Bettina Aptheker - Biography

Bettina Fay Aptheker (born September 13, 1944) is an American activist, author, feminist, and professor.

Biography

Early years and education

Aptheker was born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina to the first cousins Fay Philippa Aptheker and Herbert Aptheker, a radical activist and Marxist historian. She was raised in Brooklyn, New York. Her first job as a teenager was in the home of W. E. B. Du Bois, a good friend of her father's.

Political career

Aptheker was a delegate to the June 1964 founding convention of the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs, a Communist Party-sponsored youth organization, held in San Francisco.

Aptheker was a member of the governing National Committee of the CPUSA and was remembered by California party leader Dorothy Healey in her 1990 memoir as "one of the liveliest of the young people who rose to prominence in the party in the 1960s and also one of the warmest human beings I've ever met."

In 1968, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia divided the leadership of the CPUSA, with a majority of the National Committee, headed by party leader Gus Hall, backing the intervention of Soviet tanks into Czechoslovakian internal affairs. A meeting of the National Committee held over the Labor Day weekend backed Hall by a margin of five-to-one. Bettina Aptheker denounced the invasion, however, and voted with the minority — standing in opposition to her father Herbert, one of the CPUSA's leading intellectuals.

During the 1970s, Aptheker was actively involved in the high-profile trial of Angela Davis, a long-time friend and fellow Communist Party member.

Academic career

Aptheker obtained her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where she was a leader in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement during the Fall of 1964 as an activist in the W.E.B. DuBois Club there. At the time, neither she nor anyone else in the FSM, made public any official connection with the Communist Party, but her parentage and political beliefs were well known. "Tina" was the subject of California Senator William F. Knowland's famous remark at the time, made as he went about fighting what he saw as a conspiracy of Communists and their dupes at Berkeley, "If it walks like a Duck and talks like a Duck, it's probably a Duck"

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.

Aptheker has been teaching in the University of California at Santa Cruz Feminist Studies department since 1980.

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 grandmother. Prior to this partnership, during her undergraduate years at UC Berkeley, Aptheker was married to fellow student and Communist Jack Kurzweil.

In her 2006 memoir, Intimate Politics, she claims that she was sexually molested by her father from the age of 4 to the age of 13. Her charges are based on recovered memory and dissociation and so have been called into doubt by some. Mark Rosenzweig writes "the truth about Herbert and Bettina is inaccessible to us." She also tells about their highly emotional reconciliation several years before his death. In addition, she claims that her father's celebrations of black resistance were attempts "to compensate for his deep shame about the way, he believed, the Jews had acted during the Holocaust" (for which she has been criticized as "possibly antisemitic".)

Footnotes

Works

• Columbia Inc. New York: W.E.B. DuBois Clubs of America, May 1968.
• The Morning Breaks: The Trial of Angela Davis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976.
• The Unfolding Drama: Studies in U.S. History. With Herbert Aptheker. New York: International Publishers, 1979.
• Woman's Legacy: Essays on Race, Sex and Class in American History. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1982.
• Tapestries of Life: Women's Work, Women's Consciousness and the Meaning of Daily Life. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989.
• Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel. Berkeley, CA: Seal Press, 2006.

External links

• Google Books - Intimate Politics
• MetroActive profile
• UC Santa Cruz Feminist Studies Faculty Page
• Christopher Phelps, "Father of History," The Nation, Nov. 5, 2007 (subscriber only)