Aptheker, Bettina (1944—)
Aptheker, Bettina (1944—)
American sociologist and feminist. Born in 1944; daughter of Herbert Aptheker (a Marxist historian).
While Bettina Aptheker taught women's studies at San Jose State University and at the University of California at Santa Clara, she gained recognition in the protest and feminist movements in the United States during the 1960s. She was also one of the directors of the American Institute for Marxist Studies. Her early publications were related to protest within the academic world and included FSM (Free Speech Movement), with Robert Kaufman and Michael Folson (1965), Big Business and the American University (1966), and the bibliography Higher Education and the Student Rebellion in the United States (1969). In 1972, she wrote a Marxist appraisal, The Academic Rebellion.
Aptheker explored her concern over the radical aspects of the civil-rights movement in a 1971 collaboration with her father, Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker, entitled Racism and Reaction in the United States. That same year, she teamed up with Angela Davis for If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance. Later, Aptheker wrote an account and analysis of the Davis trial, The Morning Breaks (1975). More recent historical studies include Woman's Legacy: Interpretative Essays in US History (1980).