Joan Banks Dunlop papers

Joan Marie Banks was born in London, England, the daughter of Sir Maurice and Anne Banks. Her mother was an American and when, as a young teenager, Dunlop visited the US, she then decided she wanted to live here. She applied and was accepted at Vassar College but her parents insisted that she attend a London secretarial school instead. After graduation, she worked for the BBC before emigrating to America in 1960.

After a brief stint at a Manhattan advertising agency, Dunlop went to work at the Ford Foundation (1960-1967) as an administrative assistant to the Director of Public Affairs, Paul Ylvisaker, at a time when the Public Affairs Programs would soon serve as the model for President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society/War on Poverty programs. In the late-1960s, she worked for the City of New York in the Mayor's Office of the Budget and at the Fund for the City of New York. During the 1970s, Dunlop worked as senior advisor to John D. Rockefeller, III, and provided administrative support to his organization, the Population Council where she worked to broaden the agency's research into gender roles and sexuality. According to her obituary in the New York Times (2012-07-01), "she introduced Mr. Rockefeller to feminist leaders, including Germaine Greer and Gloria Steinem."

In 1984, Dunlop became president of the organization which would become her life's work when she joined the International Women's Health Coalition (IWHC). For the next fourteen years, she oversaw the tremendous growth of the IWHC as she secured its "reputation as an authoritative voice for women's perspectives in population policy."

When she left in 1998, Dunlop continued her work for women and reproductive rights around the world through an independent project, A Women's Lens on Global Issues. She carried on with her consulting work even after she began her third, and final, bout with breast cancer in 2006. Married and divorced twice, Joan Dunlop, according to the New York Times, "devoted herself to expanding women's rights to control their own bodies" (2012-07-01) and did so on a global scale.