Helen Matthews Lewis: Living Social Justice in Appalachia

Chapter 1: The Making of an Unruly Woman, 1924–1955

CHAPTER 1 The Making of an UnrulyWoman, 1924–1955 Judith Jennings I had a grandmother who loved to argue with preachers. She was Scotch Presbyterian, as she said, and she loved the Baptist preachers to come to the house so she could argue with them about predestination.And I see myself as I get older being more like this grandmother, who speaks back at things and won’t shut up and says the wrong thing at the wrong time. —Helen Matthews Lewis, quoted in Lori Briscoe et al.,“UnrulyWoman: An Interview with Helen Lewis” Helen Matthews Lewis grew up, attended college, became a social justice activist, and married in Georgia. She both loved and worked to change the land-based society that shaped her formative years.As she learned and developed , Georgia developed and changed, too. Urban growth and rural poverty, populism and progressivism, religious conservatism and religious radicalism, racial hatred and racial justice, traditional gender roles and new opportunities for women, galvanized her and her home state from the mid-1920s through the mid-1950s. Helen’s roots inGeorgia run deep and shape many of her lifelong views and values.She grew up knowing that two of her great-grandfathers fought for the Confederacy during the Civil War. She saw how Georgia, like other southern states, enforced a rigid system of segregation, denying African American citizens their basic rights to vote, own property, and gain high-quality education. As a child, Helen recognized the power of racism. While still a young girl, she witnessed her father’s kindness and respect for a Negro neighbor, but she also witnessed the effects of a memorable incidence of racially inspired community violence. The Making of an UnrulyWoman, 1924–1955 13 Growing up in rural Georgia meant that she understood rural poverty. Although her family was not poor, the town where she lived did not yet have a public water system or electricity. By the late 1920s, when she was a girl, the boll weevil had decimated the state’s cotton economy, forcing many farmers to become tenants or sharecroppers. Many rural Georgians experienced structural poverty long before the Great Depression, which deepened, rather than caused, the economic inequality she critiqued as a young college student. She also became keenly aware of the role of women and saw how women could claim power in a male-dominated society and how they could be punished for what were considered social transgressions. One grandmother, Mary Ida Dailey Matthews, the Scotch Presbyterian who argued with Baptist ministers, chopped down a family member’s moonshine still. Another grandmother , Jane Victoria Harris, birthed a daughter without being married and lived the rest of her life in isolation and denial. Despite,orperhapsbecauseof,MaryIda’sargumentativePresbyterianism, Helen became more concerned with the power of religion to advance social justice rather than becoming attached to a particular denomination or doctrine . In 1941 Helen enrolled in Bessie Tift College, a private Baptist women’s school in Forsyth. There, she heard Clarence Jordan preach his Cotton Patch Gospels. A homegrown social justice activist and Baptist theologian, Jordan taught economic justice and racial reconciliation by retelling New Testament scriptures in “Cotton Patch” versions, using language and settings familiar to rural listeners. Forty-seven years later, Helen vividly recalls the transformative impact Jordan’s social justice gospel stories had on her. While Helen studied at Bessie Tift, the United States entered World War II. As in other historical time periods, war accelerated the economic, social, and cultural changes already under way.Thousands of women went to work in greater numbers than ever before as men entered the armed services.Women also joined the armed services, swelling the numbers of WACs and WAVES. Although federal spending on the war effort began to end the Depression nationwide , Helen no longer had the financial resources she needed to continue her college studies and temporarily left school in 1942. In 1943, Helen enrolled in Georgia State College for Women (GSCW), a public four-year liberal arts institution. Many of her teachers had been suffragettes , helping to win women’s right to vote in 1920. At GSCW, Helen learned that women could be leaders. She worked with her classmate Mary Flannery O’Connor on the 1945 yearbook and became the yearbook editor in 1946. 14 Helen Matthews Lewis Helen also became an activist, speaking out against economic injustice and joining the Young Women’s Christian Association...