Georgia Women’s Movement Spring Event: “Recording The Reckoning”
The Georgia Women’s Movement Spring Event is held annually to highlight themes and materials in the Women’s Collections. This year’s event celebrates the remarkable collecting of activists, Lucy Hargrett Draper and Chrisy Erickson Strum. Together, Lucy and Chrisy have gathered and donated an extensive archives that documents the Women’s March and the movements and protests that have evolved as a result of the March. The donors will discuss their activism and their collecting. Lynee Gaillet and Jessica Rose, professors who have used the collections in their research and teaching will add their thoughts, and Graduate Research Assistant, Brigette McCoy will reflect on her experiences creating the new exhibit: “The Reckoning: Stand Up, Speak Out, Make Change.”
Wednesday, April 27, 5-6:30 pm
Special Collections and Archives
8th Floor, Library South
University Library
100 Decatur Street SE, Atlanta, GA 30303
The event will also be live-streamed on Vimeo: https://vimeo.com/event/2010267
Lucy Hargrett Draper
Activist, organizer, author and officer in national, state and local women’s rights organizations focused on economic, educational, and legal equality for women, Lucy Hargrett Draper holds advanced degrees in education, history, and law. She headed the first Atlanta NOW Speaker’s Bureau (1968-1971), founded West Point NOW (1973-1976), Kansas WEAL (1977), Georgia WEAL (1978), and the Georgia Coalition for the Rights of Women (1996), for which she authored the Georgia Women’s Bill of Rights.
Lucy spent her adult life identifying, collecting and preserving the record of women in the first and second women’s rights movements. Her collections include rare books, manuscripts, photographs, posters, ephemera, artifacts and memorabilia, which she has chosen to donate to public institutions.
Her materials, which document the roles of the unsung heroines of the two U.S. women’s rights movements, are being made available for scholarly research. To preserve this record, she established three collections. In 1995, Lucy proposed the Georgia’s Women’s Movement Project at Georgia State University, where she established a collection and endowment entitled the Lucy H. Draper Federal Equal Rights Amendment Research Collection and Fund Endowment, housed in the Library’s Special Collections and Archives. In 2014, this was expanded, and is now known as Lucy Hargrett Draper Collections on Women’s Rights, Advocacy and the Law (1921-). At the University of Georgia’s Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library in 1996, she established the Lucy Hargrett Draper Center & Archives for the Study of the Rights of Women in History & Law (circa 1550-1920).
Chrisy Erickson Strum
Chrisy Erickson Strum was born in New Orleans in 1968 into a family of feminists and political activists at the height of the women’s rights, civil rights, environmental and anti-war movements. She and her sister were molded by their early participation in all four movements. Her aunt, Lucy Hargrett Draper, was an activist in both Georgia and national women’s rights and civil rights movements. In 1989, Chrisy, together with her grandmother, Aunt Lucy and Uncle Stephen, traveled by train to Washington, D.C. to join over 300,000 abortion rights activists, all dressed in white, for the Mobilize for Women’s Lives March. It was a day she’s never forgotten.
After earning her B.A. in Sociology in 1993 at the University of Georgia, she started working in Alumni & Development at Georgia State University as Pledge Manager & Matching Gifts Coordinator. After five years at GSU she returned to Savannah where she became Assistant Director of Development for SCAD, the Savannah College of Art & Design. While working in Development in the mid to late 90s, she became involved in archiving the Lucy
Hargrett Draper Collections established at UGA, GSU and later at West Point. In 2002 she left the university system and started working full time on her aunt’s Women’s Rights Collections. Chrisy, “The Girl in the Attic with the Boxes”, in partnership with her aunt, developed a methodology for archiving the treasures in these boxes that Lucy Draper collected over her decades of activism. Chrisy’s role as an independent archivist is non-traditional in that she works with a private individual, and not for an institution, museum or government agency. In addition to her role as an independent archivist, she researches and identifies enhancement materials to be added to her aunt’s Collections for purposes of exhibits and education.
Lynee Gaillet
Lynée Lewis Gaillet is Distinguished University Professor of Rhetoric and Composition, housed in the Georgia State University department of English. Her book projects include Scottish Rhetoric and Its Influence; Stories of Mentoring; The Present State of Scholarship in the History of Rhetoric; Primary Research and Writing: People, Places, and Spaces; and Remembering Differently: Re-figuring Women’s Rhetorical Work. She is a Past President of The Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, and a Past Executive Director of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association.
Jessica Rose
Dr. Jessica Rose is a Marion L. Brittain postdoctoral fellow at Georgia Tech’s School of Literature, Media, and Communication. She received her PhD in Rhetoric and Composition from Georgia State University. Her scholarship sits at the intersection of feminist and multimodal rhetorics, and primary research with an emphasis on the ways technology, modality, culture and communication overlap and are remembered. Archival methods and methodologies feature prominently in her scholarship and her pedagogy, which she ties to identity and rhetorical documentation. Her current publications include two co-authored chapters – “Archiving Our Own Historical Moments: Learning from Disrupted Public Memory” from the edited collection, Nineteenth Century American Activist Rhetorics, and “At Work in the Archives: Place-Based Research and Writing” published in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing, Volume 4.
BriGette McCoy
BriGette McCoy is a Veteran who served during the Gulf War era, and a 2020 Congressional Medal of Honor Community Service Medal recipient and Georgia State University Ph. D. student of Instructional Technologies; she also earned an MS in Instructional Design and MBA Certificate of Entrepreneurship. BriGette founded Women Veterans Social Justice Network, an all-volunteer network 501(c)(3), which is a nationally recognized, diverse, and inclusive organization known for honoring past and present military servicewomen and equipping them for advanced leadership in philanthropy, entrepreneurship, civic community engagement for personal economic expansion. Currently, BriGette is the Graduate Research Assistant working with GSU’s Women’s Collections, and has curated the exhibit, “The Reckoning: Stand Up, Speak Out, Make Change.”
