Interviewee: Lynn Carrigan
Interviewer: Franklin Abbott
Date of Interview: November 7, 2014
Extent: 53-page transcript
Biography:
Lynn Carrigan is a health educator, therapist, poet, and musician. The first of four children born to middle class parents in 1946, she moved to Atlanta from Seattle at a young age and resided with her family in southern DeKalb County. She attended Gordon High School, now Ronald E. McNair Middle School. Carrigan spent two years at Woman’s College of Georgia in Milledgeville but transferred to the University of Georgia where she studied journalism. Her life was upended by an unplanned pregnancy and her husband’s deployment to Vietnam, where he returned with significant mental health and addiction issues. The couple subsequently divorced. Carrigan’s college experiences included the civil rights and war protest movements. Her unplanned pregnancy led her to an interest in feminism and public health. After graduation, she once lobbied for the ERA in the Georgia legislature, one of four lobbyists who confronted 400 church-based anti-ERA lobbyists. This experience led her to leave Georgia and relocate to Seattle where she completed a social work degree at the University of Washington specializing in feminist therapy and family therapy. She worked in the fields of mental health, pain management, grief and loss counseling for many years, while raising a daughter. Additionally, Carrigan wrote poetry, played the guitar, painted, and made jewelry.
Abstract:
The interview conducted November 7, 2014, covers Carrigan’s life and career in Georgia and Washington state. She discusses her childhood experiences including her interests in playing softball and riding horses, and an eye opening high school field trip to observe a Ku Klux Klan rally. She speaks about her political awakening at the University of Georgia in the civil rights, antiwar, and feminist movements, her interest in public health grounded her unplanned pregnancy and the inability of women to obtain birth control, her lobbying for the ERA, and her subsequent decision to relocate to the state of Washington. She speaks about her marriages, miscarriages, and divorces and the challenges of raising a daughter as a single parent. Carrigan reflects on the many aspects of a lengthy career in mental health counseling, teaching, writing, and administration. Her diagnosis and treatment for breast cancer is explored at the end of the interview along with her interest in poetry, art, and music, and her spiritual interest in Buddhism, Taoism, and Sufism.
Interviewee: Jennifer Carroll
Interviewer: Terri Wilder
Date of Interview: June 6, 2008
Extent: 15 pages; 1 audio cassette; 1 compact disc
Biography:
Jennifer Carroll grew up in Lynchburg, Virginia before moving to Atlanta at the age of nineteen. She was diagnosed with HIV in 1990 and estimated at that time to have 4-9 years to live. Carroll owns a hair salon in South Georgia and uses her business as a platform to discuss her experiences, educate her clients, and give encouragement to others. She is involved with HIV education in schools, sharing her story with students and her community.
Abstract:
Jennifer Carroll begins her interview by talking about the unusual circumstances surrounding her HIV diagnosis in 1990. She explains that she was silent about the disease for almost a decade after her diagnosis. Her second husband encouraged her to speak out about her story and become a voice for the disease and others like her. She began by talking to clients at her hair salon about her story and found that it allowed a space for them to open up to her. She went on to become an HIV advocate and educator in her local school system, speaking out and connecting with people whenever she can. Carroll also talks about her experience with doctors and medications and the logistics of pregnancy and giving birth to a son, who is HIV negative.
Interviewee: Delores Crockett
Interviewer: Janet Paulk
Date of Interview: November 7, 2007
Extent: 2 audio cassettes; 2 compact discs; 56-page transcript
Biography:
Delores Loraine "Raine" Crockett is a retired civil servant who spent twenty-seven years working for the U.S. Women's Bureau before retiring in 2006. Born in Daytona Beach, FL , she grew up in public housing, and was raised in a close family that included a single mother, three grandparents, and godparents. Valedictorian of her high school class, Crockett left Florida in 1965 to attend Atlanta's Spelman College, where she majored in psychology and graduated at age twenty-one (1969). Subsequently, she married, gave birth to a daughter, and earned a graduate degree in Counseling (1972), and divorced. After working for a nonprofit and later for Avon products, she joined the Women's Bureau, part of the U.S. Department of Labor. Over the years, she held several positions, at one point overseeing an eight-state region, and at another time, living in Washington, D.C. while serving as Deputy Director. She returned to Atlanta in 2001 and ended her career as Field Operations Manager in charge of all the Bureau's regional offices.
Crockett is a Leadership Atlanta alum (1977), and past board member, and she has served on a number of boards and commissions, including the American Red Cross, Big Brothers/Big Sisters, the Georgia Commission on the Status of Women, and Georgia’s Employment and Training Council. She was also a member of Georgia’s delegation to the 1977 International Women’s Year Conference.
Abstract:
Crockett discusses her youth in Daytona Beach, Florida as part of a large extended family. She reminisces about her college years at Spelman, including student marches, the Black Power movement, and the death of Martin Luther King, Jr. In jobs she held with the nonprofit Minority Women's Empowerment Project and the for-profit Avon products, she recalls her work on economic issues facing women in the 1970s: job training, interview-writing, and preparation for job interviews, also the challenges involving childcare and elder care, issues that were also important during her years with the U.S. Women's Bureau. Crockett discusses the speeches she gave across the country advocating for women's employment in nontraditional jobs and the importance of retirement security. She reviewed legislation that became the Family and Medical Leave Act of 1993. The Women's Bureau endorsed the Equal Rights Amendment and Crockett recalls her attendance at the National Women's Conference in Houston in 1977 and her appointment to the Georgia Commission on the Status of Women by Governor George Busbee. She analyzes the reasons for the ERA's defeat.
Interviewee: Carolyn Curry
Interviewer: Morna Gerrard
Date of Interview: November 17, 2009
Extent: 1 DVD, 3:04:20; 77-page transcript
Transcript and audio
Interviewer: Morna Gerrard
Date of Interview: December 6, 2011
Extent: 44 pages; 1 DVD
Biography:
Born in Mobile, AL, in 1942, Carolyn Curry earned a B.A. in English from Agnes Scott College (1966), and an M.A. and Ph.D. in history at Georgia State University (1979; 1987). She has taught at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, Kentucky and the Westminster Schools in Atlanta, Georgia. Compelled by women’s stories shared with her during years of research and teaching, Curry founded Women Alone Together in Atlanta in 2002.
Curry has served on a number of boards and Councils, including The American Heart Association, Cardinal Hill Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky, and the Kentucky Heritage Council. She also served on the Board of Trustees of Young Harris College in Young Harris, Georgia and on the Advisory Council for Action Ministries of The United Methodist Church.
In 1993, Curry honored with the Smith-Breckenridge YWCA Distinguished Woman of Achievement Award in Kentucky. In 2011, she received the Georgia State University Distinguished Alumni Community Service Award, and in 2014, was recipient of the Agnes Scott College Distinguished Alumna Award – Service to the Community.
For more than 50 years, she has been married to Bill Curry, the former head football coach at Georgia Tech, the University of Alabama, the University of Kentucky, and Georgia State University.
Abstract, November 17, 2009:
In this interview, Carolyn Curry begins by discussing her family background, particularly her mother and grandmother, who were independent, opinionated women. She describes her own education--she attended Agnes Scott College for two years, then left when her husband, Bill, was drafted to play for the Green Bay Packers and she moved with him to Wisconsin. She resumed her studies at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin and eventually returned to finish her undergraduate degree at Agnes Scott. Over the next several years, Curry gave birth to two children and Bill was traded to the Baltimore Colts; the Curry family divided their time between Baltimore and Atlanta. Curry earned a master's degree and a Ph.D. in history at Georgia State University. Curry discusses her dissertation, a biography of Civil War diarist and feminist Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas. She also talks about the role of feminism in her life and the lives of the women she has known, including discussions of the Equal Rights Amendment, gender dynamics in marriages, and trends she has witnessed in academia. Curry talks at length about her husband's career in football playing, coaching, and broadcasting, including the effect that moving frequently had on her and her children. She talks about her work teaching history in various locales, and about how seeing a close friend's husband die suddenly inspired her to found the nonprofit organization Women Alone Together, which supports women who are alone because of the death of a spouse, divorce, single by choice, or alone in a marriage because of separation or estrangement.
Special Collections and Archives
Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Archives
Lucy Hargrett Draper Collections on Women's Rights, Advocacy, and the Law
Archives for Research on Women
Phone: (404) 413-2880
E-Mail: archives@gsu.edu
Mailing Address:
Special Collections & Archives
Georgia State University Library
100 Decatur Street, SE
Atlanta, Georgia 30303-3202
In Person:
Library South, 8th floor
