Rita Mae Brown

Rita Mae Brown (born November 28, 1944) is an American feminist writer, best known for her coming-of-age autobiographical novel, Rubyfruit Jungle. Brown was active in a number of civil rights campaigns and criticized the marginalization of lesbians within feminist groups. Brown received the Pioneer Award for lifetime achievement at the Lambda Literary Awards in 2015. She is considered a significant Southern lesbian feminist poet and author and is associated with the women's liberation movement and women in print movement.

Biography

Early life

Brown was born in 1944 in Hanover, Pennsylvania, to an unmarried teenage mother and her married boyfriend. Brown's birth mother traveled with her cousin, Julia Brown, and Julia's husband Ralph to transport the baby girl from Hanover to Pittsburgh where they left her at an orphanage. Two weeks later, Julia, nicknamed Juts, and Ralph retrieved the infant from the orphanage, and raised her as their own in York, Pennsylvania, and later in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida. Julia and Ralph Brown were active Republicans in their local party.

Education

Starting in late 1962, Brown attended the University of Florida on a scholarship. In the spring of 1964, the administrators of the racially segregated university expelled her for participating in the civil rights movement. She subsequently enrolled at Broward Community College with the hope of transferring eventually to a more tolerant four-year institution.

Early career

Brown hitchhiked to New York City and lived there between 1964 and 1969, sometimes homeless, while attending New York University, where she received a degree in classics and English. In 1968, she received a certificate in cinematography from the New York School of Visual Arts. Brown worked as a photo editor at Sterling Publishing from 1969 to 1970.

Brown received a Ph.D. in literature from Union Institute & University in 1976 and holds a doctorate in political science. She was a lecturer in sociology at Federal City College from 1970 to 1971, a research fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies from 1971 to 1973, and visiting faculty at Goddard College beginning in 1973.

Brown wrote for Rat, an alternative bi-weekly that eventually became New York City's first women's liberation newspaper. She also contributed to Come Out!, the gay liberation newspaper in NYC, published by the Gay Liberation Front.

Later career

In 1982, Brown wrote a screenplay parodying the slasher genre titled Sleepless Nights; retitled The Slumber Party Massacre, the producers decided to play it seriously, and it was given a limited release theatrically. Brown is featured in the feminist history film She's Beautiful When She's Angry.

Writings

Brown was associated with the women in print movement, which sought to establish autonomous communications networks of feminist publications, presses, and bookstores created by and for women. As part of The Furies Collective, Brown contributed to The Furies, a newspaper with a national circulation from 1972 to 1973. Brown also chose to publish her works through feminist presses. Her first novel, Rubyfruit Jungle, was published by Daughters, Inc. in 1973. Now considered a classic lesbian coming of age novel, it was an immediate success, selling 60,000 copies in two years, primarily through word of mouth. Rubyfruit Jungle had a comical, picaresque style that reviewers compared to Mark Twain. Brown published her second novel, In Her Day, through Daughters and her first poetry collection, The Hand That Cradles the Rock, with Diana Press Publications, another feminist publisher.

After the inaugural Women in Print Conference in 1976, Daughters, Inc. began to receive national attention, partly due to the success of Rubyfruit Jungle. Daughters founder June Arnold was a feminist separatist who believed that working with male collaborators and mainstream publishers would taint the cause of the women's liberation movement. However, soon after vowing in The New York Times that she would not sell reprint rights to a traditional publisher, Arnold sold the reprint rights for Rubyfruit Jungle to Bantam Books for $250,000. Brown was in favor of the sale due to the financial stability it provided her. Arnold and Daughters, Inc. were widely criticized in many feminist outlets.

Later in her career, Brown published her works with mainstream publishers, including Bantam and Ballantine Books, though she continued to engage with feminist themes across many genres, including historical fiction, mystery, and memoir. She is considered a significant Southern lesbian poet and writer.

Philosophical and political views

In the spring of 1964, during her study at the University of Florida in Gainesville, she became active in the American Civil Rights Movement. Later in the 1960s, she participated in the anti-war movement, the feminist movement and the Lesbian Liberation movement. She was involved with the Student Homophile League at Columbia University in 1967 but left it because the men in the league were not interested in women's rights.

She was involved in the Redstockings, but also left the group because of its lack of involvement in lesbian rights. She then went on to join the Gay Liberation Front, where she suggested the formation of an all-lesbian group, since many of the women felt excluded from the feminist movement and the male-led gay liberation movement.

Brown took an administrative position with the fledgling National Organization for Women, but resigned in January 1970 over comments by Betty Friedan seen by some as anti-lesbian and by the NOW's attempts to distance itself from lesbian organizations. Brown claimed that lesbian was "the one word that can cause the Executive Committee [of NOW] a collective heart attack."