THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT
June Zeitlin
“My life’s work is my hobby.”
Interviewed by Judy Waxman, Oral Historian, March 2024
JW: June, would you please tell us your full name and when and where you were born?
JZ: Sure. June Zeitlin. I was born in Manhattan on July 3, 1948.
JW: Can you tell us a little about your childhood, your ethnic background, your parents, siblings, anything you think that led you to become the person you became?
JZ: Well, although I was born in Manhattan, my family moved first to Dobbs Ferry, and then to Newberg, New York, which is well out of New York City. I have one sister who is two years younger than me. I guess the key thing about growing up in Newberg, New York, was I felt really stifled because it’s a rural, not particularly progressive area. That began to bother me as I got older.
JW: So, you went away to college?
JZ: Yes. I went to University of Rochester for College, and then I went to NYU for law school.
JW: Back in New York City.
JZ: Yes.
JW: What got you involved in the women’s movement?
JZ: I’ve been thinking about that, and I really can’t pinpoint anything in particular from when I was in college. Most of our activism was around the Vietnam War. There might have been some things, but I definitely noticed that since I was a political science major, that most of the people in my class were men, but there were a good amount of women at the University of Rochester.
I think my activism really started when I was in law school, where, of course, there were women. Although NYU actually prided itself on taking more women than the Ivy Leagues because that was the way that they were boosting the caliber of their students. There were a group of women, and because this is 1970 to ’73, there was no course, or even a place for women to look at women’s rights. Even though ahead of my class, there were some of the first women lawyer activists that we all knew about, even though they were ahead of us.
We started, myself and about a half a dozen other women, started a Women in the Law course, and we were able to get a professor to teach it who was a feminist. So that was, I guess, the foundation. And then in the summer, after rejecting the idea of working for a law firm, I ended up – this will especially make you laugh – working in the summer for the Welfare Center. That was a backup. And Duffy was one of my people.
JW: Duffy Campbell.
JZ: Duffy Campbell, yes. That was really great. They did really good work relating to welfare and other poverty programs, and it was great. Then the second summer, I actually got a spot at the ACLU when they were starting the Women’s Rights Project. Ruth Ginsberg was one of the people in charge, although she wasn’t there as much as the others. But when it came time to doing the work, she was the person who we related to. I guess that put me on my trajectory to work on women’s rights.
JW: Sounds like it. What can you tell me about, I’ll call her Ruth. Any anecdote about Ruth?
JZ: Not really. At that time, I would say she was nothing like the way she ended up. She was very serious, and she was still a full-time teacher at law school, so she only spent a little time with us. But I did get to write a brief with her. Not on one of the big issues, it was the case of a woman who wanted to get her original name back. But anyway, I felt like I was in the midst of a lot of exciting activity.
JW: Did you win that case?
JZ: Yes.
JW: Oh, great.
JZ: I don’t remember the name. It may be in one of my boxes.
JW: That’s fine. There were a lot of them, I know. But still, they were very important. That’s great. So, when you graduated law school, then, what job did you get?
JZ: My first job was in legal services in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Most of the work that we did was related to housing, tenant, landlords, and also welfare. I did that for about two years. One of the other things I did when I was at Legal Services was help establish a labor union for lawyers in the Legal Services program. That was exciting. When I was ready to leave Bed-Stuy, I had this idea that I really wanted to work for Bella Abzug. I went around talking to everybody I knew, to see if they knew Bella and could connect me. I finally found somebody.
I guess I omitted this because it wasn’t exactly relevant, but when I was in high school, or maybe in college, I think, I worked at a summer camp. One of my campers was Liz Abzug, Bella’s daughter. She and I became friendly because even though I was a counselor and she was a camper, we were, I don’t know, three or four years different. When I was in law school, I would come and visit her and her family sometimes at their house in the village because it was right near NYU.
That is how I got there really, because when I interviewed with Bella and said what I wanted to do, and then I reminded her that I was Liz’s counselor, she said, “Oh, well, then you have the job.” She’s a very family person, and despite all the other ways she may be, and is figured, she’s really very, very kind to people who she’s close to, and certainly her family.
JW: Did you work on women’s issues when you were there?
JZ: Yes, that was my beat. Women’s issues and civil rights.
JW: Okay, like what?
JZ: It was ’75 to ’76, the end of her Congressional campaign. The key issues were childcare, because Nixon had vetoed the bill and spent a lot of time trying to come up with something that could pass, which it didn’t. The other thing that Bella wanted to do, we did a bill on giving women who are not working, pay. I was looking for the actual title, but I didn’t get it. But that was her concept. That women were left out if they didn’t have a work record and if they’re working at home, that they should be covered.
Then the other big issue was the pregnancy discrimination case. After the Supreme Court – this will be familiar to you – the Supreme Court said that was not acceptable. Of course, abortion was always an issue, but the worst things happened a little later. Then the other issues, relating particularly to civil rights, were bussing. That was a big issue at the time, and we tried to support making it more integrative, and that didn’t go anywhere either.
JW: Well, we did get a Pregnancy Non-Discrimination Act this year.
JZ: Right. And there was another something that we got earlier, but it wasn’t very complete.
JW: Right. So, it only took, let’s see, what year did you say – that was around ’75? Okay, so it only took 50 years, about.
JZ: Well, when I was doing this, I thought, “Well, we’ve worked on so many things, but when we look for actually getting it passed, it takes a long time.”
JW: Yes, unfortunately. Which were the issues that were of greatest concern to you?
JZ: At the time, I was really pushing around childcare because that just seemed so outrageous. Especially the way Nixon figured it, was leaving children out of the home. Things they still say now, that, “The home is the best place” which we all know is not true. That was a big thing, and the bussing was a big thing. Also, at that time, was the first UN Conference on Women. Bella was involved in that and I got to go to that, which was very exciting.
JW: Where was that one?
JZ: There was International Women’s Year, and then the International Women’s Conference from the UN. That was the first one on women. Many years, they started having international conferences, and that’s where Bella later, was very prominent. I guess I took a lot of that, too. I have a nice anecdote on Bella.
JW: Oh, great. Let’s hear that.
JZ: I mean, a little counter to her image in the paper. We did work very hard, and stayed in the office sometimes often until 11 o’clock because there was a lot of work to do. Her husband never came to Washington, so when she was there, she just was working. And one night, it was really late, and I started to leave to go to my place, and she said, “Oh, June,” after she had yelled at me because I hadn’t done something right. She puts her arm around me and says, “Oh, June, don’t go home in the dark. I don’t want you to do that by yourself. Let me drive you.” It was really little things like that for me, that when she was unhappy about something you did and told you without any niceties, but she was both. In the end, I really felt like she was like a Jewish mother.
JW: She was. To all of you. So, where did you go after that?
JZ: Well, that was Bella’s last years in Congress. That’s when she ran for the Senate, and she was going to be out of office no matter what. She helped me get a job in the Carter Administration, at then, HEW, Health, Education, and Welfare. I was an assistant to the general counsel, Peter Libassi, who was a really great person to work for. I worked on a variety of things, but what’s relevant here, is we worked on Medicaid. Particularly, there had been a lawsuit for Black women in Mississippi, and it might have been other places, too. When they went to have a child, they tied their tubes without any real consent. This is one of the things I’m the proudest of.
We had a meeting about the regulations that we were proposing. I was the one who was pushing to ban tying tubes at the same time as you’re giving birth, and that they’d have to have not only consent, but they have to come back when they’re at a different time. Peter said he thought it was an okay idea, but I would have to propose it. I was low on the totem pole there, but I did, and they agreed to put it in the regulations, and it’s still in the regulations. So that was exciting. This was after Nixon. And so, there were a lot of lawsuits that hadn’t been dealt with. Another one was in the south again. Nixon’s people were allowing them to not be very integrated, shall we say.
JW: Allowing who? The agency?
JZ: Sorry, the colleges. The case had been going on forever. We had an agreement with them that they had to follow the civil rights rules, and that was a big thing. And then the Hyde Amendment came up during that time.
JW: You’ve got to explain what that is.
JZ: Okay. So, the Hyde Amendment was passed by Congress to bar Medicaid, which is the government health care for people who are poor, but there are a lot of rules of what you can do and what you can’t do. Congressman Hyde didn’t want the government to be paying for abortions and it passed in the House and in the Senate, to put this on the Medicaid program.
So, for years – and it still exists unfortunately, so, I don’t know, you can calculate how many years that is – women on Medicaid can’t use their health care to get an abortion. That’s been a real important issue even before what the Supreme Court did on abortion. Because although people with means could get abortions, people without the means, and not the health care, had to find other ways in order to get an abortion. Little did we think this was going to go on for this long of a time. The lead people who were doing it, the men, of course – but we got to put in our two cents. I mean, they did try to put in some openings, but it never got through.
JW: Right. Now, just for our audience, some states use their own state money. I think it’s about 17 in Medicaid, but no federal money still, can go to pay for an abortion.
JZ: Which is why there are also a lot of NGOs, like Planned Parenthood and other places, that will give them the abortion and charge them what they can pay, or charge them nothing. It helps, but it just makes it much more difficult for these women to find out where to go and how it will be done. Of course, now, it’s even way worse.
I stayed in the general counsel’s office for about two years, and then I moved to the HEW. Well, it was then changed to Health and Human Services when they took the education out. We had a new person at the head and a decision was made to establish a new program on domestic violence. I was the first director of that program in HHS and it was very exciting for me. Really, domestic violence is one of the programs that my heart is in wherever I am, and trying to push it. It was really an opportunity to do innovative things in the area, and to support people in communities that were trying different strategies, and also to help them to some extent with money.
JW: Like what? What different strategy?
JZ: Well, first, the whole issue was quite new. It actually started with people in Minnesota having safe houses and then other states started to pick it up. One of the things that we tried to do was help them look at, What are the legal barriers? What are the health barriers? Those were the two that I remember. To help them as they were thinking, but have very little support, to try to see what would work. And we were trying to pass legislation that would give the states significant money to start domestic violence programs. That did pass, but way after my time.
Just looking ahead, Biden has been a champion of domestic violence. He helped write the law and his administration has been phenomenal, and the Obama administration did also. They really made a much bigger effort to make change around domestic violence and to make it into a more permanent area of work and to help put in a lot of support and money. Now, they also look at getting housing for people who have lost their homes. It’s really like an all-government program now. Then, Reagan got elected, and my job was actually a political job. Anyway, I wasn’t going to stay, and I was sure he wasn’t going to keep working on domestic violence.
Then, in between, I went to the National Women’s Law Center. I was there from ’81 to ’82. Basically, I worked with Duffy, and we put together a pretty comprehensive paper on child care. At that time, the right wing had major initiatives on family. And what they meant by family was the traditional family, and the traditional work of women, and they were trying to stop other initiatives. We did a variety of things and spoke a lot about the fact that, family is for us, too. We’re for family, but we’re for all kinds of family. Then I guess that disappeared with Reagan.
I went back to New York, where I had lived, and I got a position at the Ford Foundation on their women’s rights program. I was their women’s rights program officer. I started in ’86, and I was the Deputy Director for the Rights and Social Justice Program.
JW: What were some of the programs you were able to fund as part of the women’s rights group?
JZ: One area of funding was legal rights organizations. The program wasn’t that big at the time, although, I guess, compared to other places, it probably was. So, legal reform was one area, economic issues was another area, reproductive rights was an issue, and violence against women was an issue. This was over that whole time. It didn’t start that way. Then, really new work that I did was on work and family. Both on legislation and other ways.
JW: Do you recall any particular grants that you particularly were proud of?
JZ: Well, I was proud of giving the first grant on domestic violence that they had ever done to the organization in California. This program in California, they also have somebody in DC, deals with all kinds of domestic violence. They’ve done an amazing, amazing job, but it never became a big part of the Ford program, although they supported it.
Then, the legal organizations would be familiar to you, The National Women’s Law Center and The National Partnership for Women & Families. There was another one in DC, and there was a pretty in-depth program about getting women into state positions. Reproductive health was a very big issue there because they had done a lot. Not on women’s rights, but on safe childbirth in other countries. And so, we said, “There are other aspects of this that have to be done” and so, we really started the first work on abortion.
The economic areas that are still going on are paid leave, paid sick days, those kinds of things. And then the Work and Family Initiative was something that our head, Susan Berresford, was very interested in. She knew some people in the field, and they really encouraged me to take a bigger look at work and family. Looking at what’s been done in other countries and how we’re behind on all that.
There actually is a paper that I wrote that is probably in my boxes as we were developing it, to lay out exactly the kinds of things that we were going to do. I think that covers a lot of it. And then my last job there, I was the Director of the Governance and Civil Society program at Ford. And that focused on strengthening democracy and civil societies around the world, and of course, it had an important [point] – making sure that women’s groups were included in it.
JW: Right. We need that now more than ever.
JZ: Absolutely.
JZ: I left Ford after all of these years, and, going back to Bella, this was 1999. She had passed away and I had been funding their organization. I knew what they were doing, and with her out of the picture, they really needed a new executive director. It was primarily, almost entirely, doing work around the globe, and particularly around having women’s issues be part of all of the different UN international things, and so that’s when they had the one on human rights. She started the women’s human rights global work at Rutgers. Actually, from Ford, we gave her the first grant and helped her really move it along.
At that time, the human rights groups in the United States really felt we’re not supportive of talking about women’s human rights. They thought that it was going to dilute the work that they were doing. We also co-sponsored an international meeting. People in Canada were very active in trying to explain how this would work from a legal point of view.
We gave them money to convene a meeting of people from the US and Canada and other parts of the world, primarily law professors, to talk about human rights as women’s rights. Ultimately, at the first meeting that the UN had, there was a whole program of women from around the world talking about how their human rights were violated. It was really something, and it blossomed into a major program.
I worked at WEDO for almost 10 years; Women’s Environment and Development Organization. The first international meeting that they were included in, and made a big impact, was on the environment because most people did not see it as a women’s issue. It was something different. These women, Bella and the other people working on this, showed evidence that there are many environmental issues that are specific to women. And also, women want to have a say in all of these environmental issues.
JW: You worked there until when?
JZ: I worked there from 1999 to 2008. Then in 2009, I went to the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. I was hired to try to get the United States to ratify the CEDAW Convention, the Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women. The US doesn’t ratify very many international treaties to begin with, and they had never ratified this. This is the largest and most meaningful international convention on women’s rights. A group of people, including the National Women’s Law Center, agreed to help be part of it, but had decided that it would be best for it to be housed at the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.
So that’s how I came, again, to Washington. It was very exciting. There had been efforts before to try to get the US to ratify CEDAW, but the Senate wouldn’t accept it, especially because they said it would allow abortion. That was the biggest problem. So, groups like Amnesty International, a lot of good government groups like the YWCA, and lots of women’s organizations, we thought with Obama elected, that we’d have a good chance of getting it through. Of course, it didn’t quite happen that way.
We lobbied the State Department a lot to get them to move it along. It was one of the five international conferences that were on the table in the Biden administration. One of the other ones was on people with disabilities, which we also supported. They thought that; they being the administration, thought that it would be easier to do the disabilities one first, because it would be less controversial, and then do CEDAW. It was very hard to get the Foreign Affairs Committee to take up CEDAW and to have some meetings about it.
Finally, it wasn’t quite official, but the woman in Congress from California; because she was on the International Affairs Committee, I’ll think of her name, she held a hearing. We had people come and testify as to why this would be important and how it would affect issues in the United States. Unfortunately, abortion continued to be an issue, because when the Clinton administration submitted the CEDAW the first time around and did the review, they put in their review that the CEDAW was abortion neutral.
In the early efforts of trying to get it passed, that was what the advocates were saying. But that became untenable, and advocates wanted to be very clear that this is also part of it. When we had a hearing, and the National Women’s Law Center was presenting the paper for the meeting, they wanted us to soft walk abortion, and no one was willing to do that.
JW: Who wanted it to soft walk it? The administration?
JZ: The administration. Well, even the Senate. In the end, the Disability Treaty went to the House and went to the Senate and took a vote. They had been fighting even the Disabilities Treaty saying that that covered abortion. The advocates for the Disability Treaty really didn’t have the background to know how to fight it. The National Women’s Law Center and the Leadership Conference and a few other groups really tried to help them.
They did what we said, but they kept saying, “This is about disability, not abortion.” We’re going, “Yes, we understand that, but they are related.” Anyway, the conservative members of the Senate voted against it. And although it got a majority, it didn’t get the two-thirds majority. After that, no further treaties were put forward. So, I don’t know if they’ll ever ratify them. They really have a horrible record of doing that.
I guess I should say, besides the typical issues that the Leadership Conference does, I was focused mostly on employment relating to women and to unions and other things, and also on health care. I was there for the health care debate, and the Medicaid coverage was a big priority. I left the Leadership Conference to retire when Benita left to go into the Biden administration.
They brought Wade back, Wade Henderson, who’s the head of the Leadership Conference, just temporarily, while they were looking for a successor, which, of course, took a year and a half. He also brought back myself, and some of the other people who had been working with him. That’s when I did a lot of work on Medicaid and trying to expand Medicaid in a way that the states that hadn’t taken the additional Medicaid would pass.
The other thing that I did a lot of work on was on human rights. We had started when I had been there initially for the Leadership Conference, to participate in human rights activities that affect the United States or that are looking at the United States – because there’s a number of commitments they have to make on the treaties and other things that they’ve actually agreed to. One is on Race, which actually was passed many years ago. As Wade would say, “It passed at 2:00 in the morning with three people on the Senate floor” and that was that. We couldn’t do that again. That was before my time.
I did a lot of work in preparing for these reviews by the UN to try to show what the US had done, but also all the things it hadn’t done. There’s this overall review that they do every, I think it’s four years at the UN. Each member of state has to do it. We went to two of those meetings, and the last one was the last that we were working there. I actually have documents for that because that was very recent.
We put together two pages on each issue that was important to us so that the members of the committee from other countries could get our views. Although the NGOs didn’t have a role in the actual discussions of the countries, we were able to give them information, and meet with them, and push them to push the United States to do what we wanted. I’m sure I left other things out.
JW: No, that’s great. I guess I want to try to tie it together because it sounds like from the beginning of your career, working with Bella early on, and getting into women’s issues, that really continued throughout your whole career. Would you say that there was some major influence there? Where did that drive come from?
JZ: Well, I think working for Bella had a big influence on me. I stayed close to her for the rest of her life. I used to laugh when she came to the Ford Foundation, trying to get money for WEDO. I was still carrying her bag. How am I doing that? When my mother had a really big medical problem, she got me a doctor that was appropriate. She was a very important person to me. I think there’s no question about that.
I guess I really took to legislation and advocacy as opposed to more legal, traditional things. Even now that I’m retired, I can’t help but follow the details. I feel like I’m compelled to know all these things. And all my friends know that I’ll know these details. There are other people who have details on law, on things that are more, papers of the law, or in court, but I follow what’s happening there.
JW: I’ll have to call you when I have some questions.
JZ: You’ll probably have the same answers or the same questions.
JW: Well, this is great, June. Do you have any concluding comments you’d like to make?
JZ: People would say to me, “Well, what are my hobbies?” And I try to explain that my life’s work is my hobby, and it is fulfilling enough that I don’t see the need for other kinds of hobbies or activities. I feel like, and doing this was really helpful, that I did a lot. Many of [the issues] didn’t come to something, but I know they will eventually.
JW: Absolutely.
JZ: And that’s why I can keep going.
JW: That’s wonderful.