What Deborah Clubb Has Achieved

For decades, the head of the Memphis Area Women’s Council and Women of Achievement has brought attention to this city’s needs.

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Memphis has no shortage of heroes. The proof is in a long list of women who have, over the past 40 years, earned the distinction of being named Women of Achievement. It’s a distinction that, so far, has gone to 278 individuals and organizations who have shaped and defined the region.

Even as the Women of Achievement awards have honored the women who inspire our lives, it has also inspired efforts to remedy the situations where women have been marginalized. One such organization is the Memphis Area Women’s Council, which turns 20 this year.

Both groups are not only celebrating significant anniversaries but share leadership — Deborah Clubb has been with both since their beginnings.

On Saturday, October 19th, a cocktail party on the rooftop at Playhouse on the Square will celebrate the anniversaries of Women of Achievement and the Memphis Area Women’s Council. The event will recognize the organizations that continue to work for inclusion, advocacy, and recognition of notable local women. It will also honor the ongoing collaborations that helped launch the organizations and that have nurtured them through the decades.

The idea for Women of Achievement came to Clubb when she was a reporter for The Commercial Appeal. She noted that awards events she covered were plentiful — and mostly honored men. Women were making their mark in government and civic organizations, but weren’t getting the kind of public recognition for their efforts that men routinely received.

Clubb met with community organizer Jeanne Dreifus to share ideas, and they connected with Judy Card at the Memphis Public Library to work on the details. What they came up with is how it’s still done today — honoring notable women in the categories of Initiative, Heroism, Determination, Courage, Vision, and Steadfastness, as well as Heritage, a classification for women from the past.

Twenty years after Women of Achievement came into being, Clubb was approached for another project. She cites a 2000 report based on census data that was crucial to starting what would become the Memphis Area Women’s Council. “We were supposed to be in the new century,” she says, “but everything in that report was terrible. The healthcare access was awful. Women’s health was terrible, their education levels were critical. They weren’t voting. We’d passed all the laws and marched in the Seventies — so what was up?”

Several individuals were meeting to find ways to take action. Barbara Ellen Smith was director of the Women’s Studies Program as well as director of the Center for Research on Women at the University of Memphis. And Ruby Bright was then the new executive director of the Women’s Foundation for a Greater Memphis. Other key individuals who would make up the founding board of MAWC included Phyllis Betts, Mary Durham, Naomi Dyson, Nancy Hardt, Happy Jones, and Malrie Shelton.

“Memphis is a conservative community, despite our civil rights history. This is not a town that likes protests and rallies and loud speak-outs. We have to figure out how to work within what people are willing to do and how they’re willing to engage.” — Deborah Clubb

“Instead of trying to just immediately go after one thing or another,” Clubb says, “they decided that what was missing in Memphis was a place where the voice of women — and our presence in the policy discussions and at the table and the city council — would be fostered and would be regularly tended to.”

It was a time when some of the most effective women’s voices were leaving elected positions, such as Carolyn Gates, Pat Vander Schaaf, and Maxine Smith. “Those warriors who came up out of the Seventies and had done things had gradually dropped off and they hadn’t been replaced by other women,” says Clubb. “So, our voice as female citizens was not being heard in those legislative chambers. We weren’t being appointed to the boards that the mayors have access to.”

What the city needed was an organization that would serve as that voice, advocating for strategic action. The idea that developed in late 2003 was for the U of M’s Center for Research on Women to identify problems and work with MAWC to develop strategies to solve those issues.

In 2004, Clubb had left The Commercial Appeal. She’d been contemplating stepping away from the field of journalism: “I thought about doing something full-out for women,” she says. “I was ready to stop trying to be objective all the time, balanced, and neutral.” It is said that timing is everything, and it turned out that she was the right person for the job. She was soon hired as executive director and continues that role to this day along with shepherding Women of Achievement.

From the beginning, MAWC has kept its focus on particular issues. An initial summit came up with targeting health, education, and economic equity. Particular areas included ending corporal punishment, improving pay for educators, and facing domestic violence.

Another area was particularly challenging: evaluating the qualifications of judges. The Commercial Appeal had reported on the Memphis Bar Association’s judicial qualifications survey of local attorneys. (The nonprofit Just City currently has its Court Watch initiative that has volunteers who observe and report on what goes on in local criminal courtrooms.)

“In the next 20 years I hope and pray we will see women of every age and stage get engaged in that recovery. We have lost critical rights to our own health decisions. In personal settings and in some communities, that, unfortunately, could really change how women are treated in other ways because there’s a diminishing of our personhood. If I can’t even say what I’m going to do with me, then how can I have a voice for we? — Deborah Clubb

Looming large in the aims of MAWC was establishing a court to handle domestic violence issues. “That’s one of the things that we achieved,” Clubb says. “We helped get General Sessions Court Division 10 and it was created to be just for DV charges.”

The work that went into that reflects how MAWC has approached so many of its initiatives. “We have strategies and committees and work with other groups to help us speak up about things,” Clubb says. “Collaborating is really the key to the Women’s Council because we want to be a voice for all kinds of women here.”

The Women’s Council has spoken out on issues such as a living wage, workplace harassment, and the rape kit backlog. The latter has meant a lot to MAWC because it has been so collaborative. The task force was involved with the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, the Memphis Police Department, and the Shelby County District Attorney’s office as well as the city mayor’s staff and crime victim center from the county. “It’s all of us at the same time trying to change the experience of rape victims here,” Clubb says.

The group has recurring programs and events as well. What is probably best known is the annual Walk a Mile in Her Shoes men’s march to reduce rape, sexual assault, and gender violence. It also has the Memphis Says NO MORE campaign to bring awareness of domestic violence and sexual assault, DV Victims in the Workplace that offers training to employers, and the monthly WomenTalk forums.

While the past years of work have done much to elevate the awareness of women’s issues and establish a level of community involvement, Clubb says that there is never a time when it’s okay to sit back and declare that all is well.

“In the next 20 years I hope and pray we will see women of every age and stage get engaged in that recovery,” Clubb says. “We have lost critical rights to our own health decisions. In personal settings and in some communities, that, unfortunately, could really change how women are treated in other ways because there’s a diminishing of our personhood. If I can’t even say what I’m going to do with me, then how can I have a voice for we?

“A few years ago, I might’ve had a different answer because we were in a little bit more of a progressive time,” she continues. “But the Dobbs decision — the sense that we are in danger all the time, that at any moment even a local jurisdiction could come up with something that freely takes away our freedoms — it’s just hanging out there. It’s taking away the willingness to be active, but thankfully it’s also aggravating, annoying, and firing up some other people. I hope to see women my age and younger come together to provide for ourselves and our daughters and granddaughters what we need in terms of opportunity, in terms of safety, in terms of self.”

So what tangible things can be done to help bring this about?

“Memphis is a conservative community, despite our civil rights history,” Clubb says. “This is not a town that likes protests and rallies and loud speak-outs. We have to figure out how to work within what people are willing to do and how they’re willing to engage.”

“The celebrations of Women of Achievement, where we look at what we have individually and collectively accomplished over the history of the whole community, help people realize that it is possible — even as one woman, even as an older person or Black person or an immigrant — to stand up and make things different and better. I hope that the Memphis Area Women’s Council or something like it can get together and think and holler and create and energize each other toward that better future.”

Clubb observes that some people say children are our future, but it’s crucial to remember that “children are present, they’re here right now watching and listening and learning, and now they’re learning to be afraid of even their own future because of the climate and national and international politics. They’re not immune to all that. I’m concerned that we keep all that going. Stay at it.”

For Clubb, the civics and politics of the future hold the key to progress in women’s issues. There is an ebb and flow of women officeholders, which shows the need for organizations that work to recruit candidates and provide practical assistance in how to run for office and how to make it work financially.

And if the election of 2016 was a shock and disappointment to many, it also steeled the resolve of women interested in participating in the political process. Clubb acknowledges that before the election that year of Donald Trump, she took too much for granted.

“I had believed we were working in an environment where the nation understood the value of all of us engaging in building and furthering our communities, our society, our culture, our systems,” she says. “So I never did check to see if anybody was enforcing all of that really well.” She realized that just because there’s a law doesn’t mean it will be well or properly applied.

For Clubb it’s always been about digging deeper to find solutions as well as connecting with the resources and people to manifest change.

“When I got to Memphis in 1978, I was lucky to find the then-new organization called Network,” she says. “It was a safe, supportive space for all of us in male-dominated professions and workplaces, and all of us were trying to make the world more equitable. The objective was sisterhood, to share our challenges and to cheer for one another.

“That’s where I found Happy Jones, Helen Denton, Karen Shea, Mary Robinson, Jocie Wurzburg, Donna Sue Shannon, Carol Lynn Yellin — and from them the essential link to Jeanne Dreifus, Judy Card, Patricia Howard, Barbara Ellen Smith, Phyllis Betts, and other determined, inspiring women who also knew Memphis and knew how to get things done here.Too many are gone now, but I am fortunate to collaborate still with organizing dynamos like Bettye Boone and Peg Watkins and to have had Judy’s support and friendship for 40 years.”

Advocacy requires constant effort. “Traditional systems push back, and many women don’t have time to participate in efforts for change,” Clubb says. “Our current circumstances that leave women’s lives literally at risk with loss of reproductive healthcare have made some take a closer look at how important it is to unite, to speak up, to speak out, to protect ourselves from restrictions and control and oppression.”

And now, in 2024, even after 40 years of honoring dynamic women and 20 years of activism, there are still challenges, particularly at every electoral stage.

“The danger is within our state legislature, not only at the federal or Supreme Court level,” Clubb says.

Clubb will always have her eye on the future as well. “After 40 years co-producing Memphis Women of Achievement and 20 years speaking up for the Memphis Area Women’s Council, my hope for the next 20 years is that women and girls continue to speak up and speak out — despite apathy, ignorance, or inertia around them — to strive for lasting change that lets everyone do and be all that she chooses. And that women here continue to make, find, and preserve the stories of our achievements, our part in the history of our communities.”