WAPUSH Interview with Dr. Bettina Aptheker

Interview by Geneva Williams

March 14, 2025

 

Geneva Williams: Can you share a little bit about your educational background and what made you want to become a professor of women’s studies?

 

Dr. Bettina Aptheker: I did my undergraduate work at University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s. I was very involved in political activism at the time and the free speech movement which I co-lead. I graduated from Berkeley with a degree in U.S. history and cultural anthology, and then I was out of school for quite a long time because I was politically involved in all kinds of movements. I was involved in the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, and then eventually the defense of Angela Davis. She was arrested in 1970. So I didn’t go back to school until after her trial was over. At that time I was living in San Jose with my husband and I got a Master’s Degree in Communications studies which for me was a continuation in U.S. history with a concentration in African American women’s history. That’s what I was doing. 

 

I graduated with a Master’s Degree and after that I was struggling with my lesbian identity. In April 1978 I separated from my husband. About a year and a half later I fell in love with a woman, and we are still together 47 years later. At the time of my divorce I had two small children. I decided to go get a Ph.D. I applied to two programs and got accepted into both and chose the history of consciousness program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. That’s where I did the rest of my formal education. I got my doctorate in March of 1983. By the time I got my doctorate I was already teaching women’s studies at UC Santa Cruz, a program founded primarily by students, with faculty support, in 1974-1975. Unlike many other campuses, women’s studies was always a major, you could always major it in. But it had no departmental status for many years. Faculty from different departments would teach classes that would constitute the courses for the major. 

 

I started teaching in the program, a number of classes, but the one that is the most well known was Introduction to Feminisms. I taught it for more than thirty years. Thousands of students went through it because I had an enrollment of 400-500 every fall when I taught it. So it was a very large and successful class. I was passionate about women’s studies, like you are now, and became passionate about gay and lesbian rights. 

 

Williams: That was a great answer, thank you so much. My next question for you is how you are legendary for teaching feminist studies for decades at UC Santa Cruz. Can you tell us what you enjoyed about that program? 

 

Aptheker: Mostly the students! (laughs) I loved working with students across the generations. When I first started teaching, my students themselves were political activists. They were active in the women’s liberation movement. They came out of the civil rights movement, many of them had been involved in the anti-war movement so I was just a little bit older than them. As you continue teaching, the students get younger and you get older. The gap is greater. So I really enjoyed drawing upon my own history of political involvement, talking about feminist issues. I published a memoir in 2006 called Intimate Politics which many of my students read and we read from. I had wonderful colleagues at UC Santa Cruz both in feminist studies and in other departments such as literature, psychology, sociology. So I enjoyed my colleagues very much and my students immensely. 

 

In 1993, we were able to start a designated emphasis for graduate students in women’s studies. That was very early–1993. So we didn’t have our own graduate students but we had graduate students that could do a graduate emphasis and we started teaching graduate courses in the department. I taught a class on feminist pedagogy for many years. I also taught a seminar on Black feminist reconstruction about Black women’s activism in the post-Civil War into the 19th and early 20th centuries. I enjoyed graduate teaching very, very much. Many faculty do and I sure did. But I enjoyed the undergraduates also. 

 

Williams: We have interviewed many people, including Mary Lee Sargent and Zoe Nicholson, that worked for passage of the Equal Rights Amendment. Did you have any involvement working for the Equal RIghts Amendment and do you consider yourself a supporter of the ERA? 

 

Aptheker: I’m definitely a supporter of the ERA. It was introduced in 1923. This country is shameful in so many ways. I’m not even talking about the man in the White House right now. Look at the trajectory of our history. That we couldn’t pass an Equal Rights Amendment in this country. It’s just shameful. And we never have. And it still languishes in a twilight zone of having been ratified by the required number of states, but the powers that be are not permitting it amend the Constitution. Although Biden tried before he left office. 

 

The United Nations adopted something in 1979 called the Convention to Eliminate All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. The acronym is CEDAW. A convention to end all forms of discrimination against women. And it’s been ratified, or endorsed by over seventy countries in the world but the United States has not accepted it. So this is in line with the ERA also. The opposition to it comes from mostly conservative, white, Republicans who have consistently opposed it because amongst other things it grants women sovereignty over their bodies. So they won’t accept it. By which I mean reproductive justice, reproductive freedom including abortion. So I definitely support the ERA and anything related to equality for women.

 

Williams: I would love to hear about your involvement in the free speech movement. We have included your involvement in that movement in our AP women’s history course proposal. Can you tell us how you got involved in that movement? 

 

Aptheker: Surprisingly, that movement was a little over 60 years ago now. So we had 60th anniversary celebrations last year, in October, back in New York. We had a wonderful one at NYU. We also had a marvelous celebration that students organized on the Berkeley campus in October of 2024. My first comment was going to be that it’s surprisingly relevant since right now you can see what’s going on all over with the Trump administration and what they’re doing to the Department of Education and how they are really compromising freedom of speech on campuses. Our struggle held for many years and now it is being eroded by an extremely reckless administration in a really fascistic way and I say that because they are violating the First Amendment. The First Amendment was the foundation of the free speech movement. I always advise people to re-read it if you haven’t read it recently, because it says Congress shall make no law infringing upon the freedom of the press, freedom of religion and freedom of speech. No law, it’s not like some law, it’s no law. So that’s a very important element of it.

 

The thing I would emphasize about the free speech movement is that I became involved because I was an undergraduate, as I’ve already said, on the Berkeley campus, active in a group called the W.E.B. DuBois Club. The DuBois Club was named after W.E.B. DuBois who was, among many other things, an early Black scholar of immense importance and the founder of the NAACP. So we named our club after him because he was also a socialist. We were socialists, and in my case I was also a Communist. So I was in charge of setting up our table with DuBois Club literature in front of the university in an area that everyone had assumed had belonged to the city of Berkeley. We would get free speech permits from the city of Berkeley to set up our table with literature and so forth without impeding pedestrian traffic or anything like that. 

 

In the fall of 1964, the University of California Regents announced that that strip of sidewalk that everyone assumed belonged to the city belonged to the university and they were going to extend their ban on political activity to that area and it would no longer be permitted. The important thing here also to note is that there had been a long standing ban on political activity on the campus that extended all the way back to the McCarthy period and even before that going all the way back to the 1930s. There had been big struggles on the Berkeley campus and many other campuses forcing faculty to sign loyalty oaths saying they are not now and had never been a member of the Communist Party and other organizations. So the free speech movement came at that moment and we challenged those rules and regulations as a violation of the First Amendment. The only requirement for being in the free speech movement for any organization, or anybody, was agreement with the First Amendment. We didn’t care what your ideology was, you could be a Republican, you could be a Communist, a member of a religious organization, a civil rights organization, whatever you were it didn’t matter as long as you agreed with the First Amendment. So that’s what the struggle was and that’s how I became involved with it. 

 

I want to say one more thing, it’s an anecdote about why I became so prominent in the movement. We had a meeting, originally we were called the United Front, we just called ourselves the United Front, with different organizations. After seizing the police car, and the release of Jack Weinberg from the car, the beginning of negotiations with the administration about freedom of speech. Clark Kerr who was president of the university gave a statement and it was quoted in the press. Saying 49% of the demonstrators are communists or communist sympathizers. This was patently untrue. But I really was a communist. And Mario Savio, who was the spokesperson for the free speech movement, we were at a meeting where we were planning next week’s activities, and he said with glee–”I know what we’re gonna do. Bettina’s going to speak at the next rally. She’s the one real communist we actually have.” So he wanted to throw me out there as a sort of act of defiance. So I spoke at the rally and became part of the leadership. So that’s how it happened. It was very serendipitous because I was in charge of the table and Kerr made that statement and Mario responded to it in that way. 

 

Williams: That’s fascinating. I’ve been fascinated with your new book, Communists in Closets, can you share a story or two that you learned while writing this book?

 

Aptheker: Well I was very passionate about this subject because I’m a lesbian and I had been in the Communist Party, I was in it for 19 years. I’ve been out of the Communist Party for most of my life now. So I left in 1981. I knew that the Communist Party was extremely homophobic and it expelled people from membership if they were out as lesbian or gay. This created terrible hardships and trauma for people who wanted to be involved in a revolutionary organization, who believed in socialism, believed in bettering people’s lives, especially with civil rights and anti-war activities. Also union rights. I knew I couldn’t possibly have been the only gay person in the Communist Party. I knew statistically that wasn’t possible. And I became really curious about who else was gay in the party, at any time in history. The party was founded in 1921 so I was interested in any time period. So I started to do the research. I had some glimmers of ideas I have to say, it wasn’t like I had no idea. 

 

The party had a huge membership in the 1930s and 1940s, over 100,000. A lot of people don’t realize that it was a very important part of the Popular Front against fascism which had arisen in Europe and of course in Germany. So I began to probe around and I came upon knowledge about an organization called Congress of American Women. It was a coalition of women, a radical organization to advance women’s equality, education, and peace. They elected a representative to go to Europe to be part of something called the Women’s International Democratic Federation which had been set up right after World War II in France. It involved women who were all involved in the anti-fascist Popular Front in Europe. And many of them were communist but not all of them. 

 

The woman who was selected to go was from the United States, it was Betty Millard. There’s a whole chapter about her in the book. I became fascinated with her. I realized, early on, from the archives I had access to from Smith College, that she was a lesbian. She was closeted for most of her life. She had a fabulous life, she was an activist–passionate about social justice and women’s rights. She wrote a very important pamphlet in 1948, very early, called Women as Myth, in which she really challenged the ideas of male supremacy in a feminist way. And this is before Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and before Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex was published in English. It had been published in France but not in English. So she was very prescient and I was very impressed by her. Through a series of amazing coincidences I became friends with her niece. She had a niece named Olivia Millard who lives very near me. I’m in Santa Cruz and she’s in Watsonville, which is a town twenty minutes south of me. She took me into her home and talked to me about her aunt who she was very fond of. So Betty Millard became a very important figure in my book. 

 

I think the last thing I would say about that is that she lived to the age of 98. So she lived long enough to experience the gay liberation movement and became part of it at the end of her life. That was such a wonderful thing for her, because she was so closeted. She got adopted by all these young lesbians who adored her and took care of her and took her to poetry readings. 

 

The other story that is important to me is about the Black playwright Lorraine Hansberry. There is also a chapter about her. Many people did not realize that she was not only in the Communist Party but she was a very serious revolutionary, really serious, and an African liberationist. And a brilliant playwright. She wrote a play many high school students read called A Raisin in the Sun, it’s widely performed, and it was the first play by a Black woman performed on Broadway. It became a film. And then she was a lesbian and she was married. She told her husband almost immediately after they were married, she didn’t hide it from him. And he was very supportive of her and very loving, so it’s really an interesting story. She accepted that she was a lesbian and that was ok. And she began to write plays in which they were queer heroes and heroines. 

 

The other reason she was very important to me is that she was Black, worked in Harlem, at a newspaper called Freedom, that was published by the well known singer and actor Paul Robeson. She was in a circle of what you might call a Black communist intelligentsia. And I knew all of them as a child. So when I discovered her and her life, I realized I never met her but I met everyone around her and it was fascinating for me. I loved all these people very much because they were friends with my parents and they would come to our home. So I loved them as a child. 

 

Williams: That’s such a wonderful story. So who would be your top three lesser known women in history that you think we should include in our curriculum? 

 

Aptheker: I tend to think of the more radical side of politics. One person I think would be important would be Elizabeth Gurley Flynn because she was one of the major leaders of women’s labor organizing going back to the Patterson New Jersey Silk Strike of 1912-1913. And she lived all the way until 1963. She is someone I knew. She was like a folk hero amongst working people, men and women. She was a very powerful, dynamic speaker and very courageous. And she was a communist so she was eventually hounded during the McCarthy anti-communist terror of the 1950s and imprisoned for three years. I think her life is very significant. 

 

The other person I think is not that well known is Ella Baker. Ella Baker was a Black woman who was very important starting in the 1930s in organizing for civil rights. Then she was affiliated with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s organization. Then she thought the SCLC was too masculinist and kind of drifted away from it. She then became a key person in organizing the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in the 1960s. She is kind of an unsung heroine. There are very good biographies of her including one by Barbara Ransby who teaches in Chicago. But by and large she is not well known. For example, Rosa Parks is someone you tend to learn about but you tend not to learn about Ella Baker. I’m not in any way criticizing Rosa Parks, but Ella Baker was at least as important as Rosa Parks in organizing the civil rights movement. 

 

And there is one other woman who would be great for the curriculum and her name is Winona LaDuke. She is still living and she is a Native American activist with a degree from Harvard in urban management. The tribe she is with are the Anishinaabeg from Minnesota. You can look her up online, she’s written many books, spoken a lot, been out there with the struggles for Native American people for sovereignty, for land rights, she’s a very important person when thinking about women. I happen to know her. I have invited her to speak a few times and she’s always wonderful with the students. 

 

Williams: Thank you for your suggestions. What emerging feminist scholarship do you admire or whose work are you currently enjoying reading? 

 

Aptheker: I love anything by Imani Perry who is a Black feminist scholar from Harvard. She wrote a marvelous book on Lorraine Hansberry called Looking for Lorraine. Her most recent book is called Black in Blues: How a Color Tells the Story of My People. It was published last year. She’s a scholar but she tends to write in a very accessible style. So I want to recommend her. I recommend anything by Angela Davis. Her most recent book is Abolition Feminism. Haymarket books republished her autobiography. There’s a recent book published by a feminist called Clara Bingham called The Movement. And it’s an amazing book. It’s a big huge book but you could read in it–it’s based on oral histories from women active in the women’s movement from 1963-1973. The chapters are organized chronologically and she did interviews with 120 women and then she slices in their comments and memories to form the chapters. So she’s not telling the narrative–everyone who lived it is telling the story. 

 

One other book, my colleague wrote. Her name is Felicity Amaya Schaeffer. It’s called Unsettled Borders: The Militarized Science of Surveillance on Indigenous Land. I think it’s a very important book and timely because it’s about the Mexican-U.S. border. Most of that literature focuses on Mexico and the United States. But very few people focus on the indigenous people that live on the border. For example the Tohono O’odham people were split, literally the families and tribes were split when the border was formed back in 1848. So I think her book is very important. 

 

Williams: How interesting! I have one last question for you. Do you support the creation of an AP U.S. Women’s History class? If so, can you share why you think this course would be beneficial for high school students?

 

Aptheker: Well I think it would be wonderful for high school students and I do support it. And not only women high school students but also guys. I think it would be really important for everyone to see the agency, the historical work that women have done and build some respect for that. And how that has shaped this country. I don’t think there’s a snowball chance in hell of doing it while Trump is in the White House. It’s awful what they’re doing to education right now. So I think you have to wait a few years before his regime ends. I do think the principle of it is very, very good and very beneficial. I would emphasize that the curriculum is interracial and multicultural. It’s not a history of white women in the United States but the history of women including Black, brown, Native American women, immigrant women and so on. It should have that dynamic force to it.