Maria DiGiacomo, 100, nutritionist, advocate
In 1991, the Cape May County freeholders presented the Alice Stokes Paul Award to Maria M. DiGiacomo of Sea Isle City, niece Rita Hill said.
In 1991, the Cape May County freeholders presented the Alice Stokes Paul Award to Maria M. DiGiacomo of Sea Isle City, niece Rita Hill said.
Alice Paul, who grew up in Mount Laurel, advocated for the right of women to vote, as enacted in the 19th Amendment. The award recognizes those who have helped raise the status of women in Cape May County.
Ms. DiGiacomo was honored for, among her other work, being the first director in 1982 of the Coalition of Women Against Rape and Abuse in Cape May Court House, Hill said.
On Saturday, Oct. 24, Ms. DiGiacomo, 100, a nutritionist who taught at Drexel University and worked in Ethiopia, Ghana, India, and Sierra Leone, died at White Horse Village in Newtown Square, where she had lived in recent years.
Juanita Battle, current supervisor of services at the coalition, recalled that Ms. DiGiacomo was a volunteer who helped her incorporate the Cape May nonprofit agency in 1982 and directed it for three years.
"Her expertise in working with women and children inspired her to work with me" to make the agency stand on its own, Battle said. "She was wonderful."
Ms. DiGiacomo grew up in Wildwood, graduated from Wildwood High School, and served in the Women's Army Corps from 1944 through 1946, her niece said.
For a time, she taught home economics at what is now Mayer Sulzberger Middle School and Abraham Lincoln High School, both in Philadelphia.
She earned a bachelor's degree in what is now the nutrition and foods program at Drexel University in 1952 and a master's in political science at Haverford College in 1953.
In autobiographical notes, Ms. DiGiacomo wrote that Haverford "received a Ford Foundation grant, which supported my stay in Ghana for a two-year period, working in community development."
She then came home, her niece said, and earned a master's in what is now the human nutrition program at Cornell University in 1963.
Ms. DiGiacomo returned to Africa, where for three years in Ethiopia she was a pediatric nutritionist and, during that time, dean of women at Addis Ababa University.
In her notes, Ms. DiGiacomo wrote that she spent seven more years in India and two in Sierra Leone, as a nutrition adviser sponsored by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.
"In between foreign assignments," she wrote, "I taught at Drexel in the nutrition department and worked at Lankenau Hospital in cardiac research," and was the nutritionist in the Women, Infants and Children program at an outreach clinic of Thomas Jefferson University Hospital.
After retiring to Sea Isle City in the early 1980s, she was a member of its board of education and worked with Caring for Kids Inc. of Cape May County, which awarded her its blue ribbon in 2010.
Gov. Thomas H. Kean named her to a seven-year term on the New Jersey Children's Trust Fund, which, its website states, awards grants to child-abuse and neglect-prevention programs.
Besides Hill, she is survived by three other nieces.
A visitation was set for 9:30 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 29, in St. Mary Magdalene Church, 2400 N. Providence Rd., Media, with a Funeral Mass at 10:30 a.m. there and interment in Holy Cross Cemetery, Yeadon.
Donations may be sent to www.caringforkidsnj.com.
Condolences may be offered to the family at the O'Leary Funeral Home, 640 E. Springfield Ave., Springfield, Pa., 19064.
610-313-8134 @WNaedele