Eudora Woolfolk Ramsay Richardson

Eudora Ramsay Richardson (August 13, 1891 – October 6, 1973) was an American women's suffrage activist, lecturer and writer. She may be best known as the Virginia director for the Federal Writers' Project, which with her as editor in 1940 published two often-republished volumes Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion and The Negro in Virginia.

Early and family life

Born in Versailles, Kentucky, the hometown of her mother, the former Eudora Woolfolk. Her father, Rev. David Marshall Ramsay (1857-1957), was a Baptist minister and soon accepted a position at Citadel Square Baptist Church in Charleston, South Carolina, where Eudora grew up. Her father was the only surviving son of his father (who himself survived two wives and was prominent in the Lickville Presbyterian Church in Greenville County, South Carolina. In 1907, Rev. Ramsay accepted a position at Grace Street Baptist Church in Richmond, Virginia, and moved his family to Virginia's capital city. Eudora was educated at Hollins Institute (now Hollins University) in Virginia, from which she graduated in 1910, and then at Richmond's Westhampton College (later part of the Baptist-founded University of Richmond), from which she graduated in 1911. In her 1911 college yearbook, The Spider Ramsay was described as "just a few years ahead of her time" on the issue of women's suffrage.

Death and legacy

Richardson survived her husband by nearly a decade. She died of a stroke in Richmond on October 6, 1973, and was buried beside her husband in the family plot in Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond, In 2018 the Virginia Capitol Foundation announced that Richardson's name would be included on the Virginia Women's Monument's glass Wall of Honor.

Works written or edited by Eudora R. Richardson The Case of Women's Colleges in the South (Durham, N.C. 1930) Little Aleck: A Life of Alexander H. Stephens (Bobbs-Merrill Company, Grosset & Dunlope, 1932) The Woman Speaker: A Hand-Book and Study Course on Public Speaking (Whittet and Shepperson, 1936) The Influence of Men -- Incurable (1936) Virginia: A Guide to the Old Dominion (Oxford University Press, 1940) The Negro in Virginia (Hastings House, New York, 1940)