Baxandall, Rosalyn Fraad, 1939-2015

Rosalyn Fraad "Ros" Baxandall, (June 12, 1939 – October 13, 2015), was an American historian of women's activism and an active New York City feminist.


Contents
1 Career
2 Personal life and education
3 Early career and feminist activism
4 Publications
5 References
6 External links
Career
Baxandall 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 2009. Upon her retirement, a scholarship was established in her name and that of Barbara Joseph (the Rosalyn Baxandall and Barbara Joseph Scholarship).[1]

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.[2]

She was a frequent speaker and commentator on women's liberation, women's activist history, and radical activist movements.[3][4][5] Especially in her later years, Ros was a champion for the rights of Palestinians, a commitment that led her to edit an anthology of films about the Palestine-Israel conflict.

Personal life and education
Baxandall was born in New York City on June 12, 1939. 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. Rosalyn Baxandall has two sisters, Harriet Fraad Wolff, born in August 1941, and Julie Fraad, born 1948.[citation needed]

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.[6][7] 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. After high school she attended Smith College for one year and then the University of Wisconsin 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.

At the university she met Lee Baxandall, to whom she was married from 1962 until 1978. Their son, Phineas Baxandall, was born in 1967. She has two grandchildren, Julian, B. 1999 and August (Nellie), B. 2001.

After leaving Madison, Ros 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).

After a 2015 diagnosis of incurable cancer, Ros left the hospital and held a party to say goodbye to the hundred attendees. She died on October 13, 2015.[8]

Early career and feminist activism
Baxandall began to work for Mobilization for Youth,[9] 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).".[10]

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.[11]

Publications
Her books include:

Rosalyn Baxandall; Linda Gordon, eds. (2001). Dear Sisters: Dispatches from the Women's Liberation Movement. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-01707-2. Linda Gordon.
Rosalyn Baxandall, Elizabeth Ewen (2000). Picture Windows, How the Suburbs Happened, 1945–1987. Basic Books. ISBN 978-0-465-07013-8.
Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall; Linda Gordon; Susan Reverby, eds. (1976). America's Working Women. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 978-0-393-31262-1. (revised ed. 1995)
Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (1987). Words On Fire: The Life and Writing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn (Douglass Series on Woman's Lives and the Meaning of Gender). Rutgers University Press. ISBN 978-0-8135-1241-9.
Baxandall has written many articles published in 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,[12][13] 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;[14] Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left;[15] Technology, the Labor Process and the Working Class: Essays;[16] and the Encyclopedia of the American Left.[17] She wrote an introduction to a new collection of works by Clara Zetkin, Clara Zetkin: Selected Writings.[18]

Baxandall is interviewed in the 2005 film by Gillian Aldrich and Jennifer Baumgardner, I Had An Abortion.[19]

Some of her papers on the women's liberation movement are available in the Duke University Library Special Collections;[20] 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 Radcliff Library at Harvard University.[21]

Rosalyn Baxandall, a feminist historian who was among the first to bring scholarly attention to the historical role of women in the workplace and to expand the meaning of “women’s work,” died on Tuesday night at her home in Manhattan. She was 76.

The cause was kidney cancer, her son, Phineas Baxandall, said.

Ms. Baxandall served on the front lines of the feminist movement in New York in the late 1960s.

She helped create Liberation Nursery, the first feminist day care center in New York. As an early member of New York Radical Women and Redstockings, she picketed the 1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, one of the most visible of the feminist protests of the ’60s, forever associated with a symbolic burning of restrictive women’s clothes that mainstream publications referred to as a “bra burning.”

She played a prominent role in the abortion “speakout” in the West Village in 1969, a forum at which women described in public their experiences in obtaining illegal abortions.

While teaching American studies at the State University of New York at Old Westbury, she, Linda Gordon and Susan Reverby assembled primary documents, including letters and diaries, that offered a sweeping history of women and labor. Their book, “America’s Working Women: A Documentary History, 1600 to the Present” (1976), was acquired for Random House by Toni Morrison, then a young editor there.

It remains a foundational text for students of American labor history and gender studies.

“That book was and continues to be the text that defines the contour of women’s labor history,” said Eileen Boris, a professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. “It recovered the voices and the actions of many kinds of women and many kinds of occupations from the early colonial period to the late 20th century.”

Rosalyn Fraad, known as Ros, was born on June 12, 1939, in Manhattan into a radical household. Her father, Lewis M. Fraad, was a Communist who worked for the Communist International, or Comintern, in Vienna in the 1930s and later became the chief of pediatrics at Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx. Her mother, the former Irma London, was a Communist lawyer and the niece of Meyer London, who was elected to Congress on the Socialist Party ticket in 1914.

“We threw Tampax at the F.B.I. agents who parked outside of our home for two days after my father refused to speak with them,” Ms. Baxandall and her sister Harriet wrote in an essay for “Red Diapers: Growing Up in the Communist Left” (1998), edited by Judy Kaplan and Linn Shapiro. “We giggled dirty words into the phone when told that it was tapped.”

Her mother’s deep unhappiness at suspending her career to raise children made a profound impression on her.


Ms. Baxandall attended Riverdale Country School in the Bronx and Hunter High School in Manhattan. As a teenager, she picketed the nuclear submarine base in Groton, Conn., with the Committee for Nonviolent Action, took part in peace campaigns by the American Friends Service Committee and agitated for civil rights and abortion rights.

She enrolled at Smith College but after a year, she transferred to the University of Wisconsin, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in French in 1961. She met and married a fellow student, Lee Baxandall, a leftist literary critic, whose enthusiasm for Marxism and European theater took them on an extended tour of East Germany, Hungary and Poland.

The marriage ended in divorce. Besides her son, she is survived by her sisters, Harriet Fraad Wolff and Julie Fraad, and two grandchildren.

After returning to the United States, Ms. Baxandall earned a master’s degree from the School of Social Work at Columbia University in 1963. She began working for the Mobilization for Youth, a social service organization on the Lower East Side, and then plunged into radical politics and the women’s movement, the subject of her book “Dear Sisters: Dispatches From the Women’s Liberation Movement” (2000), edited with Ms. Gordon.

Recalling those days in an interview with the feminist activist Jacqueline Ceballos in 1991, Ms. Baxandall said, “The one thing that I do have against the books that are written is they talk about all the politics and the splits, et cetera, but they don’t talk about the joy and fun we had.” She added, “We knew were changing history, and it was terrific.”

In 1971 she began teaching in the American studies department at the State University of New York at Old Westbury. She later served as head of the department for many years.

“By 1973, the guts had been taken out of the women’s liberation movement, and it was no longer innovative or exciting for me,” she wrote in the essay “Catching the Fire,” included in “The Feminist Memoir Project: Voices From Women’s Liberation” (1998), edited by Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Ann Snitow.

After retiring from SUNY in 2012, she taught in the labor studies program of the City University of New York and, through the Bard Prison Initiative, at the Bayview Correctional Facility, then a medium-security women’s prison in Manhattan.

She was the author of “Technology, the Labor Process and the Working Class: A Collection of Essays” (1976), “Words on Fire: The Life and Writing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn” (1987) and, with Elizabeth Ewen, “Picture Windows: How the Suburbs Happened” (2000).

A new edition of “America’s Working Women,” extensively revised and updated, was published in 1995.