Rita Mae Brown

Rita Mae Brown, born November 28, 1944, is an American feminist writer best known for her 1973 coming-of-age autobiographical novel Rubyfruit Jungle. She came of age during the civil rights, anti-war, feminist, and lesbian liberation movements, and her public life was closely tied to those campaigns. Brown is considered a significant Southern lesbian feminist poet and author, and she is associated with both the women’s liberation movement and the women in print movement.

Brown’s early life began in Hanover, Pennsylvania, where she was born to an unmarried teenage mother and her married boyfriend. Her birth mother traveled with Julia Brown, known as Juts, and Julia’s husband Ralph to take the infant to Pittsburgh, where she was left at an orphanage. Two weeks later, Julia and Ralph retrieved her and raised her as their own in York, Pennsylvania, and later in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The Browns were active Republicans in their local party, a background that sat in sharp contrast to the radical politics Brown would later join.

In late 1962, Brown attended the University of Florida on a scholarship. In spring 1964, administrators at the racially segregated university expelled her for taking part in the civil rights movement. She then enrolled at Broward Community College, hoping to transfer to a more tolerant four-year school. Brown hitchhiked to New York City and lived there from 1964 to 1969, sometimes homeless, while attending New York University, where she earned a degree in classics and English. She also received a certificate in cinematography from the New York School of Visual Arts in 1968, later earned a Ph.D. in literature from Union Institute & University in 1976, and holds a doctorate in political science.

Brown’s writing life grew directly out of activism and feminist publishing. She wrote for Rat, an alternative bi-weekly that became New York City’s first women’s liberation newspaper, and contributed to Come Out!, the gay liberation newspaper published by the Gay Liberation Front. As part of The Furies Collective, she contributed to The Furies, a nationally circulated newspaper from 1972 to 1973. Her first novel, Rubyfruit Jungle, was published by Daughters, Inc., a feminist press, in 1973. It sold 60,000 copies in two years, largely through word of mouth, and reviewers compared its comical, picaresque style to Mark Twain. She later published In Her Day, the poetry collection The Hand That Cradles the Rock, and works with mainstream publishers including Bantam and Ballantine Books, continuing to write across historical fiction, mystery, and memoir.

Her politics were shaped by repeated fights over who was included in liberation movements. Brown was involved with the Student Homophile League at Columbia University in 1967 but left because the men were not interested in women’s rights. She was involved in Redstockings but left over its lack of involvement in lesbian rights. At the National Organization for Women, she resigned in January 1970 over Betty Friedan’s comments seen by some as anti-lesbian and NOW’s efforts to distance itself from lesbian organizations. Brown played a leading role in the “Lavender Menace” action at the Second Congress to Unite Women on May 1, 1970, where The Woman-Identified Woman was distributed. For readers of quotations, Brown’s life gives her sentences a clear source: they came from books, meetings, protests, newspapers, and arguments over who had the right to be heard.