Charlotte M. (Meyrowitz) Shapiro

Charlotte M. Shapiro passed away at the age of 98 on April 3, 2024, in Southbury, CT. She was an activist in the field of women’s rights and equality for more than sixty years. She cofounded Women on the Job with Lillian McCormick, a Long Island based community organization. The group’s primary focus was on equal employment rights for women in the workplace. She served as an education organizer, program director, administrator, and coordinator of legislative task forces. One legislative task force lobbied to end sex discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace; another lobbied for new legislation to redress domestic violence in the courts. Her community activism and leadership were honored by civic organizations, including NOW and the League of Women Voters.

She graduated from Queens College in 1946 and furthered her education at Hofstra University. Her first career was teaching American Studies and Government at South Side High School in Rockville Centre, NY. She served as a president and board member of The League of Women Voters in Levittown, Hempstead, Nassau County, and New York State.

Charlotte is the author of Searching for Matilda: Portrait of a Forgotten Feminist, 2013, a biography of an important but overlooked suffragette and feminist theorist, Matilda Joslyn Gage. Her “Women on the Job: Long Island's grassroots action for pay equity” appeared in Long Island women: activists and innovators, eds. Naylor and Murphy, 1998. She served as a researcher for HarperCollins’s Comparative Guide to American Colleges, by Cass and Birnbaum. Her Women on the Job’s papers are archived in the Robert E. Wagner Labor Library of NYU.

Charlotte and her husband, Marvin R. Shapiro (1924−2020), were happily married for 73 years. In 2001, they retired to Heritage Village in Southbury, CT, where she continued her community activism. Yet, she derived her greatest joy from family life and the deep connections she shared with not only her own family but some of her students and the children of her dearest friends with whom she developed life-long friendships.  

She is survived by her three loving children, Richard Shapiro, Susan Shapiro, and Jill DeGroff, and their respective spouses Penelope, Ed, and Dale, and by four grandsons, Adam Shapiro, Benjamin Shapiro, Leo DeGroff, and Blake DeGroff. She will be sorely missed. 

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