Ethel Skakel Kennedy (born April 11, 1928) is an American human rights advocate. Kennedy is the widow of U.S. Senator Robert F. Kennedy as well as the sixth child of George Skakel and Ann Brannack. She married Robert F. Kennedy in 1950, and the couple had eleven children together.
Shortly after her husband's 1968 assassination, Kennedy founded the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights. The organization is a nonprofit charity working to fulfill Robert F. Kennedy's dream of a just and peaceful world. In 2014, Ethel Kennedy was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama.
Ethel Skakel was born in Chicago, to businessman George Skakel and secretary Ann Brannack. Her parents were killed in a 1955 plane crash. She was the Skakels' third of four daughters and sixth child of seven, having five older siblings, Georgeann (1918–1983), James (1921–1998), George Jr. (1922–1966), Rushton (1923–2003), and Patricia (1925–2000), and one younger sister, Ann (b. 1933). George was a Protestant of Dutch descent while Ann was a Catholic of Irish ancestry. Ethel and her siblings were raised Catholic in Greenwich, Connecticut. George Skakel was the founder of Great Lakes Carbon Corporation, now a division of SGLCarbon. She attended the all-girls Greenwich Academy in Greenwich and graduated from the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Manhattan in 1945.