Bettina Aptheker
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Bettina Aptheker (born c. 1944) is an American, lesbian activist, author, and educator.
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[edit] Childhood
Aptheker was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Fay Philippa Aptheker and Herbert Aptheker, a radical activist and Marxist historian. Her first job as a teenager was in the home of W. E. B. Du Bois, with whom her father was a good friend.
[edit] Education
Aptheker obtained her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a leader in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement of the 1960s.
She completed her Master's degree at San José State University, where she later taught African-American and Women's Studies.
In the early 1980s Aptheker completed her graduate studies in the History of Consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
[edit] Family
Aptheker has been with Kate Miller, her life partner, since October 1979. They have three children (both from previous marriages), and Aptheker is a proud grandmother. Prior to this partnership, during her undergraduate years at UC Berkeley, Aptheker was married to fellow student and Communist Jack Kurzweil.
[edit] Career
Aptheker has been teaching in the Santa Cruz Feminist Studies department since 1980. While she teaches many classes, her "Introduction to Feminisms" (sic) course is one of the most popular on campus. What started as a 35 person seminar is now an overflowing lecture course. The course is so popular that in the fall of 2002 the entire course was filmed, with the eventual goal of making the videos accessible to the public.
During the 1970s, Aptheker was actively involved in the trial of Angela Davis, a long-time friend and fellow Marxist.
Aptheker is also an accomplished author.
[edit] Bibliography
- Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought For Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel available October 2006 from Seal Press, an imprint of Avalon Publishing Group, Inc.
- The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis (1976)
- Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness and the Meaning of Daily Life (1989)
