Schechter, Susan W. (Susan Williams), 1958-

Susan Schechter was born May 1, 1946, in St. Louis, Missouri. She received a bachelor's degree in comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1975, and a master's degree in social work from the Jane Addams College of Social Work at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She was married to Allen Steinberg. The couple had a son, Zachary Schechter-Steinberg. While in graduate school Schechter worked as development coordinator for Christopher House and the Loop Center YWCA in Chicago, finally becoming the director of women's services of the latter in 1976. It was during this time that she became involved in the battered women's movement and helped to organize the first battered women's shelter in Chicago. In 1978 Schechter left Chicago and moved to New York City. For a short while, she worked for the Family Abuse Project at the Henry Street Settlement, leaving this position to become coordinator of children and youth development services at the Park Slope Safe Homes Project in Brooklyn, New York. As program coordinator and later consultant at Children's Hospital in Boston (1986-1993), Schechter founded Advocacy for Women and Kids in Emergencies (AWAKE), the first program in the country to address child abuse in families also affected by intimate partner violence.

In 1991, Schechter took a position as clinical professor at the University of Iowa, School of Social Work. While she supervised several graduate students completing independent studies and practicum requirements, and also lectured for various courses taught at the School of Social Work, the University of Iowa Hospitals and Clinics, the College of Law, and the Injury Prevention Center, she mainly served as a project director for a number of grant projects. Many of these grants explored domestic violence service needs and the relationship between domestic violence and child abuse, and had an impact on national public policy and training procedures.

Co-author of Effective Intervention in Domestic Violence and Child Maltreatment, the authoritative manual on the subject, Schechter was also the author of Women and Male Violence: The Visions and Struggles of the Battered Women's Movement (1982) and (with Ann Jones) When Love Goes Wrong (1992). She died in Iowa in 2004 of endometrial cancer.