Joan Michel was a force behind the scenes in the women's movement. She helped the late Pat McQuillan organize the first-ever Marriage and Divorce conference (1974). Her activist journey began in 1971, when she borrowed $1 from Irma Diamond Newmark to get from Riverdale,NY to the New York City NOW office to help Jacqui Ceballos, then the president, who was swamped with paperwork.
 

Michel later helped with the Women's Forum and the National Women's Political Caucus, and wrote press releases out of Jacqui's apartment. One of the founders of VFA in 1992, she has been vice president of public relations. Michel, a writer and former editor for Hadassah Magazine and a freelance food writer and editor, has written and published her own cookbook, The Hadassah Jewish Holiday Cookbook.
 

A single mother of three, Michel holds a B.A. from Adelphi (1952) and an M.S. from Columbia in speech pathology and audiology, but never worked in that field because President Nixon cut the funding to hospitals at the time of her graduation. She worked with Geraldo Rivera on the One to One project for the mentally retarded, for Dave Garroway and for Stewart Mott, founder of Women for Congress.

source: Feminists Who Changed America

 

 

DONATE    IN MEMORY OF JOAN MICHEL