As Juliet Relis Bernstein lay in bed in her final days, health ever more fragile at 108, her thoughts slipped back to 1919, when she first began attending a one-room schoolhouse in upstate New York.
“On my first day of school, my father took me in a red wagon drawn by Harry, our hard-working horse,” she wrote in a letter that was published in the Cape Cod Chronicle the day before she died. “After that, I walked three miles, accompanied by my sisters and the other children we met along the way.”
Traveling a greater distance than she could have imagined during those six-mile round-trip walks to school, she became a teacher herself and an activist for her union, for women’s rights, and for peace in the world she inhabited for more than a century.
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Mrs. Bernstein, who drew international attention to the financial health care challenges the elderly face when she set up a GoFundMe so she could spend her last months in her Chatham home, died there on Nov. 18.
Her 108 years were divided almost evenly between her decades growing up in New York and working as a teacher, and the half-century since she and her husband retired in 1971 to Chatham, where she turned her attention full-time to speaking out about numerous causes.
Mrs. Bernstein surely had been one of the few people still alive who accompanied her parents to the polling station on Election Day in 1920, the first time her mother was allowed to cast a ballot.
“I remember accompanying my mother in a horse-drawn carriage to the polls in the first election when women, at long last, had the right to vote,” she said in an interview for the book “We the Resilient: Wisdom for America from Women Born Before Suffrage.”
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Already an activist by the time she started working as a high school teacher in the years before World War II, Mrs. Bernstein was a feminist in the 1930s before the term was in common use, said her son Bruce.
She also supported abortion rights throughout her life. In a Globe letter to the editor in 1979, she called for surgical procedures to “remain legal so that all women can continue to have safe, legal abortions.”
During her years on the Cape, Mrs. Bernstein worked with social justice organizations such as the Cape Cod chapter of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, an international peace group founded during World War I, for which she wrote and edited the monthly newsletter.
A former president of the League of Women Voters on Cape Cod, she also was honored by the Cape Cod NAACP in 1993 with its Unsung Hero Award. Mrs. Bernstein had spent her life advocating for racial equality.
“She was way ahead of her time,” said Bruce, who lives in New York City. “She was a follower of Martin Luther King Jr. and brought us up from the very beginning, even in the ‘50s and ‘60s, to be antiracist.”
In Chatham, she played a key role in the approval of a resolution to make the town a nuclear-free zone.
And more than 40 years ago she wrote to state lawmakers to note that the Chatham Band accepted municipal financial support, yet its bylaws said members must be at least 18 and male. Rather than forfeit the town’s budget allocation, the band changed the bylaws to eliminate the gendered language.
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“A very sensible decision,” she told the Globe in 1982, though this year she recalled that her gender equality advocacy was not well received back then: “I got phone calls. Somebody told me to drop dead.”
Juliet Relis was born on July 2, 1913, in Ferndale, a hamlet in Liberty, N.Y.
The second of four children, she was a daughter of Louis Relis and Esther Ruderman Relis, who ran a farm and a boarding house.
Louis died when Juliet was 14, and her mother encouraged her to keep studying after she graduated from Liberty High School. She received a bachelor’s degree from Brooklyn College and a master’s from Teachers College, Columbia University.
While teaching home economics in New York City high schools, she met Selig Bernstein, a mathematics teacher, when both were union activists. They married in 1937.
Mr. Bernstein, who was 86 when he died in 1993, lost his job for a few years when he was targeted during the red-baiting era of US Senator Joseph McCarthy, but he eventually was able to return to teaching.
“What we wanted was peace and justice and for everybody to be treated well,” she told the Globe earlier this year.
For most of their careers, the Bernsteins lived in the Bayside neighborhood of Queens, N.Y., where they raised their children.
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A home economics teacher whose students often won citywide contests, Mrs. Bernstein was known for her cooking and hospitality.
“She was a great mom. All my friends loved coming to our house,” Bruce said.
“What I realized in the last six months was that she was really my best friend,” he added. “I spoke with her at least once a week since I left home at age 14 to go to boarding school. At the end it was a lot more than that.”
A prolific writer of letters to the editor of various newspapers, Mrs. Bernstein penned an unpublished autobiography for her descendants to read.
She rejoiced in the election of Kamala Harris as vice president, and said in an interview for “We the Resilient” that she was “truly disappointed” when Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election.
But “instead of despairing,” she advised people to “join an organization that can make changes. Engage in nonviolent protests. Write letters to the editor of your newspaper. Work with others who are like-minded.”
Still an activist in her final months, Mrs. Bernstein drew international attention in July from as far away as The Guardian newspaper in London during a GoFundMe campaign that allowed her to independently cover her health care costs for living at home.
Financial assistance from her children, a small pension, and Social Security still couldn’t pay for everything. She raised nearly $134,000, which paid for home health care attendants.
“I’m not going to go to a nursing home,” she told the Globe for a front page article in July. “I’m remaining here.”
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Bruce said then that he was “not against nursing homes, but she has seen friends who have gone into nursing homes and died very quickly. She wants to control the terms of her final times.”
As Chatham’s oldest resident, Mrs. Bernstein was awarded the Boston Post Cane, and at her suggestion the town’s Fourth of July parade in 2020 celebrated the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote.
Much work remained, though, as she told the Chronicle: “We still have no Equal Rights Amendment.”
In addition to her son Bruce, Mrs. Bernstein leaves her daughter, Ellen Bernstein Murray of Mountain View, Calif.; another son, Robert of New Hartford, N.Y.; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Family and friends will gather to celebrate Mrs. Bernstein’s life at 2 p.m. on Jan. 16 in the VFW Hall in Chatham.
“I cannot do anything now but think of my past,” she wrote in her final Chronicle letter to the editor.
“I am ready to die,” she said in closing. “At 108, I am at peace.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.