Mad Men & Women at the Peace Corps
I got an email the other day from David Raphael who was a college student back in 1962 and worked as an intern at the Peace Corps HQ. My piece on Nan McEvoy got him thinking about the ‘other’ women in the building when he arrived in Washington from Antioch College in the summer of ’62. He was assigned to the Africa Regional Office and worked with, he said, two real power houses: Cynthia Courtney, English-speaking Africa Division Director, and Francesca Gobi, French-speaking Africa Division Director. David said that these women, and others in the Africa Regional Office, were all recruited from the Africa American Institute (AAI), which years later was exposed by Ramparts magazine as being a CIA front. Little did we know! I met Cynthia Courtney in the late summer of ’62 when I returned from Ethiopia and went to work in the Office of Volunteer Services (DVS). Cynthia was one of the . . .
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