Jacqui Michot  Ceballos

“The first NOW meeting I went to was in November 1967. We were dying to get things done, I cannot tell you the passion we had. Stop with all this talk, we wanted to do something!”

Jacqui Ceballos, an activist since 1967, grew up in Louisiana, and moved to NYC in 1946, hoping to become an opera singer. In 1951 she married a Colombian, with whom she had four children. While living in Bogota, Colombia, Jacqui formed the country’s first opera company in 1964, causing the breakup of her marriage. Realizing that “male” society had to change, she returned to NYC to join the recently organized National Organization for Women.

As New York NOW’s 1970 Women’s Strike Coordinator she led the “take over” of the Statue of the Liberty, published the NOW YORK TIMES, a newspaper written as though women ran the world, and helped bring over 50,000 women to march down Fifth Avenue that August 26. As president of NYNOW in 1971, she participated in the Town Bloody Hall debate with Norman Mailer and Germaine Greer. 

In 1993 she founded Veteran Feminists Of America to reunite early activists.  VFA, which now includes later activists, has held 40 events around the country.