Annabelle Walker oral history interview, September 24, 1999

Interviewed by Joyce Durand. The daughter of a college professor (and later, musician), Walker describes her childhood spent in college towns. She says that although she was highly intelligent, her parents “had in mind that I would be a teacher, or a librarian or a nurse. It just didn’t occur to them [for me] to be anything else." Majoring in speech therapy, Walker describes her experiences in beauty contests while at Louisiana State University. After getting engaged to the president of the student body, Walker says that she finished out her junior year at LSU and transferred to Georgia Washington University in Washington D.C. to be with her finance. After some moving around, Walker and her young family came to Atlanta, where she enrolled in Georgia State University’s Early Childhood Education Program. She says that it was through her sociology classes that she first learned about the Women’s Movement, and that her consciousness was raised immediately. She says, “At first, I began to notice how much women were put down…and discouraged from doing anything. But the constant demeaning of women really began to bother me.” She recounts that her marriage did not survive her newly-found feminism. Walker says that while she was studying Early Childhood Education, she became aware of sex-role stereotyping. She and a classmate, Ramona Frasher worked on a research project, and she recounts their work examining the roles of women in children’s textbooks. She says that although they had trouble publishing their findings, the findings were in fact very influential in forcing textbook publishers to take sexism out of their books. Walker says that she joined NOW because they “had a national structure and they… [were] middle-of-the-road enough…sort of the NAACP of the Women’s Movement.” She describes the issues that NOW focused on, such as the Weeks v Southern Bell discrimination case, and the discriminatory practices of the Salvation Army. As a member of NOW, she was asked to speak to various groups, and she recounts her experience at Westminster school in Atlanta, where she spoke about sexism to the entire high school and faculty. Walker describes moving to New Orleans in 1972, shortly after her divorce. She says that within six months of her move, she was president of the local chapter of NOW, and co-coordinator of the Louisiana ERA Coalition. She recounts the many demonstrations and rallies she attended, including “the wedding dress incident,” which involved her wearing a wedding dress with a hooped skirt to the Louisiana legislature, and carrying a sign that said “equal partnership in marriage.” The incident was recounted later in a Time magazine article which examined the different approaches taken by northern and southern feminists. Walker says that her activism waned after she started Law School: “I kind of dropped my activism and wasn’t active any more. It would take an issue to bring it back to life, I suppose. From then on, you see, you could battle individual cases of discrimination through laws that we had passed, or through organizational efforts. Because once feminism became accepted, it was no longer acceptable to be sexist anymore than it was acceptable to be racist…Because of a movement, we didn’t need the movement anymore.”