- Collection:
- Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women's Movement Archives
- Title:
- Gibson-Ferrey talks about the Commission on the Status of Women (2:50)
- Creator:
- Gibson-Ferrey, Dorothy, 1917-
- Contributor to Resource:
- Van Tilborg, Dana
- Publisher:
- Atlanta, Ga. : Georgia State University Library
- Date of Original:
- 1996-05-09
- Subject:
- Feminism
Social movements
Women's studies - Location:
- United States, Connecticut, 41.66704, -72.66648
United States, Georgia, 32.75042, -83.50018 - Medium:
- audiocassettes
- Type:
- Sound
- Format:
- audio/mpeg
- Description:
- Dorothy Wiggins Gibson-Ferrey was born in New London, Connecticut in 1917. She attended Southern Seminary (Buena Vista, VA), then moved to California with her mother and brother. Graduating from the University of San Diego, she married her first husband -- a salesman for Coca Cola. The couple lived in California and Texas before settling in Atlanta. In 1972, while Jimmy Carter was governor of Georgia, Gibson-Ferrey was elected as the first chair of the Georgia Commission on the Status of Women, having served on the board of the Fulton County Department of Children and Youth and the Georgia Committee on Crime and Delinquency. She was a member of Mayor Andrew Young's Civilian Review Board from 1986 to 1989, and also served as a board member of the Council on Battered Women.
Dorothy Wiggins Gibson-Ferry begins her oral history with a fascinating account of life in interwar New England. Her father was a painter, her mother an early English Suffragette, and her family interacted actors, artists, and writers. Gibson-Ferry says that she became politically active in 1973: After volunteering for the Georgia Department of Family and Children Services for a number of years, she was asked to serve as the first chairperson for the Governor's Commission on the Status of Women. Gibson-Ferrey recounts some of the issues dealt with by the Commission, including sexual stereotyping in vocational training agencies, sexual discrimination in state government, and the poor conditions of women's prisons in Georgia. Gibson-Ferrey believes that one of the major successes of the Women's Movement is that women now have access to a greater choice of professional and executive careers. She feels however, that as a society, we still need to be concerned about poverty among elderly women, as well as women's education and health.
Transcript of this excerpt: DGF: I think it was '73, yes, when Carter became governor. He asked Jacqueline Lassiter, who was a friend of his and very knowledgeable in the state, if she would draw up a list of women to serve on his Commission on the Status of Women, which was enacted by the legislature. But it was up to the governor at that time to choose the women. And so she gave him a list of women and eventually we got organized and I was the first chairperson of the Commission. And then -- it was really wonderful because he got an appropriation for us, so we were able to have an office, and a director, and a secretary, and we were able to take trips and do some things that we wouldn't have been able to do otherwise. I remember once going around with Jeanne Cahill, who at the time was the executive director: We took a state plane and went around to vocational schools. We were looking at how courses in those vocational schools were presented as far as women were concerned, and were women ever being invited to train for instance, as landscape artists or even women that would eventually go into the U.S. Parks Service, those kinds of training. And we found mainly, you know, that women were being put into the usual [vocational training]; cosmetic, hairdressing. In fact, at one vocational school they had applications -- the women's application blanks were all in pink [laughter] and the fellows' in blue! It was just an eye opener. I feel that things have changed a lot. I don't think women are necessarily just going into what they call cosmetology courses anymore, I'm sure they're doing other things. Forestry; I know women are involved in that, training for that. And so I feel that we've moved ahead on those kinds of things. - External Identifiers:
- Metadata URL:
- http://digitalcollections.library.gsu.edu/cdm/ref/collection/coles/id/2112
- 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:
- 5 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:
-
