that the then-Gov. Carter, who was from Plains in southwest Georgia, had potential for national office, King had groaned. “Oh, no, I know southwest Georgia,” she recalled in her recent book, “Freedom Song.” She could still visualize the young girls in jail, the multitude of arrests of civil-rights workers in those rural counties.

And the moral of the story?

Perhaps it was simply that all these women could co-exist in the same parlor because most of them hadn’t been in power. After all, it wasn’t President Johnson or President Carter or Dr. King there but wives and widows. Most of the former officials present--Abzug, Norton, Mary King, former Education Secretary Shirley Hufstedler, for example--were just that, former officials.

I prefer to think that in the years since these women marched and risked careers and started revolutionizing the roles of women and men, more women have seen that they have more in common than not. They may have argued in the past, but now they understand that the issues that unite women, be they peace, poverty or political influence, can bring together women from a wide range of backgrounds. Certainly that was what Rosalynn Carter said she was trying to do--to show her friends in Plains that the women’s movement wasn’t far out, that it affected them all.

Or the message may have been pure politics. Eleanor Smeal was another one shaking her head in history shock. “Maybe,” she said as she put on her coat against Atlanta’s inhospitable cold, “maybe Ronald Reagan just brings us all together.”