Jane Wood (activist)

Jane Wood (born Janet Kauffman; 1907 – 2003) was an American tenant rights activist who co-founded the Chelsea Coalition on Housing.^[1][2]

Wood was born in St. Louis to banker Harold M. Kauffman and Jeanette Morton, a Mayflower descendant.^[3][4] She attended Smith College, where Anne Morrow (later Anne Morrow Lindbergh) served as her sorority mentor.^[5][6]

After moving to New York City in the 1930s, Wood joined socialist organizations and became involved in anti-poverty work. In the mid-1950s, she helped establish the Chelsea Coalition on Housing, while protesting the Penn Station South redevelopment.^[7] The coalition sought priority placement for low-income residents displaced by the project and later opposed rent increases and evictions across Chelsea. Over subsequent decades, Wood became a fixture at rent strikes, Rent Guidelines Board hearings and street rallies, often credited with preventing the eviction of hundreds of households as Chelsea gentrified.^[8]

In the 1940s, she married Robert Wood, an activist and cigar importer.^[9] After his death in 1963, she continued to travel to Cuba, delivering supplies and expressing support for the Cuban government.^[10]