Riddle talks about white women's relationship with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (3:45)
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@ Georgia State University
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Mary Riddle was born in 1949 in Etowah, Tennessee. Her family later settled in Dalton, Georgia. She attended Mercer University in Macon and, after moving to Atlanta in 1970, attended Georgia State University on a part-time basis. She received her BA in English in 1975, and her Law degree in 1988. Riddle has been a proofreader for the Office of General Counsel (1973-1974), served on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (1976-1985), and since 1990, has been an attorney, drafting bills for the Office of Legislative Counsel. Riddle began her involvement in the Women's Movement by joining Georgians for the Equal Rights Amendment (GERA). She then joined NOW, which she served in a number of ways: She was executive vice president of Atlanta NOW and member of DeKalb NOW, and recorder/archivist for Georgia NOW after the defeat of the ERA. In 1983 she was voted Feminist of the Year by Atlanta NOW. Along with Janet Paulk, she was co-coordinator for ERA for the Universalist Unitarian Congregation of Atlanta.Riddle recounts a childhood in which she and her family moved around a great deal. She says that her earliest feminist activity was to run for a high school office, with the slogan, "Not the best man for the job, the best candidate." She remembers becoming very interested in feminism in the early 1970s, at which time, while working and studying in Atlanta, she read Betty Friedan's Feminine Mystique, and the newly circulating Ms magazine. Riddle states that her work proofreading for the Legislative...
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Paulk, Janet, 1932
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