Margaret Chant-Papandreou


Margaret Chant-Papandreou is a Greek-American activist, writer, author and columnist who served as the first lady of Greece from 1981 to 1989, as the wife of Prime Minister Andreas Papandreou. Among her children are the Prime Minister of Greece George Papandreou, and the Member of the European Parliament Nikos Papandreou.
Chant-Papandreou is an important participant in the struggle for women's rights, as she played a leading role in the creation, elaboration and promotion of laws that greatly improved the legal and social position of Greek women, such as the abolition of the dowry institution, the legalization of abortion, the establishment of civil marriage, the legalization of divorce by mutual consent, the possibility of women retaining their surnames after their marriage and obtaining equal rights with the husband in the custody of their children.

Biography

Chant-Papandreou was born in Oak Park, Illinois, on September 30, 1923, the eldest of five sisters. She first studied journalism and then did her masters in public health at the University of Minnesota, where she met her future husband Andreas Papandreou in 1948. The family later moved to Elmhurst, Illinois. Her father's parents were from England and her mother's were from Switzerland. She married Andreas Papandreou in 1951. They initially lived in Minnesota and later in California, where Andreas Papandreou was Chair of the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley. She was for 8 years the President of the Greek Women's Union, a Greek independent feminist organization. She is also the author of several books and a columnist.
With Andreas Papandreou she had four children, George, Sofia, Nikos and Andrikos Papandreou.
In 1989, Chant-Papandreou agreed to grant a divorce so that Andreas Papandreou could marry Dimitra Liani.

Lagarde list

In December 2012, the newspapers To Vima and Proto Thema claimed in their publications that Chant-Papandreou owned one of the accounts on the Lagarde list.
On October 14, 2014, the Economic Crimes Enforcement Agency officially responded with a letter to Chant-Papandreou that, following an investigation carried out in the context of a lawsuit filed by M. Papandreou, her name is not included on the Lagarde list. The document was signed by the special secretary of SDOE, Stylianos Stasinopoulos.