Joanne H. Alter (July 23, 1927 – November 9, 2008) was an American activist, politician, and the first woman to break the gender barrier in Chicago area politics.
[1][2] Her mother, Celia K. Hammerman,[3] had fled pogroms in Czarist Russia,[1] immigrated to the United States, and helped found the North Shore chapter of the National Conference of Christians and Jews.
In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson appointed Alter as a delegate to the United Nations Conference on the Status of Women held in Accra, Ghana.
At the time, Cook County (of which she was a lifelong resident) had no elected women officials, so Alter confronted Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley, the leader of the local Democratic Party, who invited Alter to run for countywide office herself, and slated her for a position as one of the Commissioners of the Metropolitan Sanitary District of Greater Chicago.
[6] Alter twice won re-election to the Sanitary District Board, and became known for her environmental activism, helping to found the Friends of the Chicago River, as well as fighting corruption within the agency.
Martin Luther King Jr., Oprah Winfrey, John F. Kennedy Jr., Dan Rather, Kevin Costner, Adlai Stevenson III, Mayor Harold Washington, Judge Abner Mikva, Sens.