Bonnie Bremser (b. 1939), born Brenda Frazer, is a Beat writer and protofeminist figure known for her epistolary memoir Troia: Mexican Memoirs, also published in the U.K. as For Love of Ray. [1]
Bremser was born Brenda Frazer in 1939 in Washington, D.C. She briefly attended Sweet Briar College in Virginia before dropping out to marry Ray Bremser, whom she'd met three weeks earlier. [1]
Bremser and her husband and infant daughter fled to Mexico in 1961 because her husband was wanted for parole violation. In Mexico, she engaged in sex work at the urging of her husband. [2] After Ray Bremser was jailed in 1963, Bonnie Bremser sent him weekly two-page letters chronicling their journey in Mexico and her experience of sex work. She has said the couple told jail authorities that the letters were business correspondence to get around a one-page personal letter maximum. Those letters later were compiled into Troia: Mexican Memoirs, originally published in 1969. [3] The word "troia" is Italian slang, meaning "sow" or "whore," but also references Helen of Troy. [1] [4]
Troia was republished in 2007, drawing renewed interest to Bremser's life and work. [4]
Troia has been described as a "lost classic of experimental writing that speaks the movement’s aesthetics and ethos from the vantage of a woman living the 'beat' life." [1] Bremser's work frequently draws comparisons to Jack Kerouac for her autobiographical chronicle of life on the road. [4] [5] Since the republishing of Troia, Bremser has also drawn recognition for her awareness of gender and race and her attitude toward those issues, which was nuanced especially for the 1950s and among the Beats. [6]
Simone Lucie Ernestine Marie Bertrand de Beauvoir was a French existentialist philosopher, writer, social theorist, and feminist activist. Though she did not consider herself a philosopher, nor was she considered one at the time of her death, she had a significant influence on both feminist existentialism and feminist theory.
Gloria Jean Watkins, better known by her pen name bell hooks, was an American author, theorist, educator, and social critic who was a Distinguished Professor in Residence at Berea College. She is best known for her writings on race, feminism, and class. The focus of hooks' writing was to explore the intersectionality of race, capitalism, and gender, and what she described as their ability to produce and perpetuate systems of oppression and class domination. She published around 40 books, including works that ranged from essays, poetry, and children's books. She published numerous scholarly articles, appeared in documentary films, and participated in public lectures. Her work addressed love, race, class, gender, art, history, sexuality, mass media, and feminism.
Betty Friedan was an American feminist writer and activist. A leading figure in the women's movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century. In 1966, Friedan co-founded and was elected the first president of the National Organization for Women (NOW), which aimed to bring women "into the mainstream of American society now [in] fully equal partnership with men".
Judith [Jude] Milhon, best known by her pseudonym St. Jude, was a self-taught programmer, civil rights advocate, writer, editor, advocate for women in computing, hacker and author in the San Francisco Bay Area.
Katherine Murray Millett was an American feminist writer, educator, artist, and activist. She attended the University of Oxford and was the first American woman to be awarded a degree with first-class honors after studying at St Hilda's College, Oxford. She has been described as "a seminal influence on second-wave feminism", and is best known for her book Sexual Politics (1970), which was based on her doctoral dissertation at Columbia University. Journalist Liza Featherstone attributes the attainment of previously unimaginable "legal abortion, greater professional equality between the sexes, and a sexual freedom" in part to Millett's efforts.
Sex-positive feminism, also known as pro-sex feminism, sex-radical feminism, or sexually liberal feminism, is a feminist movement centering on the idea that sexual freedom is an essential component of women's freedom. They oppose legal or social efforts to control sexual activities between consenting adults, whether they are initiated by the government, other feminists, opponents of feminism, or any other institution. They embrace sexual minority groups, endorsing the value of coalition-building with marginalized groups. Sex-positive feminism is connected with the sex-positive movement. Sex-positive feminism brings together anti-censorship activists, LGBT activists, feminist scholars, producers of pornography and erotica, among others. Sex-positive feminists generally agree that prostitutes themselves should not be criminalized.
Lily Braun, born Amalie von Kretschmann, was a German feminist writer and politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD).
Joyce Johnson is an American author of fiction and nonfiction. She was born Joyce Glassman in 1935 to a Jewish family in New York City and raised in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan, a few blocks from the apartment of Joan Vollmer Adams where William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac lived from 1944 to 1946. She was a child actress and appeared in the Broadway production of I Remember Mama, which she writes about in her 2004 memoir Missing Men.
Ray Bremser was an American poet married to Brenda Bremser.
Marabel Morgan is an American author of self-help books for married women, including The Total Woman (1973), Total Joy (1983), The Total Woman Cookbook (1976) and The Electric Woman (1986).
Alix Kates Shulman is an American writer of fiction, memoirs, and essays, and a prominent early radical activist of second-wave feminism. She is best known for her bestselling debut adult novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, hailed by the Oxford Companion to Women's Writing as "the first important novel to emerge from the Women's Liberation Movement."
Andrea Rita Dworkin was an American radical feminist writer and activist best known for her analysis of pornography. Her feminist writings, beginning in 1974, span 30 years. They are found in a dozen solo works: nine books of non-fiction, two novels, and a collection of short stories. Another three volumes were co-written or co-edited with US Constitutional law professor and feminist activist, Catharine A. MacKinnon.
Suzanne Monnier Voilquin was a French feminist, journalist, midwife, traveler and author, best known as editor of Tribune des femmes, the first working-class feminist periodical, and her memoirs, Souvenirs d’une fille du peuple: ou, La saint-simonienne en Égypt.
Ruza Wenclawska, more widely known as Rose Winslow and later as Rose Lyons by marriage, was a Polish-American suffragist, factory inspector and trade union organizer. She was a dedicated member of the National Woman's Party. Wenclawska's main goal within this organization was to advocate fair treatment in the workplace for women. She also worked as an actress and a poet.
Basanti Devi was an Indian independence activist during the British rule in India. She was the wife of activist Chittaranjan Das. After Das' arrest in 1921 and death in 1925, she took an active part in various political and social movements and continued with social work post-independence. She was awarded the Padma Vibhushan in 1973.
Multiracial feminist theory is a feminist theory promoted by feminist women of color, including Black, Latina, Asian, Native American, and anti-racist white women. In 1996, Maxine Baca Zinn and Bonnie Thornton Dill wrote “Theorizing Difference from Multiracial Feminism," a piece emphasizing intersectionality and the application of intersectional analysis in feminist discourse.
Brenda Feigen is an American feminist activist, film producer, and attorney.
Ronna C. Johnson is a Professor of English at Tufts University in Medford, Massachusetts. Johnson is an established authority on the Beat Generation. She has worked as a fiction editor for ASPECT magazine, Zephyr Press, and Dark Horse magazine. She is also the co-editor of the Journal of Beat Studies published by Pace University Press, a founding board member of the Beat Studies Association, and the co-editor of the Beat Studies book series published by Clemson University Press/Liverpool University Press.
Adela Sloss-Vento was born Karnes City, Texas to Anselma Garza and David Henry Sloss. As a young American woman of Mexican descent, she was determined to become a writer, hailing from southern Texas, educated in San Juan, later lived in Corpus Christi during World War II, and then settled in Edinburg, she used her pen as weapon for more than sixty years, countering racial discrimination and exploitation of laborers, all the while championing the civil rights of Mexican Americans through the written word.