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, my parents grew up in the Bronx but moved before I was born to upper Manhattan, near the Bridge. By the time I started school, our family moved to a suburb, Dobbs Ferry, and a few years later moved to Newburgh, about sixty miles from New York City.
I have one sister who is two years younger than me. I guess the key thing about growing up in Newburgh, was I felt really stifled because it’s a rural, and not particularly progressive area. When I started a new school in third grade, there were very few Jewish families, and I experienced some anti-semitism. Our family moved to another more diverse part of Newburgh, which made me more comfortable in school but as I got older, I found I was hedged in and wanted to be in a bigger, and more progressive environment. My parents, born and raised in the Bronx, liked smaller town living, but understood that NYC offered so much more. My grandparents still lived in the Bronx and we visited often
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 legal work on women’s rights/
JW: Did you win that case?
JZ: Yes.
JW: That’s great. So, when you graduated law school, what job did you get?
JZ: My first job was in legal services in Bedford-Stuyvesant. Most of the work that we did was for people with limited resources and could not afford a lawyer. We worked mostly on landlord and tenant cases and also helped people secure welfare benefits. I did that for about two years. One of the other tasks I took on at Legal Services was helping to 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 to her. 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 Greenwich 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 was seen as too outspsoken, etc, she’s really was concerned and supportive of people she was close to, including staff and their families. When my mother developed cancer, Bella was the person who helped me get her to the best hospital in New York.
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 last two years she was in office.The key issues then were childcare, because President Nixon had vetoed the bill and spent a lot of time trying to come up with something that could pass, which it didn’t. Bella also 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. The Supreme Court decided since only women faced pregnancy, it was not discrimination. 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 well either.
JW: Well, we did get a Pregnancy Non-Discrimination Act many years later.
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 bills 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 argued 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. For many years, the UN had started and continued over many years to have 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 projects, 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 in the hospital, the hospital also 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 women’s tubes at the same time as they were giving birth. Instead, the hospitals were not permitted to get consent at the time of birth. Instead, women had to comeback at another time and give consent for the procedure. My boss 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 today. 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 take very few steps to integrate into the Universities
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.
JW: And then the Hyde Amendment came up during that time.
JW: You have got to explain what that is.
JZ: 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 a different part of the organization. We had a new person at the head of the organization- 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 always 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: 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 since my job was a political job, I knew I would have to leave. The program got incorporated into other childrens programs. By this time there were more cities that had programs on domestic violence and eventually Congress passed the first legislation that provided support and funding to address domestic violence.
After leaving the government, I wentthe National Women’s Law Center, an organization devoted to addressing discrimination against women. I was there from 1981 to 1982. I worked with Duffy Cambell, and we put together a pretty comprehensive paper on childcare. At that time, the right wing had major initiatives on family. And what they meant by family was the traditional family, where women stay at home or engage in the few traditional work for women, and they were trying to stop other initiatives. We spoke a lot about the fact that families come in many different ways and undertake different ways of raising children. While we always believed that families were very important, but that the roles between mothers and fathers or grandparents or others varied in different kinds of family. One can see this issue has never really has gone away.
I went back to New York, where I had lived for many years, and I got a position at the Ford Foundation on women’s rights. I was their women’s rights program officer. I started in 1986, and later was the Deputy Director for the Rights and Social Justice Program. I couldn’t be happier.
JW: What were some of the women’s rights programs you were able to fund as part of your work?
JZ: One area of funding was legal rights organizations. The program wasn’t that big at the time, although, I guess, compared to other foundations, it probably was. So, legal reform was one area, economic issues was another area, reproductive rights became new issue, as well as violence against women, another new issue. In addition, toward the later part of my work, I focused on new ways to accommodate work and family that was egalitarian for both women and men.
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 the Foundation had ever given to such an organization. This program in California, which today also has an office in DC, deals with all kinds of domestic violence. They’ve done amazing work, but it never became a big part of the Ford program, although they supported it.
Then, the legal organizations were a big part of our funding. The biggest groups were The National Women’s Law Center and The National Partnership for Women & Families. Reproductive health was a very big issue there because they had previously done a lot of work on safe childbirth in other countries. And so, we said, “There are other aspects of this that have to be done” and so, we started the first work on abortion at the Foundation.
The economic areas that are still going, such as paid leave, paid sick days, and other similar issues. And my final initiative was a Work and Family Initiative. Susan Berresford was very interested in this field. 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 in many ways. I wrote a paper for the Foundation on work and family issues and ways we can learn from different ways of addressing ways that women and men can organize their lives so they can be more equal in their lives. FOR You I Tried to find at least the name of the piece I wrote for the Foundation, which was published but I couldn’t fine it. MAYBE YOU COULD FIND IT
Finally, I started looking at women’s human rights here in the United State.
JW: Right. We need that now more than ever.
JZ: Absolutely.
JZ: Charlotte Bunch, long time women’s activist started a program at Rutgers focusing on global work at Rutger, focusing on women’s human Rights. At that time the United Nations was having an international meeting on human rights and this was an opportunity to discuss women’s human rights. The Foundation gave her the first grant and helped her to bring issues of women’s human rights to the meeting.
At that time, the human rights groups in the United States not supportive of talking about women’s human rights. They thought that it was going to dilute the work that they had doing. But we felt it was an important area for raising women’s human rights. We co-sponsored an international meeting in Canada. Lawyers in Canada had been looking to explain women’s human rights at a legal point of view.
We gave them a grant 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 effective, and it blossomed into a major program.
My last job at the Ford Foundation was shifting to be the Director of the Governance and Civil Society program. That was that focused on strengthening democracy and civil societies around the world. Of course, it was important to ensure that women’s groups were included.
It was time for a change which coincided with the death of my mentor Bella Abzug, who had developed an international program, working to bring women and women’s issues from around the world into activities taking place around the world. WEDO already had a strong international board of activists and researchers around the world, including Wangari Maathai, who later on won the Nobel Peace Prize. I led WEDO, Women’s Environment and Development Organization for almost ten years. The first international meeting where WEDO participated made a big impact, on the issues around environment. Although many people did not see it as a women’s issues 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.
At WEDO, we were involved in key global international forums including Beijing Plus 10 (2005) and Beijing plus 5 (2000); World Summit (2005); Millennium Summit (2000); World Summit on Sustainable Development (2002) and others. But I am most proud of the work we did with the Center for Women’s Global Leadership and other women’s groups around the world, that demanded the UN over several years from 2005 to 2009 when the UN General Assembly approved a new and stronger women’s rights entity. The Assembly called on UN Secretary-General to carry out a process for a new Under Secretary General to lead the new entity by March 2010. This was a great success.
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 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 women leaders, 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 many women’s organizations, we thought with President 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. The administration decided to bring up the disabilities treaty 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 Congress woman from California; because she was on the International Affairs Committee, 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 CEDAW the first time around and did the review, they put in their review that 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 Senate took a vote on the Disability Treaty. They had been fighting even the Disabilities Treaty saying that that it covered abortion. Although the advocates kept saying, “This is about disability, not abortion.” “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 needed to pass. After that, no further treaties were put forward. So, I don’t know if they’ll ever ratify them.
As the “Me Two” movement brought out the pervasive issue of workplace harassment the Leadership Conference I was focused on employment relating to women’s rights, supporting unions and health care where I focused on Medicaid to extend coverage to those in need. I covered the health care debate, specifically, the Medicaid coverage was a big priority.
As the “Me Two” movement brought out the pervasive issue of workplace harassment The Leadership Conference, working with the National Women’s Law Center and other women’s groups, prepared legislation that would address “the many existing barriers. In 2018, we worked with Senators Kamala Harris and Lisa Murkowski to introduce the Empower Act, the first step to address workplace harassment. In the following years we recognized how extensive these problems were. Working closely with Senator Patty Murray and many women and civil rights advocates, we helped to prepare the “BE HEARD in the Workplace” Act. The Act included Research and Preventing workplace harassment, Additional Resources for Harassment Prevention, strengthening Workplace Rights, and many other ways to bring an end to harassment. Unfortunately, these bills never came to a vote, and while some changes have been made, there is still much to do.
The other thing that I did a lot of work on was human rights. We had started 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 a treaty 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 about every four years at the UN. We prepared the following reports on key issues:
Still Segregated: How Race and Poverty Stymie the Right to Education (September 2013)
Falling Farther Behind: Combatting Racial Discrimination in America (July 14)
Holding the Line: Combating Racial Discrimination in America (July 17)
Women’s Rights at Home and Abroad: Call to Action, US Civil Society Shadow Report on Beijing plus 20 (September 2015)
These documents are sent to the members of the committee from other countries so they 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.
And finally, I want to mention the international work that I was able to do while I was at The Leadership Conference. From 2012-2014 I served as a Special Representative of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) representing the Chairperson on gender issues. I focused on gender-based violence as the most widespread violation of women’s human rights and one that occurs in every country in the world. I visited countries throughout the OSCE, including Southern Europe, the Balkans, the Caucuses and former Soviet republics in central Asia. Several of these countries were just starting to address violence against women. Building on my work, the OSCE chairperson proposed a new 2014 Ministerial Council decision Strengthening commitments on preventing and combating violence against women. This decision was adopted by the OSCE in December, 2014.
JW: 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 major medical problem, she got me a very good doctor for her. 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.
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 doing this was really helpful, that I did a lot. While Many of issues]didn’t come to fruition, but I know they will eventually.
JW: Absolutely.
JZ: And that’s why I can keep going.
JW: That’s wonderful.