Campus News

Women’s rights center to be rededicated during Women’s History Month

The rededication of the Lucy Hargrett Draper Center and Archives for the Study of the Rights of Women in History and the Law will kick off a slate of activities at the UGA Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library to commemorate Women’s History Month.

Toby Graham, university librarian and associate provost, and Lucy Hargrett Draper will make remarks at the March 5 ceremony, which begins at 1 p.m. in the Gallery Hallway of the Richard B. Russell Building Special Collections Libraries.

A reception will follow, as will tours of the annual exhibit of materials from the collection. The exhibit uses rare books and archival materials, photographs and propaganda to examine the changing world of women from 1632 when the first treatise on women’s legal status and rights was published, to the 19th and early 20th centuries in the U.S. and Great Britain, a period of major social transformation.

The transformation can be illustrated by A Vindication of the Rights of Women, a rare book from the collection. Written in 1792 by Mary Wollstonecraft, the book argued, to considerable controversy, that the educational system of the time deliberately trained women to be frivolous and incapable.