Carolyn Goodman (1915–2007)

Carolyn Goodman, née Drucker, was born in Woodmere, New York. She earned a bachelor's degree in home economics from Cornell University, a master’s degree in clinical psychology from the City University of New York, and later a doctorate in education from Columbia University Teachers College.
She began her political activism while still an undergraduate at Cornell, helping to organize local farmers’ cooperatives. She served on a committee to aid Loyalists fleeing the Spanish Civil War.
In the late 1930s, she married Robert W. Goodman, a civil engineer with whom she had three sons. Their apartment in New York City became a meeting place for progressive artists and intellectuals. She worked for many years at The Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, where she was a specialist in early intervention family therapy for families at psychiatric risk. She eventually established and ran a program for emotionally disturbed mothers of young children and wrote articles for professional journals about this work. In 1964, her son Andrew Goodman, a 21-year-old student at Queens College, and two other civil rights workers, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner, were murdered in Mississippi while working for voter registration. She and her first husband (Robert Goodman died 1969; she remarried to Joseph Eisner in 1972) established and ran the Andrew Goodman Foundation, which supports a variety of social causes. She wrote My Mantelpiece: A Memoir of Survival and Social Justice, published posthumously.