Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel - Paperback

by Bettina Aptheker (Author)

At eight years old, Bettina Aptheker watched her family's politics play out in countless living rooms across the country when her father, historian and U.S. Communist Party leader Herbert Aptheker, testified on television in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. Born into one of the most influential U.S. Communist families whose friends included W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Bettina lived her parents' politics witnessing first-hand one of the most dramatic upheavals in American history. She also lived with a terrible secret: incest at the hands of her famous father and a frightening and lonely life lived inside a home wrought with family tensions.

Author Biography

Bettina F. Aptheker is professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she has taught one of the country's largest and most influential introduction to feminist studies courses for twenty-four years. She lives in Santa Cruz, CA, with her longtime partner, Kate Miller.