A leader in international feminism, Ms. Horton was one of the organizers of the International Tribunal on Crimes Against Women, held in Brussels in 1976, involving 2,000 women from 40 countries. Simone de Beauvoir called it "a great historic event." Gloria Steinem said, "This Tribunal will offer the facts as well as the flesh and blood of some of the worst crimes against women."
Based in Brussels, Ms. Horton was a counseling psychologist and an early practitioner of assertiveness training, with individual and corporate clients, female and male, throughout Europe and in the Middle East. In Belgium, she helped found the Maison des Femmes and Women Overseas for Equality. She attended all four of the United Nations World Conferences on Women, in Mexico, Denmark, Kenya, and China.
Upon retirement, in 1987, she and her husband, Michael Horton, a journalist, moved to Brunswick, where Ms. Horton continued her work in feminism and managed the successful campaign of her sister Sophia Douglass Pfeiffer for the Maine House of Representatives. A member of the board of Family Crisis Services, Ms. Horton helped it establish a women’s shelter. Volunteering in the College Guild, she served as a tutor and mentor to prisoners seeking to improve their writing skills. She was also an enthusiastic participant in Brunswick’s "Town and Gown," a group of Bowdoin College and other members of the community who regularly gather to share lectures on a diversity of topics.
Born in New York City in 1921, Ms. Horton attended the Horace Mann School, in New York, the Thomas School, in Rowayton, Conn., and Vassar College, from which she graduated in 1942; she later obtained a master’s degree in psychology at Goddard College, in Vermont. Electrified by Eleanor Roosevelt’s 1942 visit to Vassar to recruit for the newly created Navy WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service), Ms. Horton enlisted and served, as a lieutenant, during World War II in New York and Honolulu. After the war she moved to Paris, where she worked at the U.S. Embassy and met her husband, an editor at The International Herald Tribune. They subsequently lived and raised their four children in Bienne, Switzerland; Westport, Conn.; Zurich; and Brussels.
Predeceased by her husband, Ms. Horton leaves her children — Hilary Douglass Horton, of Canterbury, N.H.; Christopher Wells Horton and his wife, Jo Ann Van Reenen, of Portland; Lydia Stuart Horton, of Somerville, Mass.; and Cleveland Bradford Horton, of Barrington, N.H. — and her sisters, Sophia Douglass Wells Pfeiffer, of St. Paul; Gay Wells Mize, of Chelsea, Vt.; and Penelope Wells Butler, of Phoenix.
In-memoriam donations may be made to Family Crisis Services, P.O. Box 704, Portland, Maine 04104.
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