Kate Austin

Infobox Person
name= Kate Austin


birth_date= 1864
birth_place=
dead=
death_date= 1902
death_place=

Kate Cooper Austin (1864–1902) was an American journalist and advocate of feminist and anarchist causes.

Austin was raised in a Universalist and spiritualist family in Hook's Point, Iowa, where she married in August 1883. Around the same time, her father discovered "Lucifer", an anarchist/free love journal published by Moses Harmon. [cite web| last = Presley| first = Sharon| url = http://www.feminista.com/archives/v1n2/presley.html| title = Feminism in Liberty| work = Feminista! The Journal of Feminist Construction| accessdate = 2006-03-25] Austin and her entire family were influenced by Hamon's writings, but it was the Haymarket Riot of 1886 and the ensuing reaction which brought Austin to anarchism. [cite web
last = Carolyn
first = Ashbaugh
url = http://www.lucyparsonsproject.org/aboutlucy/ashbaugh_radical_wmn.html
title = Radical Women: The Haymarket Tradition
work = The Lucy Parsons Project
accessdate = 2006-03-25]

A member of the American Press Writers' Association, Austin wrote for many working-class and radical newspapers. She also contributed to "Lucifer" and to anarchist periodicals such as "The Firebrand", "Free Society", "Discontent", and "the Demonstrator". Austin's interests included sexual reform and the economic status of working people. In 1897 and 1899, Emma Goldman visited Austin at her home in Caplinger Mills, Missouri, where she gave several well-attended lectures.

"Her devotion to liberty made her an anarchist; her hostility to patriarchy made her a feminist. She was too much the former to join the organized women’s movements of her day, and too much the latter to ally with mainline political anarchists — most of them men — whose devotion to liberty often stopped short of women’s liberation."
— Miller, Howard S. "Kate Austin: A Feminist-Anarchist on the Farmer's Last Frontier" [cite journal
first = Howard S.
last = Miller
year = 1996
month = April
title = Kate Austin: A Feminist-Anarchist on the Farmer's Last Frontier
journal = Nature, Society and Thought
volume = 9
issue = 2
pages = 189–209 ]

Footnotes

References

*cite web
url = http://raforum.info/article.php3?id_article=199&lang=en
title = AUSTIN, Kate, American journalist.- An Anarchist Witness of the Haymarket Drama
work = [http://raforum.apinc.org/rubrique.php3?id_rubrique=2&lang=en Research on Anarchism]
accessdate = 2006-03-25

External links

*"", an unpublished 1901 essay by Austin at Wikisource