The obit wasn't published until late June, but I still regret not searching on her name in the last six months.

Not to be confused with the younger corporate event organizer - or with anyone whose last name is spelled differently, of course.

https://www.legacy.com/us/obituaries/legacyremembers/karen-lindsey-obituary?id=52349158
(with photo and five short remembrances)

Writer, feminist, and teacher Karen Lindsey (December 3, 1944-April 6, 2023) grew up in Queens NY. Always an activist, she moved to Boston in her twenties and became a key chronicler of the women's movement. Starting in the 1970s as a columnist for The Boston Phoenix and later the Boston Herald American, she raised feminist issues of the day for a broad readership, as well as contributing to feminist publications such as The Second Wave and Sojourner, which was published in Cambridge from 1975 to 2002.

Lindsey constantly encouraged others to see themselves as writers, whether in the feminist writing group she held in her living room or through her formal teaching at Emerson College, their Kasteel Well program in the Netherlands, and at University of Massachusetts, Boston. She brought to her teaching both the clear-eyed focus of a journalist and the creativity of a poet. Her first published book was the1975 collection of poems Falling Off The Roof.

Lindsey's openness about both her struggles and the things she enjoyed (watching figure skating or the wives of Henry VIII) modeled that feminism is anything but a monolithic movement. Her 1995 book Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII also showed that a feminist view of history can make lively and historically accurate reading.

Lindsey's support of her friends and their support of her were legendary. She wrote about this often, including in her 1981 book Friends as Family. She was coauthor of several books, including of Doctor Susan Love's Breast Book. Her commitment to writing and original thinking inspired her friends, colleagues, and students to do the same in countless books and other writings.

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22karen+lindsey%22+books&tbm=isch&ved=2ahUKEwjGiufkuOKDAxW7GmIAHRYeCIMQ2-cCegQIABAA&oq=%22karen+lindsey%22+books&gs_lcp=CgNpbWcQA1DpC1j3L2DZMWgAcAB4AIABQ4gBsQGSAQEzmAEAoAEBqgELZ3dzLXdpei1pbWfAAQE&sclient=img&ei=Qb6mZYbmObu1iLMPlrygmAg&bih=925&biw=1920
(book covers)

https://www.kirkusreviews.com/search/books/?q=karen%20lindsey&sf=t
(two Kirkus reviews)

https://www.amazon.com/stores/Karen-Lindsey/author/B000APCA4O?ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1&qid=1705427801&sr=1-1&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/228541.Divorced_Beheaded_Survived
(119 reader reviews for one book - oddly, I couldn't find reviews of her OTHER books where she was the primary author)

https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/d/1000682997
("Sexual Harassment on the Job and How to Stop It," Ms. Magazine, November 1977)

Lindsey has some jaw-dropping stories in this long article - it's about seven pages long. Especially one story about a waitress and another about Ann Landers' outrageous response to a nurse.

(I found out that column was from Feb. 1977. Nurses everywhere loudly responded and their letters were printed on March 30th. Landers apologized. I don't know much about her life, but since she and her twin, Abby, both went to college in the 1930s, when hardly ANYONE could afford college, it may be safe to say that Landers had a pretty sheltered life, both as a teen and as an adult. At any rate, Landers certainly SOUNDED at first as though she'd never heard of harassment in general. Gag.)

And, from an old post of mine:

"Why Children?" (1980, ed. Dowrick & Grundberg) is a collection of essays by 18 women. Most of the women became mothers. Lindsey got sterilized at age 28, in August of 1973, despite the opposition of her relatives AND her left-wing "friends." Her essay is on pages 243-249. Quote:

"Abortion and other forms of contraception still allow room for the myth of woman's destiny: 'I don't want children YET.' Sterilization says, firmly, that for the woman seeking it, the question is not birth control but birth prevention, and childless women who opt for sterilization are making it clear that they, and not society, will determine their 'roles.' "

(The rest of the essay is fascinating; she said she first got an image of how happy a childfree life could be at age 7, when she saw Betty Hutton as a trapeze artist in the movie "The Greatest Show on Earth.")

Unfortunately, that 1973 essay about her decision not to have children doesn't seem to be available anywhere online. Not even in snippet form at Google Books.

A few excerpts:

"...I went through four years of Catholic high school, accumulating graces and guilts, hearing with monotonous regularity that if I didn't have a religious vocation, my job was to be fruitful and multiply. It didn't work. They broke my spirit with Joycean thoroughness, but I held stubbornly to one tenet. I was going to be an old maid, and no one was going to stop me."

Then her mother started taking in foster babies/kids and telling Lindsey's brothers to play with them or walk with them, but never to feed them or change their diapers - that was KAREN's job. She objected when they told her it would be "good practice" for her; she pointed out that she wasn't going to have kids and since the brothers probably would, THEY needed the practice, not her. But, of course: "It wasn't fair, my mother said firmly, to expect boys to change diapers. Period. I changed diapers.

"And slowly, the grown-ups attitude changed. It was no longer cute that I didn't want kids..."

More later.

Keep in mind, btw, that she likely used the word "childless" in 1973 only because no one had come up with the term "childfree" yet.

"...I remember at the age of seven - we had just moved into a new neighborhood - announcing to
my new friends that I was going to be a trapeze artist when I grew up, and I wasn't going to get
married or have babies. I had recently seen 'The Greatest Show on Earth,' and despite the
conventional love-story ending, I somehow realized that Betty Hutton wouldn't have been up
there on a trapeze in her glittering turquoise costume joyfully flying through the air if she'd had
to feed a houseful of kids. Or maybe it was just the disparity between that glittering fantasy
figure and the banal reality of what being a mommy was in my world. While I soon outgrew
Betty Hutton, I remained firm in my determination to achieve spinsterhood."

(And in her late teens, she had a lover, Mark. But she didn't want to have children with him. Then, in 1965...)

"...Eventually, and for other reasons, I went into analysis. The grown-ups (at twenty, I still thought
of them as 'the grownups') heaved a sigh of relief. Now I'd get over this foolish, 'sick' notion of mine.
When my father expressed, casually, the assumption that, as the night (follows) the day, analysis
would lead to maternal yearnings, I started to tremble. I went to my analyst, in fury and terror,
demanding to know if 'health' would mean wanting children. If I was going to be cured into domesticity,
I'd keep my neurosis. My analyst, a good and wise woman, stared at me. 'How do I know what you'll want?'
she asked, and explained, carefully, that there was no set lifestyle for a 'healthy' person, but rather an
understanding of what her own, individual needs were.

"With the advent of that tragic farce The Sexual Revolution, I found (so I thought) more acceptance of my
disinterest in motherhood.

"...(At age 25) I went to my doctor, never doubting that it would be a simple process of announcing my
intention and scheduling my operation. My doctor was understanding and sympathetic, but he assured me
that no hospital in the country would sterilize an unmarried, childless woman. It was not a question of law:
only two states (back then) have laws restricting sterilisation. It was (the American Medical Association)
run hospital boards, who also worked an arbitrary 'parity' system: age times number of children must
equal a hundred and twenty before a woman can be sterilised.

"...Once, I talked to some people from Zero Population Growth. They were simply uninterested in the
rights of a childless woman to remain childless.

"...I expected negative reactions from the straight world - they'd ALWAYS thought I was crazy. But young
people who'd f----- around and had abortions and done acid and praised the Weathermen and even supported
'women's lib' were equally horrified. They acted as though I were proposing a terrible act of self-mutilation and -
yes - a hideous betrayal of nature. Rarely did people respond as if I were making a purely personal choice: they
were angry, hostile, threatened. At first, I simply didn't understand - even if I were making a tragic mistake, it
would hurt me, not them. I developed a series of stock defensive answers: (1) Yes, it's an irrevocable decision.
So is losing one's virginity. So is having a baby - with the added danger, in that case, of f------ up two lives
instead of one; (2) If I change my mind I can always adopt. The world is full of unwanted children; (3) Shut up.

"After a while, I started sticking with number 3. I got pretty tired of having to defend myself.

(Finally, she found a doctor - male - who gave her no hassle and who scheduled her for the next month - August, 1973,
when she was 28.)

"...I still sometimes get the flack I used to get. I was at a party recently, and met an acquaintance I hadn't
seen in a year. After a moment of party chat, he suddenly asked, in a lowered voice: 'Did you do what you
were threatening to do?' For a moment I wondered if I'd made some kind of remark about bombing the Pentagon
or assassinating Howard Hughes. Then it occurred to me what he meant. 'You mean my sterilisation? Yes, I did.'
'Well,' he said sadly, 'it's too late to say anything now.' 'Yes,' I beamed, 'it certainly is.'

"I keep meeting more and more childless women who've tried to get sterilised and have had experiences nearly
identical to mine. And, suddenly, people who once called abortion murder are eager for these women to take a
chance on pregnancy and then go to New York for an abortion. I am convinced that as more women seek
sterilisation, the right-to-life crowd will focus less on the increasingly more respectable alternative of
abortion and zero in on women like me. Abortion and other forms of contraception still allow room for the myth
of woman's destiny: 'I don't want children YET.' Sterilisation says, firmly, that for the woman seeking it, the question
is not birth control but birth prevention, and childless women who opt for sterilization are making it clear that they,
and not society, will determine their 'roles.'

"It seems wonderfully ironic to me now, after years of involvement in radical politics, that twenty-one years ago, at
the age of seven, sitting on my girlfriend's stoop, I made the most revolutionary commitment of my life. Long
before the days of the new feminist consciousness, I accepted as a given the right to control my own body.
Looking back, it amazes me that for twenty years, not knowing what I was fighting for, or even that I was fighting.
I held on to that right. And there is nothing in my life that I am prouder of than that first feminist decision, made
under the spell of Betty Hutton's glittering turquoise costume and the exultant freedom of her dance through the air."

Just had to post again to make sure everyone would be able to read the last line of my previous post!

Appreciate this posting, Lenona[.[, of an accomplished writer with whom I was wholly unfamiliar.

You might also have noted that the late Lindsey was born Sunday, December 3, 1944--thirteen days before the Saturday, December 16th onset of Hitler's final (and ultimately futile, thank Zeus) offensive, now known to posterity as The Battle of the Bulge. (The entire text of the American commander's ultra-succinct courageous refusal (on Thursday, December 21st) to surrender his Wehrmacht-surrounded divisions has gone down down in history as probably the most famous single-word quote of all time: "Nuts!")

BRYAN STYBLE/Florida