GSU Women’s Collections Commemorate the Life of Dorothy Gibson-Ferrey
Donor and longtime friend to the University Library Women’s Collections, Dorothy Gibson-Ferrey passed away in late November, shortly after her 97th birthday.
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, Dorothy 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 donated her personal papers to the Women’s Collections’ Donna Novak Coles Georgia Women’s Movement Archives, and was interviewed for the Georgia Women’s Movement Oral History Project. An excerpt of the interview, in which she talks about her work with the Georgia Commission on Women, can be accessed here, or via the GSU Library’s Digital Collections. Along with her friend and fellow women’s rights activist, Margaret Miller Curtis, Dorothy Gibson-Ferrey co-established Our Mother’s Fund, an endowment that supports a graduate assistantship for a GSU student to work in the Special Collections Department with the Women’s Collections archivist. Honoring Dorothy’s commitment to women’s issues and to the University Library Women’s Collections, her family requested that in lieu of flowers, donations be made to Our Mother’s Fund.
We thank Dorothy for her commitment to making the lives of women and girls better, and we thank her family for reinforcing that commitment. To make a donation to Our Mother’s Fund, please contact Margaret Park Mathews at mpmathews@gsu.edu or 404-413-3487.