- Collection:
- Oral Histories of the American South: The Civil Rights Movement
- Title:
- Oral history interview with Willie Snow Ethridge, December 15, 1975
- Creator:
- Ethridge, Willie Snow
- Contributor to Resource:
- Kessler, Lee, 1947?-
Ethridge, Mark F. (Mark Foster), 1896-1981
Southern Oral History Program - Date of Original:
- 1975-12-15
- Subject:
- Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching
Women writers--Southern States
Women civil rights workers--Georgia
Women journalists--Georgia
Women authors
Women journalists--Southern States
Women authors--Attitudes
Macon (Ga.)--Social life and customs - People:
- Ethridge, Willie Snow
Ethridge, Mark F. (Mark Foster), 1896-1981 - Location:
- United States, Georgia, Bibb County, Macon, 32.84069, -83.6324
United States, Southern States, 33.346678, -84.119434 - Medium:
- transcripts
sound recordings
oral histories (literary works) - Type:
- Text
Sound - Format:
- text/html
text/xml
audio/mpeg - Description:
- Willie Snow Ethridge was born in Georgia at the turn of the twentieth century. By the early 1920s, she had become a successful writer and had married Mark Ethridge, also a writer and newspaper editor. Ethridge explains that she initially became a writer in order to learn more about the career of her husband-to-be. When he was in Europe during World War I, Ethridge studied journalism at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia. Shortly after graduating, Ethridge began to work as a reporter and continued to do freelance writing after getting married and starting her family in 1921. Ethridge spent most of the 1920s and early 1930s in Georgia, with brief sojourns in New York City and Washington, D.C. By the end of the 1930s, she and her husband had settled in Louisville, Kentucky (they later moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina). During those years, Ethridge began to write books, ranging from informal essays to fiction to travel guides. According to Ethridge, her husband was generally supportive, if not encouraging, of her career over the years. In addition to discussing her efforts to combine career and family, Ethridge also offers revealing commentary about race and gender. During the 1920s and 1930s, Ethridge was actively involved in the anti-lynching movement. Working primarily within the Association of Southern Women for the Prevention of Lynching, Ethridge both wrote and spoke about lynching and its implications for African Americans and poor whites. In addition, Ethridge explains how her mother hoped she would grow up to be a "good Baptist girl," and she discusses what it was like to court young men while coming of age in a strict religious family in the South. Of particular interest are her comments regarding the lack of sexual knowledge she had while growing up. Her discussion of attitudes towards sex leads her to ruminate about the feminist movement and the sexual revolution, both at their height at the time of the interview in 1975. Despite her advocacy of women's right to have both career and family, Ethridge concludes the interview by describing her general disapproval of the growing tendency of men and women to live together and have sex outside of marriage during those years.
The Civil Rights Digital Library received support from a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to the University of Georgia by the Institute of Museum and Library Services for the aggregation and enhancement of partner metadata. - Metadata URL:
- http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/G-0024/menu.html
- Language:
- eng
- Extent:
- Title from menu page (viewed on November 4, 2008).
Interview participants: Willie Snow Ethridge, interviewee; Mark Ethridge, interviewee; Lee Kessler, interviewer.
Duration: 01:35:15.
This electronic edition is part of the UNC-Chapel Hill digital library, Documenting the American South. It is a part of the collection Oral histories of the American South.
Text encoded by Jennifer Joyner. Sound recordings digitized by Aaron Smithers. - Contributing Institution:
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Documenting the American South (Project)
- Rights:
-
