| Barbara Deming |
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Information About ™Barbara Deming |
| CATEGORIES ABOUT BARBARA DEMING | |
| 1917 births | |
| deming, barbara | |
| 1984 deaths | |
| american pacifists | |
| american political writers | |
| american tax resisters | |
| feminist writers | |
| lesbian writers | |
| nonviolence | |
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EARLY LIFE Barbara Deming was born in New York . She attended a ''Friends'' ( Quaker ) school up through her high school years. Deming directed plays, taught dramatic literature and wrote and published fiction and non-fiction works. On a trip to India , she began reading Gandhi , and became committed to a non-violent struggle, with her main cause being Women's Rights. She later became a journalist, and was active in many demonstrations and marches over issues of peace and Civil Rights . She was a member of a group that went to Hanoi during the Vietnam War , and was jailed many times for non-violent protest. {Link without Title} RELATIONSHIPS At sixteen, she had fallen in love with a woman her mother's age, and thereafter she was openly Lesbian . She was later the romantic partner of writer and artist Mary Meigs from 1954 to 1972 . Their relationship eventually foundered, partially due to Meigs' timid attitude, and Deming's unrelenting political activism. During the time that they were together, Meigs and Deming moved to Wellfleet, Massachusetts , where she befriended the social commentator Edmund Wilson and his circle of friends. Among them was the revolutionary Canadian author Marie-Claire Blais , with whom Meigs became romantically involved. Meigs, Blais, and Deming lived together for six years. {Link without Title} LIFES WORK Deming seemed to understand the vital link between non-violence, peace and the oppression of women that had eluded her mentors, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr . She openly believed that it was often those whom we loved that oppressed us, and that it was necessary to re-invent non-violent struggle every day. Barbara Deming's ideas have taken a quantum leap beyond previous theories in several ways. She led the way to free non-violent thinking effectively from its dependence on the religious imagery and justification of Scripture. It is often said that she created a body of non-violent theory, based on action and personal experience, that is woman-centered, and fully see's the potential of non-violent struggle in its application to the woman's movement. {Link without Title} EXTERNAL LINKS |
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