Featured Item: "We Love Lucy" Button
- Emily Erwin Jones, Delta State University
 "Lucy Somerville Howorth (1895-1997) always had a sense of history. As a lineal descendant of a family of strong "foremothers" and the daughter of a noted national suffrage leader, she grew up in the presence of remarkable women who were making and writing history long before her birth. Through her mother's leadership for suffrage and temperance Lucy Somerville developed a great admiration for leaders of the women's movement and social reform. Her early skill in parliamentary procedure, her acumen, and her quick appraisal of problems won for her leadership positions. Her good humor, southern charm, and femininity offset her candid and sometimes blunt demeanor, and thus she was nonthreatening as she pursued her agenda in politics or reform. One of the pioneer women lawyers in Mississippi after her graduation from the University of Mississippi Law School in 1922, she established a successful office and trial-law practice. Although she never held the position of judge in a court of law, she was appointed in 1927 as a commissioner of a federal district court giving her the honorary title "judge" and after that she was known affectionately more than legally as Judge Lucy even after she moved to Washington.
From the time Lucy returned to Mississippi until well past the age of ninety, Lucy remained a commanding presence throughout the American Association of University Women (AAUW). In 1973, Cora Norman, who received national recognition for her leadership in the Mississippi divisions of AAUW, began a national drive to establish an educational Foundation fellowship named for Lucy Howorth. Launched with the largest initial amount ever for a fund of its kind, the drive developed momentum as "We Love Lucy" buttons carried the message across the nation about her more than sixty years' affiliation with the AAUW. That affiliation had begun in New York City in 1918 when Howorth entered a door whose sign read "University Women's Club." She had joined as a member-at-large in 1923, before Mississippi had an AAUW organization and then she had joined the Jackson branch in 1928, a year after the state division was formed."
Excerpts taken from "Lucy Somerville Howorth: New Deal Lawyer, Politician, and Feminist from the South" by Dorothy S. Shawhan and Martha H. Swain.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
