Margaret C. Snyder (Wikimedia Commons)
Margaret Snyder, the American Catholic social scientist who died on January 26 at age 91, focused on women’s rights and economic development with implacable resolve. Snyder’s manifold accomplishments were first encouraged by Catholic mentors who believed that rather than speaking reductively of women’s rights or civil rights, the all-embracing term of human rights can be most apt.
A 1946 graduate of The Convent School in Syracuse, N.Y., and a 1950 graduate of the College of New Rochelle, she was inspired by the sense of ethics exemplified by her parents. Her father, a physician who tended impoverished patients and her mother, a silent film pianist who was underpaid for her work because of her gender, provided a model for Snyder’s later career projects. She was also enlightened by local family friends such as Theodore Hesburgh, C.S.C., later president of the University of Notre Dame. Father Hesburgh also advocated for development and women’s rights as co-chair of the National Cambodian Crisis Committee and as a supporter of the Equal Rights Amendment.