Rosalyn Baxandall

{{Infobox person

| image =

| alt =

| caption =

| birth_name = Rosalyn Fraad

| birth_date = {{Birth date |1939|6|12}}

| birth_place = New York City, U.S.

| death_date = {{Death date and age|2015|10|13|1939|1|12}}

| death_place = New York City, U.S.

| occupation = Historian

| years_active =

| education = University of Wisconsin–Madison

| spouse = {{Marriage|Lee Baxandall|1962|1978|reason=div.}}

| children = Phineas Baxandall

| relatives = {{Plainlist|

Harriet Fraad (sister)
Ephraim London (uncle)
Meyer London (great-uncle)
Sheila Michaels (cousin)

}}

Rosalyn Baxandall ({{nee}} Fraad; June 12, 1939 – October 13, 2015) was an American historian of women's activism and feminist activist.

Early life and education

Baxandall was born in New York City on June 12, 1939.[https://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/15/nyregion/rosalyn-baxandall-feminist-historian-and-activist-dies-at-76.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss New York Times Rosalyn Baxandall, feminist historian and activist, dies at 76] Her father, Lewis M. Fraad, was chairman of the Department of Pediatrics at Bronx Municipal Hospital, and Assistant Dean of the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Her mother, Irma London Fraad, was a curator of Middle Eastern Art at the Brooklyn Museum. She had two sisters, Harriet Fraad Wolff (born 1941) and Julie Fraad (born 1948).{{Cite web |title=Papers of Rosalyn Baxandall, 1933-2015 |url=https://researchworks.oclc.org/archivegrid/archiveComponent/930046781 |access-date=2025-03-22 |website=researchworks.oclc.org |language=en}}

Baxandall's maternal great-uncle, Meyer London, was a U.S. Congressional Representative elected on the Socialist Party ticket in 1915. He was one of 50 Congressmen and six Senators to oppose U.S. entry into World War I.{{cite news|url=https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2003/jun/07/weekend7.weekend2|author=Gary Younge|

title=Born in the eye of the FBI|date=June 6, 2003|work=The Guardian|access-date=July 27, 2015}}{{cite news|url=http://jewishcurrents.org/a-socialist-felon-in-congress-my-great-uncle-meyer-london-20822|title=A Socialist in Congress: My Great Uncle Meyer London|date=September 7, 2013|author=Rosalyn Baxandall|work=Jewish Currents|access-date=July 27, 2015|archive-date=January 11, 2015|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150111204627/http://jewishcurrents.org/a-socialist-felon-in-congress-my-great-uncle-meyer-london-20822}} Rosalyn's uncle, Ephraim London, a labor lawyer, was a distinguished civil libertarian and legal scholar.

She attended Riverdale Country Day School and then Hunter High School, graduating in 1957.{{Cite web |date=2022-07-09 |title=Oral History Interviews Portal: Collection Overview |url=https://web.archive.org/web/20220709103035/https://oralhistoryportal.library.columbia.edu/document.php?id=ldpd_8600916 |access-date=2025-03-22 |website=web.archive.org}} After high school she attended Smith College for one year and then the University of Wisconsin–Madison, from which she graduated with a major in French in 1961. While at the university, she was active in a struggle for racial integration in housing.{{cn|date=August 2022}}

Early career and feminist activism

Baxandall began to work for Mobilization for Youth,{{cite web|url=http://www.columbia.edu/cu/lweb/archival/collections/ldpd_4079120/index.html|title=Mobilization for Youth records|work=Columbia University Libraries Archival Collections}} a service organization on the lower east side of New York City founded by Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward in 1961, where she led youth groups and started a day care center. She translated French articles for the New Left journals Liberation and Viet Report.

A leader from the earliest days of the New York City women's liberation movement, Baxandall was a founding member of New York Radical Women, established in 1967, which published the well-known Notes from the First Year and Notes from the Second Year. She was also a member of Redstockings, created in 1969; WITCH (the Women's International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell), which arose as a split-off from New York Radical Women, emphasizing political rather than personal change; No More Nice Girls; and CARASA (Coalition for Abortion Rights and Against Sterilization Abuse).".{{cite book|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=csGUOUsPK_gC&q=rosalyn+baxandall&pg=PA513|title=The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women's Liberation|author1=Rachel Blau DuPlessis |author1-link=Rachel Blau DuPlessis |author2=Ann Snitow|author2-link=Ann Barr Snitow|publisher=Rutgers University Press|date=2007|isbn=978-0-8135-3973-7}}

She was a member of the east-coast Marxist Feminist Group #1, an informal discussion group of scholars on socialist feminism. Shortly after her son was born, she and other parents founded Liberation Nursery, a cooperative that continues as a daycare center today. In 1968, Baxandall appeared on the nationally syndicated David Susskind show with fellow feminists Kate Millett, Anselma Del'Olio and Jacqui Ceballoss. She was also the first speaker at the historic abortion speak-out at Washington Square Methodist Church in 1969.{{cite web|url=http://wordsofchoice.blogspot.com/2009/02/today.html|title=Abortion Speakout: 2009 and 1969|date=February 28, 2009|work=Words of Choice: Up the Creativity}}

Career

Baxandall taught Women's studies at Queens College, City University of New York. She was among the early faculty, starting in 1971, at the new campus of the State University of New York at Old Westbury (SUNY). Beginning as Associate Professor of American Studies, in 1990 she became a full professor there. In 2004 she was awarded a Distinguished Teaching Professorship. She retired in 2012. Upon her retirement, a scholarship was established in her name and that of Barbara Joseph (the Rosalyn Baxandall and Barbara Joseph Scholarship).{{cite web|url=http://www.oldwestbury.edu/giving/foundation/scholarships-and-endowments|title=Scholarships at Old Westbury|date=2015|access-date=August 9, 2015|archive-date=April 19, 2021|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20210419104744/https://www.oldwestbury.edu/giving/foundation/scholarships-and-endowments|url-status=dead}}

After retirement, she taught at the Labor Studies Program of the City University of New York (CUNY) as well as in a women's prison, Bayview Correctional Facility in Manhattan, through the Bard Prison Initiative.{{cite news|url=http://www.catalystatoldwestbury.com/news/view.php/35209/An-Interview-with-Rosalyn-Baxandall

|author=Katie Long|title=An Interview with Rosalyn Baxandall|date=December 20, 2011|work=The Catalyst|access-date=July 27, 2015}}

She was a frequent speaker and commentator on women's liberation, women's activist history, and radical activist movements.{{cite web|url=https://www.opendemocracy.net/5050/kathleen-b-jones/feminism-in-action-rewriting-frances-colonial-past|title=Feminism in action: Rewriting France's colonial past|author=Kathleen B. Jones|date=March 24, 2014}}{{cite web|url=http://www.albany.edu/talkinghistory/arch2005july-december.html|title=Rosalyn Baxandall on Women's Liberation and the History and Politics of Day Care in New York City|date=2005}}{{cite web|url=http://www.ontheissuesmagazine.com/cafe2/article/175nalCode=rrm|author=Rosalyn Baxandall|title=The Populist Movement Reborn, At Last, In Occupy|work=On The Issues Magazine|date=October 14, 2011}}{{Dead link|date=November 2018 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }} Especially in her later years, she was a champion for the rights of Palestinians, a commitment that led her to edit an anthology of films about the Palestine-Israel conflict.

Publications

Her books include:

{{cite book| url=https://archive.org/details/dearsistersdispa0000unse | url-access=registration | quote=Linda Gordon. | title=Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women's Liberation Movement |editor= Rosalyn Baxandall |editor2=Linda Gordon |editor2-link=Linda Gordon | publisher= Basic Books| year= 2001| isbn= 978-0-465-01707-2}}
{{cite book| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=A0mzAAAAIAAJ| title=Picture Windows, How the Suburbs Happened, 1945–1987 |author=Rosalyn Baxandall |author2=Elizabeth Ewen |publisher=Basic Books| year=2000|isbn=978-0-465-07013-8}}
{{cite book| title=America's Working Women| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=9qzWvhNZ5pMC&q=Linda+Gordon| year= 1976|editor=Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall |editor2=Linda Gordon |editor2-link=Linda Gordon |editor3=Susan Reverby |editor3-link=Susan Reverby | publisher= W. W. Norton & Company| isbn=978-0-393-31262-1}} (revised ed. 1995)
{{cite book| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=mqbaAAAAMAAJ| title=Words On Fire: The Life and Writing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (Douglass Series on Woman's Lives and the Meaning of Gender) |author=Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall |author2=Elizabeth Gurley Flynn| publisher=Rutgers University Press| year=1987| isbn= 978-0-8135-1241-9}}

Baxandall wrote many articles for magazines and journals, including Second-Wave Soundings with co-author Linda Gordon in The Nation and Re-Visioning the Women's Liberation Movement's Narrative: Early Second Wave African American Feminists in Feminist Studies,{{cite news|url=http://www.thenation.com/article/second-wave-soundings/

|author=Rosalyn Baxandall, Linda Gordon|title=Second-Wave Soundings|date=July 3, 2000|work=The Nation|access-date=July 27, 2015}}{{cite news|jstor=3178460/

|author=Rosalyn Baxandall|title=Re-Visioning the Women's Liberation Movement's Narrative: Early Second Wave African American Feminists|date=Spring 2001|work=Feminist Studies}} as well as authoring the pamphlet, Women and Abortion: The Body as Battleground.

Her work is also in several anthologies, including A Companion to American Women's History;{{cite book|title=A Companion to American Women's History|editor=Nancy A Hewitt|publisher=Wiley-Blackwell|date=January 14, 2005|doi=10.1002/9780470998595|isbn = 978-0-470-99859-5}} Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left;{{cite book| url=https://books.google.com/books?id=SFZ2t1ojGo8C|title=Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left|editor1=Judy Kaplan |editor2=Linn Shapiro|publisher=University of Illinois Press|date=1998|isbn=978-0-252-06725-9}} Technology, the Labor Process and the Working Class: Essays;{{cite book| url=https://archive.org/details/technologylaborp0000unse

| url-access=registration

|title=Technology, the Labor Process, and the Working Class: Essays|publisher=Monthly Review Press|date=1976|isbn=978-0-85345-397-0}} and the Encyclopedia of the American Left.{{cite book|url=https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofam00buhl_0|url-access=registration|editor=Mari Jo Buhle |editor2=Paul Buhle |editor3=Dan Georgakas|publisher=Oxford University Press|title=Encyclopedia of the American Left|date=1998|isbn=978-0-19-512088-2}} She wrote an introduction to a new collection of works by Clara Zetkin, Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings.{{cite book|url=http://www.haymarketbooks.org/pb/Clara-Zetkin|title= Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings| publisher=Haymarket Books|editor=Philip S. Foner|date=2015}}

Baxandall was interviewed in the 2005 film by Gillian Aldrich and Jennifer Baumgardner, I Had An Abortion.{{cite web|url=https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0815754/|title=I Had An Abortion|website=IMDb }}

Some of her papers on the women's liberation movement are available in the Duke University Library Special Collections;{{cite web|url=http://library.duke.edu/digitalcollections/wlmpc/about/F|title=Rosalyn Baxandall Papers at Duke Library Special Collections}}{{dead link|date=November 2017 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }} Papers from her work with Linda Gordon are housed in the Tamiment Library and the Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives at New York University. An extensive collection of her papers, interviews, and letters are in a collection at Radcliffe Library at Harvard University.{{Cite web|url=https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/8446|title=Harvard Library collection of Rosalyn Baxandall}}

Personal life

At the University of Wisconsin, she met Lee Baxandall, to whom she was married from 1962 until they divorced in 1978.{{citation needed |date=June 2021 |reason=years of marriage}} Together, they had one son, Phineas Baxandall.

After leaving Madison, Rosalyn and Lee Baxandall spent some time in Germany, Hungary and Poland, where Lee pursued his interests in radical theater and European Marxism. The experience solidified their convictions that the Soviet system did not offer an alternative. Moving back to New York, she enrolled in the Columbia University School of Social Work from which she received a Master of Social Work (MSW).

Rosalyn Baxandall's maternal cousin was Sheila Michaels, also a remarkable feminist in her own right, whom Ephraim London never publicly acknowledged as his daughter.{{cite news|last1=Fox|first1=Margalit|title=Sheila Michaels, Who Brought 'Ms.' to Prominence, Dies at 78|url=https://www.nytimes.com/2017/07/06/us/sheila-michaels-ms-title-dies-at-78.html|work=The New York Times|date=July 6, 2017}}

Death

After a 2015 diagnosis of kidney cancer, she left the hospital and held a party to say goodbye to the hundred attendees. She died on October 13, 2015, at her home in New York City.{{citation needed |date=June 2021 |reason=details on party and diagnosis date}}

References

External links

[http://socialarchive.iath.virginia.edu/ark:/99166/w69c6wpd] Rosalyn Baxandall, Social Archive
[https://id.lib.harvard.edu/ead/sch01052/catalog Tully-Crenshaw Feminist Oral History Project Records, 1961-2001]. MC 548. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass.
[https://hollisarchives.lib.harvard.edu/repositories/8/resources/8446 Papers of Rosalyn Baxandall, 1933-2015: A Finding Aid.] [https://www.radcliffe.harvard.edu/schlesinger-library Schlesinger Library], Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.

Category:1939 births

Category:2015 deaths

Category:20th-century American historians

Category:20th-century American women writers

Category:21st-century American historians

Category:21st-century American women writers

Category:American women historians

Category:Queens College, City University of New York faculty

Category:Columbia University School of Social Work alumni

Category:Deaths from kidney cancer in New York (state)

Category:Feminist historians

Category:Historians from New York City