Ellen Chesler

Ellen Chesler, Distinguished Lecturer and Director of the Eleanor Roosevelt Initiative on Women and Public Policy.

She "is a former senior fellow at The Open Society Institute, the international foundation started by George Soros. From 1997 through 2006, she directed the foundation's $35 million program in reproductive health and rights and advised on a range of other grantmaking and policy development concerns. She is the author of the highly regarded Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America, for which she was awarded PEN's 1993 Martha Albrand citation for the year’s best first work of nonfiction, and she is co-editor of Where Human Rights Begin: Health, Sexuality and Women in the New Millennium, forthcoming from Rutgers University Press. She has also written essays and articles in many anthologies and in newspapers and periodicals including the New York Times, the WashingtonPost, the New Republic, the Nation, the American Prospect and the Women's Review of Books." 

"From 1997 to 2003, Chesler chaired the board of the International Women's Health Coalition. She currently chairs the Advisory Committee of the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch and also serves on the board of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Early in her career she served as chief of staff to New York City Council President Carol Bellamy, who was the first woman elected to citywide office in New York. An honors graduate of Vassar College, Chesler earned her master's and doctoral degrees in history at Columbia University."


 * Commissioners: Women's Commission for Refugee Women and Children
 * Trustee, The Nation Institute