Fran Worden Henry papers

Frances Worden Henry was born in St. Albans, NY to Dorothea Louise Ziegler, a legal secretary, and John Chadwick Worden, a carpenter and boat captain. Her siblings are brothers Don (b. 1943) and John (b. 1951), and a sister, BJ (b.1949). She began working at age 14 doing cleaning and babysitting and worked every summer and most school years doing clerical, factory, or retail jobs. She graduated from the New School for Social Research in 1971 and then began working for the Emergency Employment Act in Massachusetts, helping unemployed people find work. In 1973 she took on her first explicitly feminist position when she became executive director of the first Massachusetts Governor's Commission on the Status of Women. Subsequently, she became the director of the President's Citizens Advisory Committee for Women under Gerald Ford (1975-1976) and, later, the Northeast conference coordinator for the President's International Women's Year Commission under Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter (1976-1978). After working from 1978 to 1980 as the Director of Communications for Appropriate Technology International, a non-profit organization serving indigenous organizations in developing countries that operated out of Washington D.C., Henry returned to school, graduating from Harvard Business School in 1982 with a Masters in Business Administration. She has written about her experiences as a woman at Harvard Business School in her book Toughing It Out at Harvard: The Making of a Woman MBA (1983). For the first ten years post-business school Henry owned Management Consultants, a strategic planning consulting practice, and she served as a partner in Enterprise Associates, a marketing and financial services business that included clients such as the National Academy of Sciences and the Woods Hole Research Center. In 1992, however, she resumed her work as a professional feminist by starting the organization Stop It Now! which has pioneered the use of public health strategies to prevent child sexual abuse, reaching abusers and those who know them through media and community action campaigns. Henry left Stop It Now! voluntarily in 2004. In addition to her paid employment, Henry has also served on many boards of directors including the Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers and the Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund (US).