LaborArts

Alix Kates Shulman, writer and activist in the civil-rights, anti-war, and radical feminist movements, was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1932. In the early 1960s she was active in CORE’s 7-Arts Chapter; during the Vietnam War she was arrested attempting to close down an Army induction center; she helped plan the first national demonstration of the women’s liberation movement, the 1968 Miss America Protest in Atlantic City.

She was arrested again in 1985 for preventing CIA recruiters from entering the University of Colorado, Boulder campus; in 1991, while teaching in Honolulu, she organized a Pacific branch of No More Nice Girls to mount an abortion speak-out and street theater actions; and in 2012 she helped organize Occupy Wall Street’s four Feminist General Assemblies.

Her first feminist publication was her widely attacked 1970 article “A Marriage Agreement,” proposing that men and women split childcare and housework equally. Among her books are To the Barricades: The Anarchist Life of Emma Goldman; the “feminist classic” novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen; Burning Questions, a novel about the rise of women’s liberation; and A Marriage Agreement and Other Essays: Four Decades of Feminist Writing. Currently she is co-editing, with Honor Moore, the anthology Writing the Women’s Movement: American Feminism, 1963–1991.

Interview

Video by Julia Fitzgerald, interviewed by Rachel Bernstein

Awards ceremony

Video by Julia Fitzgerald

Honorees

• Doreen Wohl
• Alix Kates Shulman
• Anne Cunningham
• Evelyn Jones Rich
• Mirene Ghossein