Quenby Wilcox

Quenby Wilcox was born in New Orleans, grew up in Tucson, Arizona and moved abroad for the first time to England in 1976. She attended Cobham Hall in Kent, returning to the USA in 1978 to attend Foxcroft School in Middleburg, VA. In 1981, she moved to Washington, DC where she attended George Washington University and worked on Capitol Hill. She graduated with a BBA in International Marketing.
After university she worked for several years in the financial markets, and in 1988 packed her bags and was off to Paris to learn French. In 1989 she returned to the USA with the intention of entering law school, but soon returned to Paris to live with her future husband.

Six months later they were off to Madrid, where they were married. In 1991, they were expatriated by her husband’s multinational employer to Brussels, where their two children were born. They were then transferred to Paris in 1995.

In 1997, they were transferred to Bogotá, Colombia. While in Bogotá she was active in the Anglo-phone, Franco-phone and Hispanio-phone expat communities, serving on the board of a variety of expat associations, with a tenure as president of Bogotá Accueil (Fédération Internationale des Accueils Français et francophones a l’Etranger-FIAFE). In addition to her involvement in her children’s school, she worked with various local non-profit children’s organizations.

At the end of 2003, her family was transferred back to Madrid, where once again she struggled with the perpetual problem of trailing spouses; maintenance of a career. Due to very limited career prospects for a 40+ year old woman in Spain, along with the many entrepreneurial opportunities on the Internet, she decided to start a website for expat families. The idea eventually became Global Expats.

In 2007, www.global-expats.com was launched on the Internet, and the project received enormous interest from the global mobility industry and expats around the world. However, her husband had never wanted her working outside of the home, and when she refused to renounce her work on Global Expats, a very high-conflict, complicated, international divorce ensued.

As she continues her legal battles which are now headed towards the international courts on human rights, she has become involved in advocating for domestic violence as a human rights violation, women/homemaker’s rights within the courts, and the