Suzanne La Follette

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Suzanne Clara La Follette (June 24, 1893 – April 23, 1983) was an American journalist, and an author who advocated for libertarian feminism in the first half of the 20th century.

She was born in Washington state into the politically prominent La Follette family. Her father was U.S. Congressman William La Follette; her brother was Chester La Follette, a painter.

Her full-length book, Concerning Women, broke ground in the 1920s, but went out of print for a second time after a 1972 reprint in the Arno Press American Women series. In 1973, an excerpt entitled "Beware the State" was included in "The Feminist Papers," an anthology edited by Alice Rossi. A short biography of La Follette, based on interviews with her grand-niece Maryly Rosner, her brother Chester La Follette, and her colleagues John Chamberlain, Priscilla Buckley and Helen Tremaine, can be found in the article "Suzanne La Follette: The Freewomen" by Sharon Presley (see External Link below).

In the 1930s, LaFollette served as secretary for the Committee for the Defense of Leon Trotsky, also known as the Dewey Committee for its chairman educator, John Dewey. LaFollette wrote the summary of the Committee's findings after holding an investigative meeting in Mexico where Trotsky was in exile. Many of the committee's members, like La Follette, Carlo Tresca, and Dewey were not Trotskyists, but consisted of anti-Stalinist socialists, progressives and liberals.

La Follette was active in the League of Equal Opportunity, a feminist organization that, unlike the larger National Women's Party, opposed not just sex-based minimum wage legislation, but all such legislation. She explained her opposition to such laws in Concerning Women. Her economic views, like those of her mentor Albert Jay Nock, were libertarian but influenced by Henry George.

She founded the libertarian magazine "The New Freeman" in 1932 and helped to found the libertarian magazine The Freeman edited by Albert Jay Nock and the conservative National Review. However, La Follette was not a traditional conservative. In the 1950s, there was no outlet for libertarian thought so she joined forces with conservatives, who at that time were closer to libertarians than any other group. In the interview conducted by Presley in 1980, her colleague, John Chamberlain stated that she was a libertarian, not a conservative. Her feminist views in fact often clashed with the conservative point of view. Based on an interview with Buckley, as reported in the "Freewoman" article ( see External link below), Presley states, for example, that "in 1964, when the New York Conservative Party, of which she was a co-founder, came out in favor of anti-abortion laws, she demanded that her name be dropped from the Party's letterhead - and it was."