BCRW marks with sadness the passing of Janet Axelrod (Barnard Class of 1973), one of the Center’s student founders. Axelrod passed away on December 26, 2021, at the age of 70.
Janet Axelrod was a leader in the student movement at Barnard and a founding member of the Women’s Center, as BCRW was first known. After Barnard, she went on to become the first staff member at the Haymarket People’s Fund, an activist-governed foundation established in 1974 that continues to fund small-budget social justice and social change organizations in New England. Her later work at Lotus, an early software company, emphasized progressive corporate personnel policies, anti-racism, and alignment with the anti-apartheid movement. She worked with Blackside, a Black-owned documentary production company, and served as the Business Consultant on the award-winning series, Eyes on the Prize, which documented the history of the US civil rights movement. Over her long career, she served on numerous non-profit boards, including that of South Africa Partners, Grassroots International, and the Cambridge Public Library, whose board she chaired for more than two decades.
Axelrod was a featured speaker at the 40th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Barnard Center for Research on Women, a conference dedicated to the theme of Activism and the Academy: Celebrating 40 Years of Feminist Scholarship and Action in 2011, and she received the Millicent Carey McIntosh Award for Feminism from Barnard in 2013.
Her remarkable career as an activist and progressive philanthropist has been beautifully articulated in obituaries in the Boston Globe and Wicked Local, as well as tributes by Grassroots International and the Cambridge Public Library Foundation. Friends, comrades, and family members remember Janet’s remarkable life at the online Janet Axelrod Archive.