Eleanor Bontecou

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Eleanor Bontecou (February 14, 1891 – March 19, 1976) was an American lawyer, civil rights advocate, law professor, and government official. Born in Short Hills, New Jersey, she studied at Bryn Mawr College, graduating in 1913, and earned a law degree from New York University in 1917. She also studied law with Felix Frankfurter at Harvard University.

In 1943, Bontecou joined the Civil Rights Section of the U.S. Department of Justice, becoming one of the first seven attorneys in that unit. She later moved to the War Department in 1946 and helped plan the prosecution of major war criminals from the Pacific during World War II. In 1947 she traveled to Nuremberg to study war crimes.

Earlier in her career, Bontecou served as Acting Dean of Bryn Mawr College in 1922 and earned a Ph.D. from the Brookings Graduate School of Economics and Government in 1928. She taught briefly at the University of Chicago's School of Social Service Administration before contracting encephalitis lethargica, a long illness that kept her mostly bedbound through the 1930s. She recovered some, but continued to have a tremor and balance problems.

Bontecou later became a law professor at Seton Hall University in New Jersey, and a chair there is named in her honor. She devoted herself to civil liberties and women’s rights, and helped people who were wrongly accused during the McCarthy era. She also conducted research with Ralph Bunche on voting rights in the South, showing how poll taxes and low wages kept Black Americans from voting, and advised on studies for the New School and the Carnegie Foundation.

In 1941 she testified before a Senate committee about poll taxes and voting. Her papers are kept at the Harry S. Truman Library and Museum. In 2011, the Library of Virginia honored her as a Virginia Woman in History.