"A share of honour"

the long version

"Three years ago [i.e., in 1982], Lynda Johnson Robb launched the Virginia Women's Cultural History Project. She was joined by Helen Bradshaw Byrd and twenty-three other board members, all committed to organizing an unprecedented undertaking: a state-wide endeavor to uncover and to document the exciting and fascinating history of Virginia's women. The focal point of this commitment [...] is the exhibition 'A share of honour' : Virginia women 1600-1945 and its accompanying catalogue. What no one could have predicted [...] was the scope and diversity of activities which the project would come to encompass. [...] At this particular point in human development, whether in the Western Hemisphere or elsewhere, the moment has arrived to recognize that women should and can have only one place in society: that of absolute equality. This conclusion is based on the realization that--not only biologically but also spiritually and socially--women have provided the continuity, indeed the very base, upon which humanity has evolved in the past and continues today to strive toward a better future. Why it has taken this long for us to acknowledge and appreciate the important role played by our mothers, wives, and sisters, and by their forebears, seems an unfathomable riddle. [...] What both the exhibition and this book do accomplish is to affirm the faith, courage, self-abnegation, resourcefulness, devotion, creativity, social grace, and civic conscience that have characterized generations of women in Virginia"--p. ix, xix.