LAFF Society

NEWSLETTER

In Memoriam, November 2012

 

 

Joan Dunlop, a global leader on women’s issues whose work led to universal guidelines on a woman’s right to control her own body, died of breast cancer at her home in Connecticut on June 29. She was 78.

 
“To give the unborn child—I don’t care what stage of gestation they are—preference over the woman in whom parents, teachers, society, culture has deeply invested, and say that investment has less value than a bunch of cells, is to me an outrage,” she said in an oral history compiled by Smith College.
 
Ms. Dunlop was the first president of the International Women’s Health Coalition (IWHC), an advocacy group that supports more than 50 health projects in eight countries. She held the position for 14 years, until 1998, and successfully lobbied delegates from more than 180 countries attending a world conference on women’s issues in 1995 in Beijing to sign the guidelines on women’s rights her coalition had helped develop. 
 
A year earlier she led a group of colleagues at a meeting in London that wrote the “Women’s Declaration on Population”, which was adopted by the United Nations. It was the first international agreement on population policy to make women’s rights a central concern.
 
“When we say population policy,” she said in an interview at the time with The New York Times, “people think family planning, and we’re saying it’s far more than that.”
 
Brian Brink, chair of the board of the IWHC, said at her death, “Her endless energy, courage and extraordinary wisdom made her a force to be reckoned with as she secured significant and progressive victories for the sexual and reproductive health of women.” 
 
Ms. Dunlop, who was born in London, had an illegal abortion when she was a young woman, which helped shape her unremitting desire to improve women’s choices and roles. She was living in the United States when she took over the IWHC, then a small and underfunded organization. “I was furious about the Reagan Administration’s policy on abortion,” she said. “It was time to get into the trenches.”
 
She had worked at various jobs in England before coming to the United States. At first she worked at a Manhattan advertising agency but then was hired by the Ford Foundation to work on urban policy projects. She left to work in the budget office of New York City under Mayor John V. Lindsay and eventually became an adviser on population issues to John D. Rockefeller III, drawing on her work with Ford. Through Rockefeller she went to work for the Population Council, which he had founded in 1952 to provide scientific research on population questions. After a brief stint working for Vartan Gregorian at the New York Public Library she joined the IWHC.
 
Her interests in women’s rights had deepened to this point and, with promises of funding from Ford  and others, she left to develop the coalition, which at the time was a small organization funding scattered abortion training and health service projects in a few countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America. Under her leadership it became one of the pre-eminent international organizations in its field.
 
Beverly Levine, who worked at the Foundation in various positions from 1984 to 2003, died September 10 after a short illness. She was 76.
 
Beverly was as active in affairs in Ardsley, New York, the village in Westchester County where she lived, as she was committed to her work at Ford. The mayor of Ardsley, Peter Porcino, said of her at her memorial service, “There’s an old Woody Allen quote that says 80 percent of success is just showing up. Whenever you needed her, Beverly showed up.”
 
She had been on the village’s Board of Trustees for six years and was running for election to her fourth term. She was president of the Ardsley library and acting village historian. She helped implement a program, Nixle, that automatically connects all residents in an emergency. She served on the board of the Southern Westchester BOCES for 28 years, and was a member of the Ardsley Board of Education for six years. She also earned a master’s degree from New York University.
 
“She was a very tenacious woman who had very little tolerance for nonsense,” said the village manager George Calvi. But she had a whimsical side too: During a December meeting of the village board she suddenly began singing, “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas”. 
 
“I was always that kid whose mom worked at the high school,” said her son, Michael. “She was tough on us but always active in everything we did. After everyone in our family ran out of this great community, my mom refused to leave.”       
 
Karen McGruder, who was reference librarian at the Foundation from August 1995 to November 1996, died recently of breast cancer at the age of 54. Until two months before her death she was a reference and consulting librarian for the RAND Corporation in Washington, D.C.
 
Karen earned a bachelor’s degree from Wellesley College and a master of library science degree from Rutgers University, where she was a founding member of the Rutgers African-American Alumni Alliance.
 
Donations in her memory may be made to the American Cancer Society or Our Voices of Hope, an advocacy and support group in Washington, D.C., that helps raise awareness of metastatic breast cancer.

 

 

Members log in to comment