Helen Ramirez-Odell was born Helen Hershinow in Chicago and grew up in the Lincoln Square neighborhood of the city. She attended Loyola University Chicago and received her B.S.N. and R.N. degrees in nursing in 1964. She then worked in the Chicago Public Schools as a school nurse for over forty years until her retirement in 2011. When she discovered, in the late 60s, that she could not make a needed purchase from Goldblatt’s because they did not give women credit she was outraged and joined Chicago NOW. Here she became an activist for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, a cause she has championed to this day. In the early 70s, she joined the Chicago Teachers Union and became a member of its Women’s Rights Committee which she chaired from 1984 to 2009. During her tenure the Committee worked to end sexual harassment, supported women’s advancement at the Washburne Trade School, sought to improve conditions and employment for women in sports, promoted women’s labor history, supported women political candidates, and fought for women’s health, birth control and reproductive choice, among many other issues. In 1995 she was a founder of the Women in Labor History Project, later called the Working Women’s History Project. During this time she was also active in the Chicago Coalition of Labor Union Women and Cassandra, A Radical Feminist Nurses Network. She wrote and published Working Without Uniforms, the story of school nurses in Chicago from 1951 to 2001 and created a manuscript RN Revolution Needed, about the need for a feminist transformation of the nursing profession.