American Women — Activists

  • Activist Donna Allen and her experience with HUAC

    Feminist and political organizer Donna Allen speaks on her experience with the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). She is on the National Committee to Abolish HUAC.

  • In Celebration of Black Womanhood / Aileen Hernandez

    Aileen Hernandez, former President of the National Organization for Women, and founder of the Black Women Organized for Action, gives a brilliant presentation of the problems, triumphs, and realities of life for Black women in the USA. Opens with Joyce Carol Thomas reading “A Poem for Black Women.” Hernandez is introduced by Margaret Sloan. Venue…

  • Lesbian Express: Self defense (Part 2 only)

    Aircheck of Lesbian Express episode about self-defense, December 9, 1973. Women are both leading and taking self-defense classes on street fighting and karate present their views on the physical confidence and mental state necessary to confront violence. This portion of the recording features a portion of a tape of another woman discussing self-defense. Also contains…

  • Sharing feminism: empowerment or imperialism? / Mary E. Hunt

    A discuss of feminist liberation theology in Latin America by Mary E. Hunt at the Graduate Theological Union at UC Berkeley, date unknown but likely late 1981. Hunt, a lesbian feminist theologian, spent eighteen months working in Argentina. In this talk, Hunt explores what relevance feminism has to women in Latin America and how her…

  • Rita Mae Brown, Donna Eagles and Zoe Nawoe discuss class differences

    Rita Mae Brown, author of The Hand That Cradles the Rock, Songs to a Handsome Woman, Rubyfruit Jungle and other books, and Donna Eagles, Bay Area activist, discuss class differences, feminism, sexual orientation, power and lack of power, publishing, humor, how to build a successful movement, and more with KPFA’s Zoe Nawoe. Includes phone calls…

  • Group interview with Rita Mae Brown, Sally Gearhardt, Zoe Nawoe, and Ellen Dubrowin

    Group interview with Rita Mae Brown, poet and author of Songs to a Handsome Woman (Diana Press, 1973), feminist writer and activist Sally Gearhart and KPFA’s Zoe Nawoe and Ellen Dubrowin, on teaching, art, politics, humor and survival. Brown reads her poems “The New Lost Feminism,” “Deja Vu: Watching Old Movies on the Late Night…

  • Annette Rubenstein talks to Blanch Cook about her book on Crystal Eastman

    Annette Rubinstein, editor of Science and Society, literary historian and critic, and veteran radical political activist, speaks with Blanche Cook, Associate professor at John Jay College and author of a recent book on the life and writings of Crystal Eastman, a socialist and feminist active during the early part of the twentieth century. Note “Use…

  • Sagaris and the August 7th Survival Community

    This summer, 200 active feminists from all over the United States and Canada came to Lyndonville, Vermont to attend Sagaris, the first independent institute for the study of radical feminist thought. This program includes interviews with Sagaris students and teachers, excerpts from taped classes, and readings from the analysis written by the August 7th Survival…

  • Women and the world in the 1980s: Cora Weiss and Annette Rubenstein

    Blanche Wiesen Cook interviews Cora Weiss, activist with Women Strike for Peace and director of the disarmament program at Riverside Church, and Annette Rubinstein, editor of Science and Society, an editor of Jewish Currents, and author of the two-volume work The Great Tradition in English Literature: From Shakespeare to Shaw (Monthly Review Press Classics, 1983).…

  • Blanche Cooke on Crystal Eastman

    Blanche Cooke talks about the life and work of Crystal Eastman (1881-1928), a radical, feminist, and socialist, and an attorney who graduated from the NYU law school in 1907. She was the first women New York State commissioner advocating for workers compensation, and she founded the Women’s International Peace Movement, now called the Women’s International…