Terry O'Neill

Terry O'Neill (born c. 1953) is an American feminist, civil rights attorney, and professor. She was the president of the National Organization for Women (NOW) from 2009 to 2017, as well as president of the NOW Foundation and chair of the NOW Political Action Committees. Education and family O'Neill graduated from Rosemary Hall (now Choate Rosemary Hall), and holds a bachelor's degree in French with distinction from Northwestern University and a J.D. degree magna cum laude from the Tulane University Law School. She has one daughter. According to O'Neill her first husband beat her after a dispute when she was 22 years old, and she left him to live with her parents in New Orleans. She is amicably divorced from her second husband. Early career O'Neill got her start in politics in the early 1990s when David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana. At the time she was a professor of Law at Tulane University in New Orleans. She signed on with the Stop Duke Campaign and contributed by going door to door in her uptown neighborhood getting out the vote against Duke. The following year she joined NOW. She served as NOW's vice president for membership from 2001 to 2005. She taught feminist legal theory and international women's rights law, corporate law and legal ethics at Tulane and the UC Davis School of Law. She is a past president of Louisiana NOW, Maryland NOW and New Orleans NOW and member of the National Racial Diversity Committee. She served on the NOW National Board, representing the Mid-South Region (2000–2001) and the Mid-Atlantic Region (2007–2009).