Dr. Michele Hindi-Alexander provided the following autobiographical statement to The New School Archives in September 2021. It has been edited lightly for length and style.

I’m a retired epidemiologist. I grew up in Alexandria, Egypt, in a Coptic/French family. Married, moved to the States and had two children. In 1974, [I] moved to Brussels Belgium for my husband's job. While working on my dissertation at the University of Louvain la Neuve (and SUNY/Buffalo), I joined a group called 'Women Overseas for Equality-WOE' headed by Lydia Horton, an American living in Belgium. Shortly after, we heard of a group of women planning an 'International Tribunal of Crimes Against Women" (ITCAW), inspired by two other events, Femø, in Denmark, and a feminist conference in Frankfurt. At the time, there was a very early global cultural awakening recognizing women’s rights similar to #BLM [Black Lives Matter] and #Metoo [the Me Too movement] today and we were eager to collaborate and be part of the change.

We joined this group of originally eight women planning the two day-event. It eventually took two years of planning and expanded to a five day event (March 4-8, 1976), opening with a letter from Simone de Beauvoir, at the Palais des Congres in Brussels, Belgium. Over two thousand women from at least forty countries flew, drove, and hitchhiked to attend. The logistics, all analog (providing affordable housing, etc.) were mind-boggling, but all were resolved with amazing collaborations.

The event was a very powerful moment in our lives, and all who participated were changed forever by the shared experience, tragic stories, and depth of collaboration that helped shed light on the circumstances women were facing across the world. At the closing ceremony, Susan Heller Anderson of the International Herald Tribune called it 'the biggest international feminist event in history.'

I was part of the reception team during the event, did daily translations and press releases, and ultimately helped with the transcription and translation of the tapes (English, French, Spanish). I brought my daughter, Rhea Alexander, to the opening and closing ceremonies. At 10 years old, she became the youngest participant. She went on to work in design and social justice and graduated for both her undergraduate and graduate degrees from Parsons School of Design, where she is now a member of the fulltime faculty.

Personally, participating [in the Tribunal] fueled a lifelong conviction to support human rights and continuing to fight for women’s rights, supporting refugees, and the underserved both professionally and privately.