Born: 4 August 1928, United States
Died: 9 May 2025
Country most active: Canada
Also known as: NA
The following is excerpted from Infinite Women founder Allison Tyra’s book The View from the Hill: Women Who Made Their Mark After 40.
Another notable environmentalist writer, Betty Krawczyk, “certainly wasn’t raised to be a protester,” she said. “I was raised a poor, country, southern, white woman.” Nonetheless, she wrote “about civil disobedience and the absolute necessity of it in these times of societal and ecological breakdown.” Born in Louisiana in 1928, she married the first man who asked and within a few years was left a single mother of three in Phoenix, Arizona. “The west had its advantages. Nobody gave a damn where you lived or with whom you lived or what your background was. The downside was, nobody gave a damn about you, either,” she wrote. Moving to California, she married again, divorcing after a year and now with a fourth child. “It has always been a source of astonishment to me how my rotten choices in men produced such wonderful children.” Fortunately, her luck changed with husband number three, a physicist with whom she returned to Louisiana and had her fifth child. It was also during this pregnancy that she sold her first published writing, earning $400 from a magazine.
Baby number six was just a month old when the family moved again for her husband to take a job with NASA in Virginia. While she was selling stories for “the pulps,” Krawczyk was also expanding her own world view, reading works like George Bernard Shaw’s The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism and Friedrich Engels’s The Origins of the Family. At 36, she was disturbed when her 18-year-old son, Joey, joined the Air Force, as her own perspective became increasingly opposed to the country’s political, economic, and military structures. She joined a group of peace protestors who refused to pay taxes on the grounds that the money was funding the Vietnam War, but it didn’t stop her other son Mike from registering for the draft.
In order to keep “this particular son’s wilderness-oriented ass from the American military,” the mother of eight moved to Canada, living in British Columbia’s Clayoquot Sound in an A-frame house built by Mike himself. But the peace she found there was not to last, as she was arrested with two other grandmothers while blocking a bridge to prevent logging in the area. “I didn’t deliberately set out to become a rebel. It just happened in the natural order of searching for a meaning to my life,” she wrote.
Krawczyk published her memoir, Clayoquot: The Sound of My Heart, in 1996, but it wasn’t until a few years later that she became well-known in British Columbia for her efforts to stop the destruction of ancient rainforests in the Elaho Valley near Whistler. Now a 72-year-old great-grandmother, she was imprisoned for a year in the Burnaby Correctional Institute for Women for her peaceful demonstrations. It was her third arrest, and she would publish her second memoir, Lock Me Up or Let Me Go: The Protests, Arrest and Trial of an Environmental Activist, in 2002, followed by Open Living Confidential (From Inside the Joint).
“Many men at this point don’t really know what women want in a man,” she wrote. “We as women must know what we want, what we want our male partners to become, what we want our sons and grandsons to become, what we want to become ourselves. Male structures try to convince us that because we are women we must vie for male approval, but in reality it is the other way around. Young women and elder women must stick together here if things are going to change. If we get up the gumption to demand that men stop creating the categories of a super rich few and many super poor, and stop making a dung heap of our beautiful planet in the process, then we need to present a united front.”