- Collection:
- Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Archives
- Title:
- Cahill talks about women in prison (2:26)
- Creator:
- Cahill, Jeanne Taylor, 1932-
- Contributor to Resource:
- Van Tilborg, Dana
- Publisher:
- Atlanta, Ga. : Georgia State University Library
- Date of Original:
- 1995-12-01
- Subject:
- Feminism
Social movements
Women's studies - Location:
- United States, Georgia, Bacon County, 31.55367, -82.45269
United States, Georgia, Bacon County, Alma, 31.53937, -82.46236 - Medium:
- audiocassettes
- Type:
- Sound
- Format:
- audio/mpeg
- Description:
- Norma Jeanne Taylor, civic activist and businesswoman, was born in Alma, Georgia in 1932. She graduated from Bacon County (GA) High School in 1949, and attended Berry College (Rome, GA), 1949-1951. She went on to attend Jacksonville Jr. and Massey Business Colleges in Jacksonville, Florida (graduating in 1953), and studied business law and elementary psychology at the University of Georgia, Waycross Center, 1957-1958. Jeanne married Al (William Alpheus) Cahill in 1959. She worked as Industrial News editor with the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, 1962-1965, and then with various family businesses until 1972, when she became president of Cahill Properties, Inc., a company specializing in land development and real estate. Appointed in 1972 to the Georgia Commission on the Status of Women, Cahill became chair in 1973, and in 1974 she became the Commission's first and only paid executive director. The position was funded for one year only. She was appointed to the White House Conference on Families in 1979, was a member of the Georgia Coordinating Committee for the Observance of International Women's Year, and was also a member of the board of directors of ERA Georgia, Inc. Active in Democratic politics, Cahill supported Jimmy Carter in both gubernatorial and presidential races and served as a delegate to the 1974 and 1978 Democratic National Conventions. In 1975-1976, she campaigned for a seat in the state House of Representatives, but was unsuccessful in her bid against incumbent Ken Nix. Founder and CEO of Advanced Fitness Systems, 1981-1994, Cahill was also president of the Buckhead Business Association, 1994, vice president of the Epilepsy Foundation of America, 1982-1994, and in 1995 was vice president of the Georgia Student Finance Commission. Cahill has been involved in many civic organizations, including the Georgia Federation of Women's Clubs, the Cobb County (GA) Symphony, N.W. Georgia Girl Scout Council and Leadership Atlanta.
Jeanne Cahill's oral history provides great insight into the life of a young girl in post-war America. She describes her childhood in South Georgia, and discusses her own and her parents' expectations for her life. She recalls how she became involved in the women's movement and what the women's movement meant to her. Cahill also discusses many other important social issues such as rape, hiring quotas, reproductive freedom and equal pay. Cahill was very active in working toward the better treatment of female prisoners in Georgia and she recounts her efforts in great detail. She also provides a rich description of the goals of the women's movement in Georgia, the leaders of the movement, and also some of the biggest obstacles these women faced in attempting to achieve their goals.
Transcript of this excerpt: JC: Another area that we worked on and spent a lot of time on, thanks to Rosalyn Carter was women in prison in Georgia. That turned out to be just a real scandal. They were in a horrible building on the grounds of the Georgia State Mental Facility at Milledgeville in -- one of the buildings was so substandard they didn't put mental[ly ill] patients there anymore. When it rained the women had buckets and pans all over their beds and rooms because it just poured through the ceiling. We got them moved from that building into a better building. We got volunteer teachers to come from colleges around the area to offer classes for them. We got volunteer doctors and nurses from Grady [Memorial Hospital] to go down there and take samples of medicines, drugs, and so on, and start[ed] giving them some decent medical care and giving all of them checkups because some of them said [that] they'd been there three or four years [and] had never seen a doctor because they hadn't been sick. So they weren't getting any kind of medical preventative health care. We found out that they were being given lots and lots of Valium -- that's what the medical people discovered. Later, we went down there. And when we were talking to the legislators about the fact that those women needed some training so they could get jobs when they got out, they said, "Well, you know, we've offered a few things to them and all they want to do is sit around and sleep and watch TV." When we found out how much Valium was being given out we thought, "No wonder!" You know, I don't even know how they could wake up to go to work. And they worked in the mental hospital, in the laundry and the food service and housekeeping and so on. So they really were a free work force to help run that huge mental hospital. Of course, Jimmy Carter [as governor] broke up that big hospital and did more community-based things. We tried to stop the building of the new facility, which was called Hardwick, which is also in Milledgeville, but we were told that contracts had already been signed and the state would be sued if they didn't proceed with it. We said it shouldn't be [built] down there in the boondocks, that most of these women were from Atlanta, [area and a] large number of them- had families; they had children here [in Atlanta], there was no public transportation for families to visit down there [Hardwick]. So we really wanted to block that construction, but we were not able to do that. They said, "Well, it could be used for some other facility -- we'll go ahead and build it and put the women there for a time," but of course, they're still there and this is a lot of years later. That issue occupied a great deal of our time and attention, and we felt good about the changes we were able to make. - Metadata URL:
- http://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/coles/id/2080
- IIIF manifest:
- https://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/iiif/2/coles:2080/manifest.json
- Language:
- eng
- Additional Rights Information:
- Copyright to this item is owned by Georgia State University Library. Georgia State University Library has made this item available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International License. For more information, see https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
- Extent:
- 32 pages (one audio cassette)
- Original Collection:
- Georgia Women's Movement Project Collection
Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Archives - Holding Institution:
- Georgia State University. Special Collections
- Rights:
-
