Felice Nierenberg Schwartz (1925-1996) was the founder of Catalyst and its first president from 1962 to 1993. She was the daughter of Albert Nierenberg (1892-1950), a businessman, and Rose Levin Nierenberg (1897-1984); the family lived in New York City. Schwartz graduated from Smith College in 1945. Motivated in part by the isolation she felt as one of the few Jewish students on campus, Schwartz founded the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students (NSSFNS) shortly after graduation. This organization was dedicated to helping Black students gain admission to white colleges and universities. The NSSFNS placed 750 such students under Schwartz’s leadership in 1947, and was considered to be a pioneer in integrating higher education for the duration of its forty-year existence.

In 1951, following her father’s death, Schwartz left the NSSFNS to run Etched Products Corporation, the family’s failing metal etching and embossing business, alongside her brother, Theodore “Ted” Nierenberg (1923-2009). After four years, the business was successfully turned around and sold, whereupon Schwartz became a full-time mother to her three children with husband Irving L. Schwartz (1918-2011), a scientist, educator, and physician whom she married in 1946.

During her nine years outside the workforce, Schwartz became frustrated with the barriers experienced by women trying to enter or return to the workforce, and in response, founded Catalyst Inc. with the mission to “bring to our country’s needs the unused capacities of educated women who want to combine family and work.” In 1972, she published the influential book How to Go to Work When Your Husband is against It, Your Children Aren’t Old Enough, and There’s Nothing You Can Do Anyhow. Schwartz continued to lead Catalyst and grow the organization, shifting its focus during the 1980s from helping individual women break into the business world to helping them thrive, thereby changing corporate culture to be more inclusive. In 1989, she provoked national controversy with her Harvard Business Review article, “Management Women and the New Facts of Life.” Although the article was well received in the corporate world and won the journal’s prestigious McKinsey Award, the reaction in the popular press was extremely critical. Some readers felt that Schwartz was advocating unequal treatment: a fast track for career-focused women and a slow one for women who wanted families. The New York Times dubbed the latter the “Mommy Track.” Schwartz maintained that her article was misunderstood and that, in fact, it advocated for workplace flexibility that allowed all people, regardless of gender, to make their own choices regarding work/life balance. She responded to the criticism in her 1992 book Breaking with Tradition: Women and Work, the New Facts of Life.

Schwartz retired from Catalyst in 1993, publishing her last book three years later, The Armchair Activist: Simple Yet Powerful Ways the Fight the Radical Right. She died the same year, a few months before the book’s release.