In Memoriam: Cicely Nichols, 1937–2008

The last of the EFA founders, Cicely Nichols, died on April 5, 2008 after a long battle with cancer. She is survived by her three daughters, Hilda, Jenny, and Christy. A memorial service will be held on Sunday, May 11 in Greenwich Village (see below). Two excerpts from an earlier issue of the EFA newsletter, The Freelancer, offer a glimpse into the singular individual she was and the immeasurable contribution she made to EFA.

A Tribute to Cicely Nichols

From The Freelancer, September-October 2006

That EFA survived as a stable, professional organization is a testament to the work of a handful of people. At the time of EFA's development, there were several distinct and incompatible visions of what EFA would become. Mary Heathcote and Cicely Nichols were the two who deserve most of the credit for steering the EFA ship to where it is today.

That nautical metaphor is more than apt in describing Cicely Nichols's work and interests. In addition to her love of books and clear communications, Cicely loved the rivers running around the City of New York. In the earliest years of this organization, Cicely lived in a Greenwich Village apartment with her teenage children. That apartment was the location of some of the informal meetings early in EFA's history.

Later she moved to a houseboat docked at a Hudson River marina. She kept the apartment, though. After all, nobody ever gives up a rent-controlled apartment in New York. I remember hearing her voice on a radio news program, when she was the press spokesperson for New York Waterways, announcing a new ferry connecting Manhattan with New Jersey. Cicely was the speaker at the first meeting I attended of the nameless organization that soon became the Editorial Freelancers Association. It was in October 1976. Cicely had just won a decision by a New York State Department of Labor appeals board, which granted her unemployment insurance after she lost a regular assignment for freelance copyediting from McGraw-Hill.

With the assistance of an attorney from Legal Services (who also spoke at the meeting), she appealed the initial decision denying her unemployment compensation. We all know that freelancers are not entitled to unemployment compensation, right? Well, not always. Since she had the regular assignment for a long time, probably several years, providing her a regular predictable income, under the supervision of the Editorial Services Department of McGraw-Hill, the appellate board ruled that she was, in effect, an employee entitled to the same protections as any other employee. These were unusual circumstances, so no legal precedent was set; freelancers still are not normally entitled to unemployment compensation. But even though we can't cite it in our own behalf. We can relish the satisfaction of Cicely's victory.

— Elliot Linzer, long-time EFA member and former board officer

How We Began

Excerpt from The Freelancer, September-October 2006

Thirty-six years ago, in the winter of 1970, "editors at Grove Press went on strike in an effort to make the publishing industry more responsive to their needs. Two Grove editors who found themselves freelancing again—Mary Heathcote and Cicely Nichols—met with freelancers Faith Sale, Louise Stallard, and Margaret Wolf to discuss the situation, and predicaments, of freelancers" (from a letter from Cicely Nichols to Trumbull Rogers and Martin Kohl, 1999)....

It is probably a good idea to recount the story of EFA's founding every few years, so newer members can become aware of our origin, and to remind the rest of us of how we began. Like many organizations, our beginning was small and uncertain.... Yet EFA's continued existence was by no means assured by the fact of those early meetings. As word of what they were up to began to spread from friend to friend, more and more freelancers showed up until the nascent group outgrew people's apartments. Then, in 1977, attempts to unionize Macmillan led to another strike, which in turn led to a schism in EFA's leadership, because a group led by Faith Sale, Margaret Wolf, and a former Macmillan editor named David Sachs, thought EFA should become a union.

As a result, they eventually founded a short-lived splinter organization—they held perhaps three meetings—which they called Freelance Editorial Workers Inc. Others in EFA, including Cicely, Mary Heathcote, Mary Barnett, and Jeannine Ciliotta, opposed this unionizing effort, feeling "the clout for a successful union was not present" (from Nichols letter, 1999) and so establishing a stable organization first should be the goal. When I joined EFA, there were still those in the organization who were for turning the group into a union, but the prevailing opinion was that if we wanted to have any influence at all on publishers, we needed to become a responsible, professional society, and in order to attract members, we needed to offer services to the members, including a better place to network and socialize than the school cafeteria where EFA was, at the time, holding its general meetings.…

— Trumbull Rogers, long-time EFA member and former board officer