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Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel
Set amidst the political upheaval of the McCarthy trials, the Vietnam War, and the rise of the women's movement, Intimate Politics is a courageous and uncompromising account of one woman's personal and political transformation, and a fascinating portrayal of a key chapter in our nation's history.
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 on 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 incest at the hands of her famous father and a frightening and lonely life lived inside a home wrought with family tensions.
A gripping and beautifully rendered memoir, Intimate Politics is at its core the story of one woman's struggle to still the demons of her personal world while becoming a controversial public figure herself. This is the story of childhood sexual abuse, abortion, sexual violence, activism, and the triumph over one's past. It's about FBI harassment and persecution, Jewish heritage, and lesbian identity. It is, finally, about the courage to speak one's truth despite the consequences and to break the sacred silence of family secrets.
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 on 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 incest at the hands of her famous father and a frightening and lonely life lived inside a home wrought with family tensions.
A gripping and beautifully rendered memoir, Intimate Politics is at its core the story of one woman's struggle to still the demons of her personal world while becoming a controversial public figure herself. This is the story of childhood sexual abuse, abortion, sexual violence, activism, and the triumph over one's past. It's about FBI harassment and persecution, Jewish heritage, and lesbian identity. It is, finally, about the courage to speak one's truth despite the consequences and to break the sacred silence of family secrets.
375 pages, Paperback
First published September 5, 2006
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
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August 5, 2021insightful & powerful memoir, worth reading for insight into cpusa, the changes and growth in marxism & feminism & their intersections. also a pretty good way to see how deep the academic machine runs with co-optation of marxism.
genuinely really liked bettina and everything she was writing about until she got to her weird little bit about white women’s spirituality and new age obsession with nonviolence, toxic pacifism (like, interpersonal conflict is not war y’all, please stop acting like the dharma will stop genocide and oppression), and buddhism.
genuinely really liked bettina and everything she was writing about until she got to her weird little bit about white women’s spirituality and new age obsession with nonviolence, toxic pacifism (like, interpersonal conflict is not war y’all, please stop acting like the dharma will stop genocide and oppression), and buddhism.
April 25, 2021
Intimate Politics, How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel, Bettina F. Aptheker, (Emeryville: Seal Press,/Avalon, 2006)
I have read perhaps a dozen or more 1960’s movement activist’s bios or memoirs from Malcolm X, Angela Davis, to Howard Zinn, and Carl Bernstein. None of them are more compelling, more searingly honest and more personably written than Bettina F. Aptheker’s Intimate Politics.
Here is the full blossoming of a soul shedding the husk of overpowering familial tradition, parental abuse, and childhood political indoctrination to acknowledge who she is as a thinker, an observer of life, and a woman full in her self. We turn every page feeling that she is taking us someplace she herself had no idea she was headed for.
Dr. Aptheker begins life in Brooklyn as the daughter of the premier thinker of the American Communist Party, Herbert Aptheker. Feeling she is fulfilling a bright clearly defined future, she leaves an adolescence dominated by party ideals, and her father’s every opinion to move to Berkeley, California just before the Free Speech Movement of 1964. Still cocooned in self-congratulatory party indoctrination, she becomes a mainstay of the Free Speech, Civil Rights, and Anti-war Movements, and a California Communist Party member. All of her personal contacts and social awareness are tied to the connections she makes in this world.
She convinces herself she is fulfilled and successful in her father’s eyes and in her own expectations until her simmering sexual awakening towards women erupts beneath the carefully groomed landscape of activist politics and marriage. Her fast-building dilemma boils over from the pressure of molestation by a comrade, her memories of abuse, and the acknowledgment that the people she moves towards with real yearning are women, some beyond the Party.
Bettina is a person who inexorably is unable to deny the truth about anything including herself. During the 1970s the ideas behind Feminism began to saturate her experience. This is when her politics became personal. She recognized that women’s experience was a universal paradigm beyond classic Marxist-Leninism, but the party refused to accept that their male-dominated leadership participated in exploiting the women in their own cadre. They refused to consider the exploitation of women as profoundly universal and transcendent of class. She breaks from the party—and therefore the yoke of her father—at the same time that the Party purges her from their leadership ranks.
Bettina then rapidly blossoms into a new understanding of real comradeship and love. She embraces her sexual identity and begins to breathe. However, she pays a price for her path to self-awareness. Her memories of parental abuse resurface and she becomes aware of the limits of a political philosophy, though ultimately humanist in its intentions, is expressed in cold doctrinaire terms that no longer appeal to a mind moved by her heart.
For those yearning for a map to guide us in looking at our own lives, Intimate Politics is more than a good read, it’s an important one. Bettina Aptheker exemplifies the deep female wisdom of cutting the strings to her earlier life in such a way as too keep the love of her ex-husband and children. She comes to a oneness in Zen Buddhism, partnership with a true soul mate, and a full life with her family. Ultimately she earns her reward for her struggle in terms of inner peace.
In Intimate Politics Bettina Aptheker reveals the tender unfolding layers of her own self truth with the skill of a trained researcher. The most important subject she has researched is her own soul. The book is a true teaching. It is the sound of one soul listening.
Joel D. Eis, MFA
Former Draft Resistance organizer
Former professor of theatre, (retired)
I have read perhaps a dozen or more 1960’s movement activist’s bios or memoirs from Malcolm X, Angela Davis, to Howard Zinn, and Carl Bernstein. None of them are more compelling, more searingly honest and more personably written than Bettina F. Aptheker’s Intimate Politics.
Here is the full blossoming of a soul shedding the husk of overpowering familial tradition, parental abuse, and childhood political indoctrination to acknowledge who she is as a thinker, an observer of life, and a woman full in her self. We turn every page feeling that she is taking us someplace she herself had no idea she was headed for.
Dr. Aptheker begins life in Brooklyn as the daughter of the premier thinker of the American Communist Party, Herbert Aptheker. Feeling she is fulfilling a bright clearly defined future, she leaves an adolescence dominated by party ideals, and her father’s every opinion to move to Berkeley, California just before the Free Speech Movement of 1964. Still cocooned in self-congratulatory party indoctrination, she becomes a mainstay of the Free Speech, Civil Rights, and Anti-war Movements, and a California Communist Party member. All of her personal contacts and social awareness are tied to the connections she makes in this world.
She convinces herself she is fulfilled and successful in her father’s eyes and in her own expectations until her simmering sexual awakening towards women erupts beneath the carefully groomed landscape of activist politics and marriage. Her fast-building dilemma boils over from the pressure of molestation by a comrade, her memories of abuse, and the acknowledgment that the people she moves towards with real yearning are women, some beyond the Party.
Bettina is a person who inexorably is unable to deny the truth about anything including herself. During the 1970s the ideas behind Feminism began to saturate her experience. This is when her politics became personal. She recognized that women’s experience was a universal paradigm beyond classic Marxist-Leninism, but the party refused to accept that their male-dominated leadership participated in exploiting the women in their own cadre. They refused to consider the exploitation of women as profoundly universal and transcendent of class. She breaks from the party—and therefore the yoke of her father—at the same time that the Party purges her from their leadership ranks.
Bettina then rapidly blossoms into a new understanding of real comradeship and love. She embraces her sexual identity and begins to breathe. However, she pays a price for her path to self-awareness. Her memories of parental abuse resurface and she becomes aware of the limits of a political philosophy, though ultimately humanist in its intentions, is expressed in cold doctrinaire terms that no longer appeal to a mind moved by her heart.
For those yearning for a map to guide us in looking at our own lives, Intimate Politics is more than a good read, it’s an important one. Bettina Aptheker exemplifies the deep female wisdom of cutting the strings to her earlier life in such a way as too keep the love of her ex-husband and children. She comes to a oneness in Zen Buddhism, partnership with a true soul mate, and a full life with her family. Ultimately she earns her reward for her struggle in terms of inner peace.
In Intimate Politics Bettina Aptheker reveals the tender unfolding layers of her own self truth with the skill of a trained researcher. The most important subject she has researched is her own soul. The book is a true teaching. It is the sound of one soul listening.
Joel D. Eis, MFA
Former Draft Resistance organizer
Former professor of theatre, (retired)
June 27, 2019
A really potent, fascinating history of a life of radical politics. Particularly growing up as a Red Diaper Baby, the Berkeley Free Speech movement and the trial of Angela Davis. There are also long sections on spirituality which I found a little dull, but this absolutely worth your time.
August 15, 2024
Haven’t even finished it yet but it’s just that good.
March 18, 2010
This is definitely an interesting book, but I'm not quite sure what to make of it.
I enjoyed the inside-the-movement looks at 60s history. Aptheker's descriptions of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and the trial of Angela Davis are compelling. However, some of the personal is political sections seemed a bit far-fetched. Ms. Aptheker interprets what seem like normal childhood experiences through a political lens. Similar events in my life portended nothing in particular. I loved some of my grade school teachers but it wasn't an early sign of a lesbian self. I hated shopping in big department stores with my mother but my distaste was not related to a secret molestation.
A central issue of this memoir is 10 years of childhood sexual abuse by Bettina's father which she did not remember until she was forty years old. I am skeptical about recovered memories. I believe it is possible but that many reported cases are the result of therapists who believe so much in sexual abuse as the root of problems that they create memories in people at their weakest most vulnerable moments.
No matter what the truth is about the sexual abuse, Ms. Aptheker seems to have plenty of problems related to her parents and the cult-like aspects of the Communist Party. It amazed me that a woman who went to Berkeley and participated in the Free Speech Movement could remain slavishly dedicated to the Communist Party Line for so many years. Whether Ms. Aptheker really lost 10 years of memories or was the victim of falsely created memories, it seems likely that her anxiety and nervous breakdown were related to living in a setting where her beliefs were dictated. For years she managed to believe things that she could see from her own experiences were not true.
I enjoyed the inside-the-movement looks at 60s history. Aptheker's descriptions of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and the trial of Angela Davis are compelling. However, some of the personal is political sections seemed a bit far-fetched. Ms. Aptheker interprets what seem like normal childhood experiences through a political lens. Similar events in my life portended nothing in particular. I loved some of my grade school teachers but it wasn't an early sign of a lesbian self. I hated shopping in big department stores with my mother but my distaste was not related to a secret molestation.
A central issue of this memoir is 10 years of childhood sexual abuse by Bettina's father which she did not remember until she was forty years old. I am skeptical about recovered memories. I believe it is possible but that many reported cases are the result of therapists who believe so much in sexual abuse as the root of problems that they create memories in people at their weakest most vulnerable moments.
No matter what the truth is about the sexual abuse, Ms. Aptheker seems to have plenty of problems related to her parents and the cult-like aspects of the Communist Party. It amazed me that a woman who went to Berkeley and participated in the Free Speech Movement could remain slavishly dedicated to the Communist Party Line for so many years. Whether Ms. Aptheker really lost 10 years of memories or was the victim of falsely created memories, it seems likely that her anxiety and nervous breakdown were related to living in a setting where her beliefs were dictated. For years she managed to believe things that she could see from her own experiences were not true.
March 7, 2010
Very engrossing memoirs of a young Communist activist whose father was one of the leading theoretician/historians of the US Communist Party. Underneath her activism in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement, defending Angela Davis and her leftist activism was a tremendous amount of internal turmoil highlighted by her father's sexual abuse of her as a young child. It was quite moving for me to know of her from a distance and having no idea (along with everyone else) about the turmoil she was going through. Betina later becomes a feminist, lesbian and gets into a spritual trip which is a little foreign to me but she is understandable as the book is good at keeping its ties to her progressive upbringing and activities while witnessing her new directions. I actually had a hard time putting the book down.
October 6, 2007
Intimate Politics: How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel is the autobiography of Bettina Aptheker living those subtitles and more. Unfortunately, some of the "more" or last part of the book is about how Aptheker becomes a hippie and appropriates Buddhism. The rest (or most) of the book is engaging and full of clear and strong analysis of the racist, classist, capitalist hetero-patriarchy state. I found Aptheker's work on Angela Davis' case particulary interesting as well as her critiques of the US Communist Party, which she distances herself from when she realizes the Party's dogmatic nature.
March 28, 2009
Bettina Aptheker carries a revolutionary fire within her. She is a popular professor at UC Santa Cruz and founder of the Department of Women's Studies. The daughter of noted historian and Marxist scholar, Herbert Aptheker, Bettina tells the story of her life within and without the Communist Party...Although much of the book is about the radical politics of the 1960s which she, as a student at UC Berkeley and an open member of the Communist Party--helped to shape she never hesitates to speak honestly about her personal life as well--sorrows, psychological upheavals and her ultimate personal liberation from them. Read this book. And learn from it. Bettina is a personal hero to me.
Want to read
November 10, 2008i just picked this up after a few months hiatus. i like aptheker's socialist take on contemporary history like the cuban missle crisis, black panthers, SDS; in addition to her feminist spin on the communist party with great anecdotes about shirley graham du bois and angela davis. aptheker also takes on don herbert, her father and party father, as having molested her as a child, in addition to the misogyny and sexual harassment she encounted as a member of the CP in berkeley during the sixties. a lot of ground for her to cover, so we'll see...
June 27, 2008
I loved this book! It is one of those I read from beginning to end with barely a break. Having been involved in the radical movement in the 70s and early 80s, running in the same circles, I had an opportunity to know Bettina. She is a warm, lovely woman who has gained wisdom over the years. We can all learn from her.
Yay, Bettina!
Yay, Bettina!
July 24, 2011
Highly recommend this book for any activist. The struggles between the personal and the political and how to combine those two to become a better activist are developed excellently within this memoir.
I think a significant chunk of the end could've been chopped off as the book lost steam around the middle. Nevertheless, I welcome a writer sharing her personal struggle in this manner.
I think a significant chunk of the end could've been chopped off as the book lost steam around the middle. Nevertheless, I welcome a writer sharing her personal struggle in this manner.
January 15, 2008
Bettina was a professor of mine at UC Santa Cruz and a real-life mentor. Her book is truly inspiring. She reminds me that being yourself at all costs is what makes life rich, and that compassion and love are what really change the world.
January 28, 2008
If you like autobiographies - especially emotional ones about radical women, then you'll like this one! I did, and I also learned a lot about other folks involved in the civil rights and free speech movements of the 1960s.
July 2, 2008
Revisiting the political climate of the sixties and seventies, as well as my college days of the 80s. This book is written by a former professor of mine, and I enjoyed it a lot - she's a fantastic writer, very honest and brilliant.
November 23, 2008
This book is an amazing memoir! Bettina describes her role in various social movements with a critical eye. Her passion and intellect come across excellently in her writing, reading her book has helped me admire her as my professor in an entirely new way.
June 5, 2008
Maybe the best book I've read in the last year. TOTALLY inspiring..and not just because she's my professor!
December 23, 2009
Liked the activist parts more than the family and relationship parts.
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January 15, 2010memoir,women's studies
April 15, 2010
I love this woman.
July 5, 2015
I thoroughly enjoyed this for its honesty, insight, and sheer fascination as to the academics and operations of the Communist Party. A really touching and ultimately uplifting read.
Want to read
February 28, 2008I'm just assuming Bettina wrote a fascinating book. ;^)
December 1, 2008
A fantastic autobiography of a great woman
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews