An exhibit of Mississippi women proudly proclaims the accomplishments of Mississippi women through early June in the Faulkner room of the J.D. Williams Library at Ole Miss. Greg Johnson, curator of blues archives and assistant professor at Ole Miss, conducts an excellent tour of "In Her Own Words," and gives the history of Mississippi women and their contributions to daily Mississippi life.
Not proud or arrogant, these women were just your “everyday Mississippians doing their thing,” says Johnson.
Among the various cases exhibiting the success of women, is a case displaying a May 1944 issue of Mississippi Business Woman magazine promoting the interests of the state’s early working women.
Beside the magazine, Charm, a fashion magazine from New York, shows a color cover of a beautiful model of the stylish 1950’s, but it’s what’s inside the magazine that grabs your undivided attention--an article about a young woman working on the ever famous square in small town Oxford, Mississippi.
She, along with three other women, solely ran and operated every aspect of the Baker’s dress shop, from buying and selling clothes, bookkeeping, alterations, and cleaning. Pictures in the article exhibit women carrying out all the tasks necessary to keep a business successfully up and running.
A few cases over, however, resides a case containing the photographs of the famous Eudora Welty. As most know, Eudora Welty is most well known for her literary attributions to Mississippi, as well as American, literature.
Nonetheless, one single photograph in her book One Time, One Place epitomizes Mississippi women -- whether well known globally, nationally, or not known at all.
A picture of an African American woman, in her Sunday dress and church hat, laughing with a smile so wide, it almost won’t fit on her face. She has ecstasy, ambition, kindness, and power—a woman who not only could make a difference for herself, but a difference for the state of Mississippi and America.
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