Women in Public Life, (18 July 1960) Accra, Ghana

“Women in Public Life,” delivered July 18, 1960, Hedgeman, Anna Arnold. (1899-1990)

This copy-text was derived from the “Women in Public Life” speech file in the Anna Arnold Hedgeman Papers, National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center, Wilberforce, OH. (=A)

Paragraph structure has been retained from the document in the Hedgeman Papers and paragraph numbers have been added in brackets.

At times, there were multiple spaces between sentences which have been removed to make the text more readable. Hyphens that functioned as dashes were made into em dashes (—) for clarity and ease of reading.

We have maintained Hedgeman’s spelling in a number of places (i.e., “organisations,” “sufferage,” “apologise,” “practiced,” “for ever”) to best preserve her voice.

We have also maintained grammatical discrepancies from the text such as instances where the period was typed outside the quotation marks (i.e., ‘President’.) or misplaced periods in acronyms (i.e., “P.T.As.”).

In efforts to keep the speech text authentic, we kept the single quotation format instead of using the standard double quotation marks. There is one exception where Hedgeman uses double quotations in paragraph 5.

Two small edits were made to the speech text where the error was obvious and could be easily fixed for accuracy and ease of reading. The number corresponds to the paragraph in which the error occurred:

6: “nothave” became “not have”

6: “Terrel” became “Terrell”

6: An end quote was added at the end of, ‘I make it so!’

7: An end quote was added at the end of, ‘If you’s a teacher I’s gonna trust you!’

This transcript has been proofread for accuracy by Garth Pauley, Elisabeth Stevens, and Skye de Saint Felix.