Barbara Deming
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Barbara Deming (1917 - 1984) was an American feminist and advocate of nonviolent social change.
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[edit] 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. [1]
[edit] 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 floundered, 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. [2]
In 1976, Barbara moved to Florida with her partner, artist Jane Verlaine. Jane painted, did figure drawings and illustrated several books written by Barbara. Jane was a tireless advocate for abused women.
[edit] Lifes Work
Deming 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.
It is often said that she created a body of non-violent theory, based on action and personal experience, that centered on the potential of non-violent struggle in its application to the woman's movement. [3]
- Deming, Barbara: Prison Notes. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1966.
- Deming, Barbara: Running Away from Myself: A Dream Portrait of America Drawn from the Movies of the Forties. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1969.
- Deming, Barbara; Berrigan, Daniel; Forest, James; Kunstler, William; Lynd, Staughton; Shaull, Richard; Statements of the Catonsville 9 and Milwaukee 14 Delivered Into Resistance The Advocate Press: 1969.
- Deming, Barbara: Revolution and Equilibrium. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1971.
- Deming, Barbara: Wash Us and Comb Us. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1972.
- Deming, Barbara: We Cannot Live Without Our Lives. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1974.
- Deming, Barbara: A Humming Under My Feet. London: Womens Press, 1974.
- Deming, Barbara: Remembering Who We Are. Tallahassee, FL: The Naiad Press, 1981.
- Deming, Barbara; Meyerding, Jane (Editor): We Are All Part of One Another a Barbara Deming Reader . Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1984.
- Deming, Barbara; McDaniel, Judith; Biren, Joan E.; Vanderlinde, Sky (Editor): Prisons That Could Not Hold . University of Georgia Press, 1995.
- Deming, Barbara; McDaniel, Judith (Editor) I Change, I Change: Poems. New Victoria Publishers, 1996.
[edit] External links
- Barbara Deming: An Activist Life
- Ira Chernus, American Nonviolence: The History of an Idea
- Barbara Deming Papers. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University.
- A Random Chapter in the History of Nonviolence, by Michael L. Westmoreland-White
