Buffalo, New York (AP) – Isabel Marcus, a University at Buffalo law professor and women’s rights advocate who met protesting students in China’s Tiananmen Square and confronted Operation Rescue protesters close to home, has died. She was 83 years old.
Marcus spent most of her five decades in education at the University of Buffalo, where she co-founded the Institute for Research and Education on Women and Gender, served as director of graduate and international programs at the Law School, and twice at Fulbright. She was a scholar. ,
According to family members, he died on October 31 in Los Angeles after living with advanced Alzheimer’s disease.
In Buffalo, Marcus focused on women’s rights and gender equality, becoming an international human rights scholar. Her public conflict with Operation Rescue, the anti-abortion group that sparked mass protests in Buffalo in 1992, threatened death, her family said.
A lifetime of wanderlust took her to Latin America, Europe, Egypt, India, the Middle East, and China, where, as one of the few Westerners in Beijing in June 1989, she visited Tiananmen Square before the bloody crackdown on pro-democracy China. I met the students. demonstrator. He was taken out on one of the last flights along with other professors and students who were on a UB exchange with Beijing University.
As the Cold War ended, Marcus – who would spend time as a Fulbright scholar in Romania and later Macedonia in 1997 – turned his attention to developing a legal framework for women’s rights in Central and Eastern Europe. His seminal work “Dark Numbers” explored the lack of official accountability for domestic violence.
His son, Associated Press journalist Justin Pritchard, said “his intellectual rigor and desire to move to other places did not help train a generation of lawyers who have pushed for equal rights in Eastern Europe and beyond.” “He did it at a crucial time in history, and the effects are lasting.”
Marcus was born in the Bronx in 1938 to an Orthodox Jewish family. At age 15, she was the only girl among multiple winners of a national “I Speak for Democracy” oratory contest sponsored by Voice of America. The victory earned him a visit to Washington and a cameo with President Dwight Eisenhower and Vice President Richard Nixon.
He was elected class president and later student body president at Barnard College as a freshman, staying a year away to serve as vice president of international affairs for the National Students’ Union – later revealed to be secretive. was funded by the Central Intelligence Agency.
Marcus completed his undergraduate education at the London School of Economics, then went to the University of California, Berkeley, where he earned his Ph.D. in Political Science and law degree in 1975.
As a graduate student, Marcus was denied a year’s leave for her second pregnancy. Marcus said he was denied employment at state-sponsored universities in the 1970s because of his involvement in a gender discrimination lawsuit against the University of California.
She taught law and public policy for several years at the University of Texas, Austin, before arriving at Buffalo, where she remained until retiring at the age of 80. He also taught at universities in a dozen other countries.
At UB, Marcus led students on trips to the former Yugoslavia and elsewhere. She also brought in promising graduate students from overseas to study at Buffalo, who often paid their own way. As part of the Isabel Marcus International Research Fellowship, she sponsored young women to live in her apartment, family members said.
In 2012, the University of Buffalo formally recognized his contributions to international education. She also worked with the Erie County courts to strengthen the help offered to domestic violence survivors.
Apart from his son, he is survived by a daughter, designer Erica Pritchard, and four grandchildren.
