Leslie R. Wolfe

Leslie Rosenberg Wolfe (November 24, 1943 – November 30, 2017) was an American women's rights activist, known for her work as the longtime leader of the Center for Women Policy Studies. She particularly focused her activism on the intersection of racism and sexism faced by women of color.

Early life and education Leslie Rosenberg was born in 1943 in Washington, D.C., and grew up in the nearby suburb of Bethesda, Maryland.

She attended the University of Illinois, graduating in 1965, then obtained a master's degree from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 1967.

Career Wolfe worked briefly as an English professor at Olivet College, but during the years of second-wave feminism she became actively involved in women's rights activism, which became her long-term career.

In 1983, Wolfe was fired from government service, ostensibly in a "reduction of force," but she believed her dismissal was politically motivated. She had long sparred with her supervisors in the Reagan administration, at one point refusing to remove a poster of Che Guevara from the wall in her office. The year before, an anonymous article in the magazine Conservative Digest had described her program as "a network of openly radical feminists," and four of Wolfe's co-workers were fired at the same time as she was.

Personal life Her marriage to her first husband, Barry Wolfe, ended in divorce. Wolfe remarried, wedding William Greene, who died in 1998.

She continued to live throughout her adult life in Montgomery County, Maryland, where she was involved in educational equity efforts. She died in 2017 in Rockville, Maryland.