Dolores Alexander was born in Newark, New Jersey to factory workers Dominick DeCarlo and Sally nee Koraleski.
20 Facts About Dolores Alexander
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Dolores Alexander attended Roman Catholic schools in New Jersey and worked as an office clerk for Equitable after graduating high school.
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Dolores Alexander then went on to serve as a reporter, copy editor and assistant women's editor at Newsday, serving as a feature writer for the publication's weekend magazine until 1969.
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In 1966, while working at Newsday, Dolores Alexander came across a press release announcing the creation of a new women's rights organization: the National Organization for Women.
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Dolores Alexander interviewed Betty Friedan and with her media experience, she became chair of the Monitor Subcommittee of the National Task Force on Image of Women in Mass Media.
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In December of 1968, Dolores Alexander proposed a new position in NOW, the Executive Director, who would set up a New York office to answer mail, put out a newsletter, and do other organizational work for NOW.
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Dolores Alexander quit her job at Newsday and began working as the Executive Director officially in February 1969.
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Dolores Alexander intended for the Executive Director position to be a part time job so she could work on freelance writing to supplement her income, but the workload ended up taking up all of her time.
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Bottini encouraged Dolores Alexander to hire Rita Mae Brown for an open position in NOW's national office.
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Dolores Alexander hired Brown and reassured Bottini that they'd still be friends without resolving her own feelings about lesbianism.
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Dolores Alexander explained that Friedan's recent divorce coupled with her love of flattery would make it easy for Anselma Dell'Olio to seduce.
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However, Dolores Alexander understood this as a precursor to her firing a few months later due largely to Friedan's insistence that Dolores Alexander be fired because she was a lesbian.
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Dolores Alexander continued to lecture about women's rights and worked with the New Feminist Talent Collective, which was formed by Jacqueline Ceballos to provide the services of speakers about the women's movement.
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Dolores Alexander co-founded and organized Women Against Pornography and worked with the New York Radical Feminists.
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Dolores Alexander served as board member for the National Association for Repeal of Abortion Laws, an advisory board member for the New York NOW chapter and was a member of the New York Newspaper Women's Club.
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Dolores Alexander was a notable figure in numerous events in the women's movement.
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Dolores Alexander helped end the practice of gender-segregated want ads in The New York Times, was witness to the lesbian purge of the National Organization for Women, participated in 1977's National Women's Conference in Houston, and the UN's Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing in 1995.
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Every night for the first couple of weeks of Mother Courage's opening, Ward and Dolores Alexander explained their restaurant was at near capacity for dinner.
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Dolores Alexander's papers are held in the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College and the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University.
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On May 13,2008, Dolores Alexander died in Palm Harbor, Florida.