Ann Hunter Popkin, 1945-

Educator, sociologist, feminist, and activist Ann Hunter Popkin was born on September 21, 1945, to Sally and George Popkin and raised in Long Island, New York. As a teenager, Popkin won the first of many scholastic awards, including an American Field Service scholarship in 1961, for an intercultural summer program that enabled her to travel to Norway as an exchange student. During the 1960s, she also participated in peace marches, and became involved in the civil rights movement, which included organizing food and clothing drives for freedom workers in the South, and registering voters during Mississippi Freedom Summer of 1964. An essay based on her experience was published in Letters Home (1965). Popkin also attended the Encampment for Citizenship, a summer youth program founded in 1944 to encourage political activism and volunteerism. Her volunteer activities included working with inner city youth in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York.

Popkin graduated cum laude from Radcliffe College in 1967 and took a year off to work with noted sociologist Noam Chomsky researching the American media's coverage of the Viet Nam war. She attended Brandeis University from 1968 to 1977, earning an M.A. and a Ph.D. Beginning in 1970, she taught introductory classes in sociology at Brandeis and subsequently at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, the University of California at Santa Cruz, and for numerous women's organizations.

In 1969, Popkin became a founding member of Bread and Roses in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the oldest and largest women's liberation organizations in the United States. Adopting the slogan used by striking textile workers in 1912 for its name, Bread and Roses consisted of standing committees, consciousness-raising collectives, and study groups. Members used public speeches, leafleting, guerilla theater, and other tactics to advocate for a broad range of women's issues, including abortion and reproductive rights, child care, equal employment opportunities, and violence prevention. After the organization disbanded in 1971, Popkin remained active in numerous organizations, including the New England Marxist-Feminist Study Group, the Boston Women's Union, Boston Women in the Social Sciences, and the Socialist Column, a radical faculty group at the University of Massachusetts at Boston.

Popkin wrote about her experience in the women's liberation movement in "Women's Liberation," an article co-authored with Linda Gordon, also a member of Bread and Roses (in Seasons of Rebellion: Protest and Radicalism in Recent America, 1972), and in "The Personal Is Political: The Women's Liberation Movement" (in They Should Have Served that Cup of Coffee, 1979). A number of her photographs were published in local newspapers and various publications, including Women and Their Bodies: A Course, the predecessor publication to Our Bodies, Ourselves, published by the New England Free Press (1970). She also made several films that focused on issues pertinent to women.

In 2003, Popkin was awarded a Women of Achievement award from Oregon State University Women's Center for her role in developing and teaching the Difference, Power and Discrimination Program. She has served as director of the University's Women's Studies department, and taught Unlearning Racism workshops to students and teachers. She currently resides in Eugene, Oregon and is the Diversity Coordinator for the Shambhala Center in Portland.

From the guide to the Additional papers of Ann Hunter Popkin, 1954-1979, (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute)

A 1967 graduate of Radcliffe College, Annie Popkin was in 1969 a founding member of Bread and Roses, a women's liberation organization in Cambridge, Mass. Made up of consciousness-raising groups devoted to increasing personal and political understanding of the status and condition of women, Bread and Roses sought to educate others by sponsoring various events, including talks at high schools and colleges, and by investigating and protesting instances of sexism. Popkin was also active in the New England Marxist-Feminist Study Group and the Boston Women's Union. A teacher and film-maker, she has taught at the University of California at Santa Cruz, the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and the University of Oregon, where she was acting director of women's studies. For a photograph of AP, see PC 101 in the Schlesinger Library.

From the guide to the Papers, 1968-1977, (Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute)