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Jeannie Isabelle Rosoff
Guttmacher Institute
Obituary
Jeannie Isabelle Rosoff US campaigner for reproductive rights. Born in Clamart, France, on Nov 8, 1924, she died in Chevy Chase, MD, USA, on May 12, 2014, aged 89 years. Not many US citizens find their retirement from work marked by a speech read into the record of the US Congress. Jeannie Rosoff was one who did. It happened on Oct 6, 1999, and the speaker was Henry A Waxman, Democratic Representative for California and sometime Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment. During his time in this office, he explained, he’d fought many battles alongside her. All in all, he concluded, “Her innumerable contributions to furthering the cause of reproductive rights have been invaluable and lasting, perhaps most of all to those young women and poor women who will never know her name…Thank you, Jeannie.” Many of the contributions to which he referred were made in the context of Rosoff’s two decade long stint as President and CEO of the Guttmacher Institute, a body founded in 1968 as the Center for Family Planning Program Development. But her career in social and political activism began long before her tenure at Guttmacher, and soon after she first came to live in the USA. Born and educated in France, Rosoff was doing a law degree in Paris when she met and, in 1945, married an American stationed there. He returned to the US to enrol at Duke University for a physics PhD. In due course Rosoff joined him. Although North Carolina was a fairly liberal state, the racial discrimination she encountered there shocked her, and she decided 488
to get involved in community action. In an interview recorded back in 2001 she reflected that this was perhaps a presumptuous aspiration for someone not yet a US citizen. “But it gave me this real sense for injustice, which I think has been carried on into other types of activity.” After a move in the mid-1950s to New York, Rosoff learned dress pattern making, by mail, from a firm in Paris. A friend then got her a job making high-end dresses, and she became involved with her branch of the garment employees’ union. This led to work on behalf of a local Congressman in East Harlem; to organising tenants in a public housing project; to co-chairing a polio immunisation drive; and, eventually, to meeting Alan Guttmacher, then a leader of the birth control movement. In due course she was recruited by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which spawned what became the Guttmacher Institute. By the most circuitous of routes Rosoff had found her vocation. Susan Cohen, Acting Vice-President for Public Policy at the Guttmacher Institute, first met Rosoff in 1978. Talking of the late 1960s and early 1970s she describes her as innovative and visionary. “She figured out a proactive agenda for what we now call the sexual and reproductive health and rights movement.” Rosoff’s concerns were focussed most sharply on the needs of low-income and other disadvantaged groups. “She was also a visionary in recognising the critical importance of gathering evidence to advance policies, and knowing how to use it in a powerful way.” Rosoff was instrumental in creating a part of the Guttmacher’s original programme: the provision of technical assistance to a growing network of family planning clinics, and the collection of the data necessary to prove they were successful. Another Guttmacher colleague of long standing Senior Fellow Jacqui Darroch, speaks of Rosoff’s role in getting legislation through Congress to finance a family planning programme. It created a novel federal grant scheme, known as Title X, to provide family planning and related preventive health services, and was introduced in 1970 as part of the Public Health Service Act. “Jeannie was one of its architects”, says Darroch, who describes Rosoff as a master at understanding how American politics works. “She was able to think strategically. She was very much a people person. She was always on the phone. She had a vast network of people that she knew. They liked her. They respected her.” Cohen agrees. “Jeannie had a knack for making the personal political at a time when this was not a well-understood concept. She really was the mother of the family planning programme here in the United States.” Once asked what she was proudest of, Rosoff gave an answer that seemed to encapsulate the improbable course of her life: “I think my ability to change with the times very quickly…Changing is the hardest thing to do because we don‘t like to be nudged out of our comfortable assumptions.” She leaves one daughter.
Geoff Watts www.thelancet.com Vol 384 August 9, 2014
Obituary
Jeannie Isabelle Rosoff US campaigner for reproductive rights. Born in Clamart, France, on Nov 8, 1924, she died in Chevy Chase, MD, USA, on May 12, 2014, aged 89 years. Not many US citizens find their retirement from work marked by a speech read into the record of the US Congress. Jeannie Rosoff was one who did. It happened on Oct 6, 1999, and the speaker was Henry A Waxman, Democratic Representative for California and sometime Chairman of the House Subcommittee on Health and the Environment. During his time in this office, he explained, he’d fought many battles alongside her. All in all, he concluded, “Her innumerable contributions to furthering the cause of reproductive rights have been invaluable and lasting, perhaps most of all to those young women and poor women who will never know her name…Thank you, Jeannie.” Many of the contributions to which he referred were made in the context of Rosoff’s two decade long stint as President and CEO of the Guttmacher Institute, a body founded in 1968 as the Center for Family Planning Program Development. But her career in social and political activism began long before her tenure at Guttmacher, and soon after she first came to live in the USA. Born and educated in France, Rosoff was doing a law degree in Paris when she met and, in 1945, married an American stationed there. He returned to the US to enrol at Duke University for a physics PhD. In due course Rosoff joined him. Although North Carolina was a fairly liberal state, the racial discrimination she encountered there shocked her, and she decided 488
to get involved in community action. In an interview recorded back in 2001 she reflected that this was perhaps a presumptuous aspiration for someone not yet a US citizen. “But it gave me this real sense for injustice, which I think has been carried on into other types of activity.” After a move in the mid-1950s to New York, Rosoff learned dress pattern making, by mail, from a firm in Paris. A friend then got her a job making high-end dresses, and she became involved with her branch of the garment employees’ union. This led to work on behalf of a local Congressman in East Harlem; to organising tenants in a public housing project; to co-chairing a polio immunisation drive; and, eventually, to meeting Alan Guttmacher, then a leader of the birth control movement. In due course she was recruited by the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which spawned what became the Guttmacher Institute. By the most circuitous of routes Rosoff had found her vocation. Susan Cohen, Acting Vice-President for Public Policy at the Guttmacher Institute, first met Rosoff in 1978. Talking of the late 1960s and early 1970s she describes her as innovative and visionary. “She figured out a proactive agenda for what we now call the sexual and reproductive health and rights movement.” Rosoff’s concerns were focussed most sharply on the needs of low-income and other disadvantaged groups. “She was also a visionary in recognising the critical importance of gathering evidence to advance policies, and knowing how to use it in a powerful way.” Rosoff was instrumental in creating a part of the Guttmacher’s original programme: the provision of technical assistance to a growing network of family planning clinics, and the collection of the data necessary to prove they were successful. Another Guttmacher colleague of long standing Senior Fellow Jacqui Darroch, speaks of Rosoff’s role in getting legislation through Congress to finance a family planning programme. It created a novel federal grant scheme, known as Title X, to provide family planning and related preventive health services, and was introduced in 1970 as part of the Public Health Service Act. “Jeannie was one of its architects”, says Darroch, who describes Rosoff as a master at understanding how American politics works. “She was able to think strategically. She was very much a people person. She was always on the phone. She had a vast network of people that she knew. They liked her. They respected her.” Cohen agrees. “Jeannie had a knack for making the personal political at a time when this was not a well-understood concept. She really was the mother of the family planning programme here in the United States.” Once asked what she was proudest of, Rosoff gave an answer that seemed to encapsulate the improbable course of her life: “I think my ability to change with the times very quickly…Changing is the hardest thing to do because we don‘t like to be nudged out of our comfortable assumptions.” She leaves one daughter.
Geoff Watts www.thelancet.com Vol 384 August 9, 2014