Wednesday, November 30, 2011, at 12:00 Noon, I am hosting my show, The Advocates on WVOX- 1460, my guest is author and historian Dr. Ellen Chesler and we will be talking about Margaret Sanger, the struggle over women’s reproductive rights, and the revisionist attacks of the right wing on Planned Parenthood.
Dr. Chesler is currently a Senior Fellow at the Four Freedoms Center of the Roosevelt Institute, an innovative New York City- based think tank that promotes ideas, influences policy and nurtures young talent, all by way of creating a living legacy for Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, whose presidential library in Hyde Park, the institute also supports. She is shaping the institute’s new policy program on human rights while also helping to expand overall public programming.
From 2007-2010, she was Distinguished Lecturer and Director of the Eleanor Roosevelt Initiative on Women and Public Policy at Roosevelt House, the new public policy institute of Hunter College of the City University of New York. She played a central role in defining the institute’s three part mission: engaging students through the development of policy courses; supporting the faculty in applied policy research and advocacy; and sponsoring lectures, seminars, and conferences, most prominently “Aspen at Roosevelt House,” a discussion and lecture series in collaboration with the Aspen Institute that attracted large and enthusiastic audiences.
For nearly ten years prior, Dr. Chesler served as a senior fellow and program director at the Open Society Institute, the international foundation started by George Soros, where she helped develop and execute the foundation's multi-million dollar global investments in reproductive health and women’s rights and advised on a range of other program initiatives. Her work with women combined support for policy research and advocacy, public education, and litigation with strategic investments in new birth control products and model service innovations that promise long-term benefits in public health in the United States and in many countries around the world.
Dr. Chesler is author of the critically celebrated Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America. A finalist for PEN's 1993 Martha Albrand award in nonfiction, the book was released in a new paperback edition in 2007. She is also co-editor of Where Human Rights Begin: Health, Sexuality and Women in the New Millennium, Rutgers University Press, 2005, and she has written numerous essays and articles in academic anthologies and in newspapers and periodicals including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Nation, the New Republic, the American Prospect, and the Women's Review of Books. She has written blogs for New Deal 2.0, the on-line publication of the Roosevelt Institute, for the Huffington Post and other web-sites.
Dr. Chesler has extensive experience as a voluntary leader with non-governmental organizations. She currently chairs the nominating committee of the board of directors of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America. And she serves on the Advisory Committee of the Women’s Rights Division of Human Rights Watch, which she chaired for six years. From 1997 to 2003, she chaired the board of the International Women's Health Coalition. She is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 2009 and 2010, she served as a U.S. public delegate at meetings of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. She has also long been active in Democratic politics, especially on behalf of women candidates, most recently New York Senators Kirsten Gillibrand and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Early in her professional career, Dr. Chesler was chief of staff to New York City Council President Carol Bellamy, who was the first woman ever elected to city wide office in New York. An honors graduate of Vassar College, Chesler earned her masters and doctoral degrees in history at Columbia University. She is married to New York lawyer, Matthew Mallow, and they are the parents of two adult children.
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