Kate Austin

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This article is about the anarchist writer Kate Austin. For the similarly named character from the television show Lost, see Kate Austen.

Kate Cooper Austin (1864–1902) was an American journalist and advocate of feminist and anarchist causes.

Austin was raised in a Universalist and spiritualist family in Hook's Point, Iowa, where she married in August 1883. Around the same time, her father discovered Lucifer, an anarchist/free love journal published by Moses Harmon^[1]. Austin and her entire family were influenced by Hamon's writings, but it was the Haymarket Riot of 1886 and the ensuing reaction which brought Austin to anarchism.^[2]

A member of the American Press Writers' Association, Austin wrote for many working-class and radical newspapers. She also contributed to Lucifer and to anarchist periodicals such as The Firebrand, Free Society, Discontent, and the Demonstrator. Austin's interests included sexual reform and the economic status of working people. In 1897 and 1899, Emma Goldman visited Austin at her home in Caplinger Mills, Missouri, where she gave several well-attended lectures.

A study of Austin's contributions to the social reform movements of the late 19th century summarized her role thus: "Her devotion to liberty made her an anarchist; her hostility to patriarchy made her a feminist. She was too much the former to join the organized women’s movements of her day, and too much the latter to ally with mainline political anarchists — most of them men — whose devotion to liberty often stopped short of women’s liberation.”^[3]

[edit] Footnotes

^ Presley, Sharon. Feminism in Liberty. Feminista! The Journal of Feminist Construction. Retrieved on 2006-03-25.
^ Carolyn, Ashbaugh. Radical Women: The Haymarket Tradition. The Lucy Parsons Project. Retrieved on 2006-03-25.
^ Miller, Howard S. (April 1996). "Kate Austin: A Feminist-Anarchist on the Farmer's Last Frontier". Nature, Society and Thought 9 (2): 189–209.