ROBIN CHANDLER DUKE
Ambassador
The 2007 International Award for the Health and Dignity of Women is named for Ambassador Robin Chandler Duke, a founding member of Americans for UNFPA. Duke has devoted her life and influence to expanding women’s options worldwide. A stalwart champion of family planning, she focuses on population and development projects that incorporate human rights with health care for women.
Duke began her career in the 1940s writing about women’s issues in the New York Journal-American. She anchored the six o’clock news on a Philadelphia television station and covered news events for The Today Show. She left journalism to earn a degree in finance and became one of a handful of women working as a broker at the New York Stock Exchange.
Her activist spirit, talent for diplomacy and marriage to Angier Biddle Duke, President John F. Kennedy’s Chief of Protocol, lead her into positions where she could promote international cooperation and advance the rights of women. Among her numerous contributions to social and economic opportunity worldwide, Duke co-founded the United States-Japan Foundation, worked extensively in Asia and Africa for women’s health, and was appointed Ambassador to Norway during the Clinton Administration.
Her lifelong commitment to women, entrepreneurship and international relations have inspired Americans for UNFPA to recognize three exemplary women in her name.