New Hampshire Women’s Foundation celebrates New Hampshire’s trailblazing women at our annual GAL|A event. The GAL|A 2020 AmplifiHER Honoree is Mary Rauh.  Our 2020 Trailblazers are Caroline Dillon, Julie Eades, and Dr. Marie Metoyer (1925 – 2020).

2020 AmplifiHER Honoree: Mary Rauh

Mary Rauh has a long history as a champion of women in New Hampshire and beyond. In 1986, Mary brought her passion for women’s issues to New Hampshire when she moved from Cincinnati, OH with her husband John and three sons.

Mary has been active in a number of women’s organizations and in the political realm. She ran as the New Hampshire Democratic Nominee for Congress in 1998 and served as New Hampshire Co-Chair of Obama for President. She served on the boards of Planned Parenthood of Northern New England and Planned Parenthood Federation of America.

Mary was a founding board member of the Women’s Fund of New Hampshire and the Women’s Initiative. She also served on the NHPR board and is currently on the Leadership Council for the Campaign for Legal Services, serving agencies that provide legal services to low-income residents.

Through her tremendous leadership, advocacy, and philanthropy on behalf of women and girls in New Hampshire, Mary truly embodies the spirit of the AmplifiHER award.

2020 Trailblazers:

Caroline Dillon

Period Poverty Student Activist

Caroline Dillon is a New Hampshire native who is currently studying nursing at the University of Pennsylvania. In 2019, she worked with NH Senator Martha Hennessey to pass New Hampshire’s period poverty law. Caroline hopes to use her past legislative experience and future nursing experience to continue making NH a better place for all of its citizens.

Julie Eades

President, New Hampshire Community Loan Fund

Juliana Eades retires tomorrow as President and founding Executive Director of the New Hampshire Community Loan Fund, one of the first Community Development Finance Institutions (CDFIs) in the nation. She joined the organization in January 1984.

The Community Loan Fund provides the financing and technical assistance people with low incomes need to have affordable homes, quality jobs and child care, and to be financially independent. The organization has loaned or invested nearly $350,000 in N.H. to help create or preserve more than 10,000 affordable housing units, 3,800 jobs and 4,400 child care spaces. A robust investment program, Opportunity NH Investments, is the main source of capital, with nearly 700 different investors, more than 75% of them individuals.

Eades was named the winner of the 2012 Ned Gramlich Lifetime Achievement Award for Responsible Finance from the Opportunity Finance Network. She has received numerous other honors, including the prestigious Granite State Award from the University of New Hampshire, Outstanding Woman in Business from the New Hampshire Business Review, and he Episcopal Bishop’s Award for Humanitarian Service.

She has served with a variety of community organizations including Leadership New Hampshire, as a trustee of Citizens Mutual Fund, on the board of directors of the New Hampshire Charitable Foundation, for the local 4-H Foundation, leading youth baseball, and as a founding board member of the Opportunity Finance Network.

Her varied previous work background included business, nonprofits, government, advocacy, and self-employment. She is a Trailblazer in more than one sense of the word–she hiked the Appalachian Trail end-to-end in 1977.

She has a family of friends and a red-headed daughter.

Ms. Eades received her B.A. in History from Swarthmore College and her M.B.A. from the University of New Hampshire.

Dr. Marie Metoyer (1925 - 2020)

First African American female psychiatrist in NH; community mental health, women’s rights, and black scholarship advocate
Remarks by Nadine Thompson

A resident of Manchester, NH for nearly four decades, Dr. Metoyer was a soft-spoken woman of few words whose appearance belied her impact on the State of New Hampshire, not only as the first African American female psychiatrist in the state, but her decades serving those less fortunate in community mental health, and the health and welfare of women and minorities.

Dr. Metoyer was born September 11, 1925 in Jersey City, NJ, to Dr. Lena Edwards (a recipient of the 1964 Medal of Freedom from President Johnson) and Dr. Lewis Keith Madison, physician parents who had met at Howard Medical School.

Dr. Metoyer was the eldest of their six children. An accomplished pianist with a keen intellect, she graduated summa cum laude from Fordham University (when women were only allowed on campus on weekends) and entered Cornell Medical School at twenty. She was one of the few women there and would become the first African American woman to graduate from medical school. She mentioned that the professors would often complain that, due to World War II, too many women were enrolling; and they were looking forward to the war ending and the men returning. Also, they thought that it would be a waste to educate women because the women would drop out as soon as they married and became pregnant. Dr. Metoyer pledged that she would work until retirement to prove them wrong, and she did. She graduated from medical school as a married, young mother of two and she worked until her retirement at age 70.

While at Cornell Medical School, she met and married architectural draftsman/artist Victor Metoyer, Jr of Omaha, NE, who was stationed in New York City during World War II. The couple had five children: Victor III, Stephen, Cecile, Eric and Adrienne. The family settled in Jersey City, NJ where Dr. Metoyer took over her mother’s obstetrics/ gynecology practice from 1952-1968.

In the 1960s, after delivering hundreds of babies, she heard the call from President Kennedy emphasizing community mental health, so she moved from New Jersey to Vermont to pursue a residency in psychiatry at the University of Vermont from 1968-1972 and received a Fellowship in Community and Child Psychiatry.

Dr. Metoyer practiced in Vermont from 1972-1981 as the sole psychiatrist in the Northeast Kingdom, a collection of three counties in one of the most rural areas of Vermont. She was Clinical Director at Northeast Kingdom Community Mental Health, President of the Vermont Psychiatric Association 1980-81 and Secretary of the Vermont State Medical Society 1979-81.

Once empty-nesters, Marie and Victor moved to Manchester, NH in 1981. Dr. Metoyer worked as a psychiatrist 1981-85 then Clinical Director of the Day Program 1985-96 with Manchester Mental Health. She was also Chairperson of the Women’s Committee of NH Psychiatric Society 1990-92, and Member of Ethics Committee of the NH Psychiatric Society 1990-95, and 1999, as well as membership in several national psychiatric organizations.

She retired in 1996 at the age of 70 and dedicated her retirement to women, minorities and medicine, seeking to promote African American heritage, racial equality, cultural diversity, and the fine arts. Dr. Metoyer was Vice President of the Cultural Diversity Task Force of Greater Manchester, Chair of the Scholarship Awards for the Greater Manchester Black Scholarship Foundation, three-term Secretary of the Manchester NAACP, eight years on the New Hampshire Commission on the Status of Women, and member of the Advisory Boards of the Mental Health Center, New Hampshire Minority Health Coalition (serving as Treasurer 1997-99), the Currier Museum of Art, the NH Advisory Committee to Federal Civil Rights Commission, and the Cultural Competency of the Mental Health Center. In 2012, US Senator Jeanne Shaheen honored Dr. Metoyer for her years of service to the people of New Hampshire. More recently, Senator Shaheen called her while in hospice to thank her again for service to the people of New Hampshire.

Dr. Metoyer was also the recipient of the Martin Luther King award in 2008 from the MLK Coalition, was named a member of the “It” list by New Hampshire magazine in 2007 with Nabil Migali for their multi-cultural work reinvigorating People Fest (formerly known as the “International Festival”). She was a recipient of the Susan B. Anthony Award by the Manchester YWCA in 2002, and was an honoree for the 2000 Eight New Hampshire Women of Color and the 2001 NH Speaking of Women’s Health. She was active in the New England chapter of the African American Historical and Genealogical Society (AAHGS) and had extensively recorded the family tree on both sides of the family.

Dr. Metoyer became a lay associate member of the Sisters of Mercy in 2016. She was featured in an article in Parable magazine from the Catholic diocese of Manchester in February 2020, a month before her death. The timing was serendipitous, so the staff at Catholic Medical Center and Community Hospice House could read and understand the woman in her final weeks of life.

Biography from The Black Heritage Trail of New Hampshire