Vicki Gabriner (1942-2018) was an American civil rights activist, feminist and LGBT rights activist who became an activist when she was just a student. She was briefly a member of Weathermen, which was the radical student activist group in the late 1960s. In 2002, Gabriner was honored at the Women Who Dared event in Boston. [1]
Gabriner was born in Homecrest, Brooklyn, New York, and raised in politically active family. Her mother and she had a lot of conversations about the importance of fighting for social justice. Her mother, Edna Levins, was president of the PTA, which organized against McCarthy-era legislation and put on concerts, mainly of socially conscious performers. [2] Gabriner went to Cornell University, where she got involved in civil rights organizing and graduated in 1963. [1]
Gabriner went to Fayette County, Tennessee with a Cornell-affiliated group for three summers (1964-1966). [3] She taught at freedom schools, worked on local elections, voter registration, and integration of public facilities. [4] She earned a master's degree in education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Gabriner, who moved to New York in 1968, taught in a decentralized school. In the meanwhile, she joined the radical student activist group, "The Weathermen" (also known as the Weather Organization). She had ambivalent feelings about this group. Then, she went to Cuba with the Venceromos Brigade. After she became a feminist, she moved to Atlanta in 1970 and she came out as a lesbian. Gabriner helped to found the Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA) in 1972, which became one of the earliest and longest running lesbian feminist organizations. [1] In 1974, she worked as lead organizer for Georgians for the ERA. [2]
Gabriner moved to Boston in 1979, where she worked as a civil rights investigator responding to federal Equal Opportunity Act infringements and as Executive Director at Sojourner, a feminist publication. [2]
Weathermen was a radical left-wing group which carried out bombings, jailbreaks, riots from 1969 through the 1970s.< In 1973, Gabriner was arrested in Atlanta on charges of accomplice to passport fraud connected to her brief Weathermen involvement. The FBI was seeking information about all Weathermen/SDS participants. Gabriner was tried in Boston Federal Court with Judge W. Arthur Garrity presiding. Her case was slowed by Judge Garrity's responsibilities implementing the desegregation of Boston Public Schools. Gabriner was convicted at trial but in 1978 she won on her appeal with lawyer, Nancy Gertner. [2]
Gabriner wrote prolifically for publications such as off our backs , Quest: A feminist quarterly , The Great Speckled Bird , ALFA's newsletter Atalanta, Sojourner, and Gay Community News . In 1971 she published Sleeping Beauty: A Lesbian Fairy Tale with Sojourner Truth Press. In 2009, she received her Ph.D from the Union Institute with a dissertation concerning Homecrest's PTA activism: Peak Time: Progressive Jewish Mothers, the PTA, and the Postwar Red Scare in Brooklyn, New York, 1946-1956. Gabriner's papers were deposited in 2015 to the Schlesinger Library. [5] The Robert and Vicki Gabriner Papers on Fayette County organizing are at The Wisconsin State Historical Society. [6]
Gabriner was honored in 2002 by Women Who Dared in Boston. [1]
Alix Cecil Dobkin was an American folk singer-songwriter, memoirist, and lesbian feminist activist. In 1979, she was the first American lesbian feminist musician to do a European concert tour.
Alice Stone Blackwell was an American feminist, suffragist, journalist, radical socialist, and human rights advocate.
Black feminism is a philosophy that centers on the idea that "Black women are inherently valuable, that [Black women's] liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else's but because our need as human persons for autonomy."
Barbara Smith is an American lesbian feminist and socialist who has played a significant role in Black feminism in the United States. Since the early 1970s, she has been active as a scholar, activist, critic, lecturer, author, and publisher of Black feminist thought. She has also taught at numerous colleges and universities for 25 years. Smith's essays, reviews, articles, short stories and literary criticism have appeared in a range of publications, including The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Ms., Gay Community News, The Guardian, The Village Voice, Conditions and The Nation. She has a twin sister, Beverly Smith, who is also a lesbian feminist activist and writer.
Grace Atkinson, better known as Ti-Grace Atkinson, is an American radical feminist activist, writer and philosopher.
Women Against Pornography (WAP) was a radical feminist activist group based out of New York City that was influential in the anti-pornography movement of the late 1970s and the 1980s.
Florynce Rae Kennedy was an American lawyer, radical feminist, civil rights advocate, lecturer and activist.
The Furies Collective was a short-lived commune of twelve young lesbian separatists in Washington, D.C., in 1971 and 1972. They viewed lesbianism as more political than sexual, and declared heterosexual women to be an obstacle to the world revolution they sought. Their theories are still acknowledged among feminist groups.
The Combahee River Collective was a Black feminist lesbian socialist organization active in Boston from 1974 to 1980. The Collective argued that both the white feminist movement and the Civil Rights Movement were not addressing their particular needs as Black women and, more specifically, as Black lesbians. Racism was present in the mainstream feminist movement, while Delaney and Manditch-Prottas argue that much of the Civil Rights Movement had a sexist and homophobic reputation.
Pat Parker was an American poet and activist. Both her poetry and her activism drew from her experiences as an African-American lesbian feminist. Her poetry spoke about her tough childhood growing up in poverty, dealing with sexual assault, and the murder of a sister. At eighteen, Parker was in an abusive relationship and had a miscarriage after being pushed down a flight of stairs. After two divorces she came out as lesbian "embracing her sexuality" and said she was liberated and "knew no limits when it came to expressing the innermost parts of herself".
The Miss America protest was a demonstration held at the Miss America 1969 contest on September 7, 1968, attended by about 200 feminists and civil rights advocates. The feminist protest was organized by New York Radical Women and included putting symbolic feminine products into a "Freedom Trash Can" on the Atlantic City boardwalk, including bras, hairspray, makeup, girdles, corsets, false eyelashes, mops, and other items. The protesters also unfurled a large banner emblazoned with "Women's Liberation" inside the contest hall, drawing worldwide media attention to the Women's Liberation Movement.
Martha Shelley is an American activist, writer, and poet best known for her involvement in lesbian feminist activism.
Ernestine Eckstein was an African-American woman who helped steer the United States Lesbian and Gay rights movement during the 1960s. She was a leader in the New York chapter of Daughters of Bilitis (DOB). Her influence helped the DOB move away from negotiating with medical professionals and towards tactics of public demonstrations. Her understanding of, and work in, the Civil Rights Movement lent valuable experience on public protest to the lesbian and gay movement. Eckstein worked among activists such as Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, Barbara Gittings, Franklin Kameny, and Randy Wicker. In the 1970s she became involved in the black feminist movement, in particular the organization Black Women Organized for Action (BWOA).
Chude Pamela Parker Allen, also known as Pamela Parker, Chude Pamela Allen, Chude Pam Allen, Pamela Allen, and Pam Allen is an American activist of the civil rights movement and women's liberation movement. She was a founder of New York Radical Women.
Jean V. Hardisty was a political scientist and lesbian radical feminist activist who became a national resource for human rights movements seeking social and economic justice and an end to bigotry based on race, gender, or class. She was a senior scholar with the Wellesley Centers for Women.
The Atlanta Lesbian Feminist Alliance (ALFA) was an American lesbian feminist organization, among the oldest and longest running in the country. It formed in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1972 as a breakaway from Atlanta's Gay Liberation Front (GLF) and Atlanta Women’s Liberation. The organization dissolved in 1994.
Sandra Cason "Casey" Hayden, was an American radical student activist and civil rights worker in the 1960s. Recognized for her defense of direct action in the struggle against racial segregation, in 1960 she was an early recruit to Students for a Democratic Society (SDS). With Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in Mississippi Hayden was a strategist and organizer for the 1964 Freedom Summer. In the internal discussion that followed its uncertain outcome, she clashed with the SNCC national executive.
Vivian Leburg Rothstein is a labor rights activist, feminist, and community organizer. She was instrumental in the civil rights movement and the peace movement. She also cofounded the Chicago Women's Liberation Union.
Persephone Press was a publishing company and communications network run by a lesbian-feminist collective in Watertown, Massachusetts. The company published fourteen books between 1976 and 1983, when the organization was sold to Beacon Press.
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