Born: 23 July 1917, United States
Died: 2 August 1984
Country most active: United States
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.
Although she was educated at a Quaker school growing up, it was not until her 40s that Barbara Deming became an activist fighting for peace, human rights, and related causes. Born in 1917, she studied literature and drama at Bennington College and went on to earn her Master’s in drama in 1941 at Case Western Reserve University, building a career as a poet, writer, and film critic. After a 1959 trip to India sparked an interest in the activism of Gandhi (presumably not extending to the more problematic aspects of his character), she turned those skills to political and advocacy writing, promoting a secular approach to non-violent resistance.
During the ‘60s, she demonstrated against Polaris submarines, participated in walks for peace, attended the International Peace Brigade in Europe, and observed the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, which perpetuated a proverbial witch hunt against those accused of having Communist sympathies. She also traveled to Vietnam from 1965 to 1967 to protest the war.
A prolific writer, Deming published several books, starting with 1966’s Prison Notes, detailing her account of being arrested and jailed in Georgia while protesting segregation in 1963. It was far from the only time she was arrested, nor even the first. That was while protesting nuclear weapons testing at the Atomic Energy Commission, which led to her imprisonment at New York City’s Women’s House of Detention. In 1983, the year before she died and despite her ill health, she was jailed for participating in a march to protest the deployment of cruise missiles in Europe.
A lesbian, Deming had relationships with various women, including a fellow writer, Marie-Claire Blais, in the 1970s and Jane Verlaine, an artist, radical activist, and author, from 1976 until Deming’s death in 1984. She and Verlaine started the Sugarloaf Women’s Village in the Florida Keys in the mid-’70s, which grew to include other women and would eventually become the Sugarloaf Women’s Land Trust, with the property dedicated to all lesbians.
Deming was also a feminist, founding the Money for Women Fund in 1975 with a few thousand dollars of her own money to support feminist writers and other creatives. It was one of the main beneficiaries in her will and was renamed Money for Women/Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. “In my life I’ve been helped as a writer to do my work. I think it’s fair that I try to help others,” she explained.