Peggy Simpson has followed the dramatic evolution of “women’s place” both as a reporter and as a media activist. She worked for the AP for 15 years, covering the Kennedy assassination in Dallas and covering Congress for a decade. She also created an AP beat on the fledgling women’s political movement in 1972, wrote a Washington column for Working Woman, opened a Washington bureau for MS Magazine in 1998 and, since 2006, wrote for the Women’s Media Center.

She was on the founding board of JAWS, was president of the Washington Press Club and started an oral history project on women who broke barriers in journalism for the WPC Foundation. Simpson also spent a decade in Eastern Europe, freelancing for a dozen outlets about the rebirth of countries once controlled by the Soviet Union. Back in the US, she served three years as president of Dupont Circle Village, a pioneer in the national aging-in-place movement.