Rosalyn Baxandall

Rosalyn "Ros" Baxandall (born Rosalyn "Ros" Fraad June 12, 1939 in New York City ; died October 13, 2015 in New York City) was an American activist and historian of the women's movement.

Life

Rosalyn Fraad came from a family of American communists. Her father, Lewis M. Fraad, was a doctor at the Bronx Municipal Hospital and a professor of medicine at Albert Einstein College of Medicine , and her mother, Irma London, was a curator at the Brooklyn Museum . She had two sisters. Fraads great uncle Meyer London was a socialist congressman.

Fraad studied French for a year at Smith College and then at the University of Wisconsin-Madison . After graduating in 1961, she married the writer and publisher Lee Baxandall in 1962 , they had a son, and they divorced in 1978. In 1968 she was one of the founders of the children's shop Liberation Nursery . The family lived for a time in the communist-ruled states of the GDR, Poland and Hungary out of political conviction. On her return, she studied at Columbia University School of Social Work in New York and graduated with a Master of Social Work (MSW).

Baxandall was appointed Associate Professor at the State University of New York (SUNY) and became Professor of American and Women's Studies in 1990. She retired in 2012. She then taught at the City University of New York and in rehabilitation in a prison in Manhattan .

Baxandall was among the founders of the New York Radical Women in 1967 and was also active in the Redstockings, founded in 1969, and in the theater group Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell (WITCH). In 1968 she took part in the demonstration ( bra burning ) on the occasion of the Miss America elections in Atlantic City .

Baxandall wrote the pamphlet Women and Abortion: The Body as Battleground and spoke in 1969 in Washington DC at a rally to change the abortion law, she participated in the CARASA (Coalition for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse). In 2005 she was interviewed by Gillian Aldrich and Jennifer Baumgardner for the film I Had An Abortion .

Baxandall was part of the informal circle Marxist Feminist Group # 1. She wrote the foreword to a selection of the translated writings of Clara Zetkin ,

Baxandall became involved on the Palestinian side in the Middle East conflict and published an anthology on films on this subject.

Fonts (selection)

• with Linda Gordon , Susan Reverby (Eds.): America's Working Women . WW Norton & Company, 1976 ISBN 978-0-393-31262-1 (revised 1995)
• Technology, the Labor Process and the Working Class: A Collection of Essays . 1976
• Words On Fire: The Life and Writing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn . Rutgers University Press, 1987 ISBN 0-8135-1241-7
• Catching the Fire , in: Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Ann Snitow (Ed.): The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices From Women's Liberation . 1998
• with Elizabeth Ewen : Picture Windows, How the Suburbs Happened, 1945–1987 . Basic Books, 2000 ISBN 0-465-07013-2
• with Linda Gordon (Ed.): Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women's Liberation Movement . Basic Books, 2001 ISBN 978-0-465-01707-2
• Re-Visioning the Women's Liberation Movement's Narrative: Early Second Wave African American Feminists , in: Feminist Studies , 2001

literature

• Sheila Rowbotham : A Century of Women. The History of Women in Britain and the United States . London: Viking, 1997 ISBN 0-670-87420-5 , p. 586
• William Grimes: Rosalyn Baxandall, Feminist Historian and Activist, Dies at 76 , in: NYT, Oct 14, 2015

Web links

• Literature by and about Rosalyn Baxandall in the catalog of the German National Library
• Literature by and about Rosalyn Baxandall in the WorldCat bibliographic database
• Rosalyn Baxandall in the Internet Movie Database (English)
• Katie Long: An Interview with Rosalyn Baxandal , in: The Catalyst, December 20, 2011
• Rosalyn Baxandall on Women's Liberation and the History and Politics of Day Care in New York City , Discussion, Nov. 17, 2005, archived at University at Albany