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At eight years old, Bettina Aptheker watched her family's politics play out in countless living rooms across the country when her father, historian and U.S. Communist Party leader Herbert Aptheker, testified on television in front of the House on Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. Born into one of the most influential U.S. Communist families whose friends included W. E. B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Bettina lived her parents' politics witnessing first-hand one of the most dramatic upheavals in American history. She also lived with a terrible secret: incest at the hands of her famous father and a frightening and lonely life lived inside a home wrought with family tensions.
A gripping and beautifully rendered memoir, Intimate Politics is at its core the story of one woman's struggle to still the demons of her personal world while becoming a controversial public figure herself. This is the story of childhood sexual abuse, abortion, sexual violence, activism, and the triumph over one's past. It's about FBI harassment and persecution, Jewish heritage, and lesbian identity. It is, finally, about the courage to speak one's truth despite the consequences and to break the sacred silence of family secrets.
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edwin mayen
reviewed Intimate Politics: How I Grew up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel on March 07, 2010
Intimate Politics: How I Grew up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel
This is definitely an interesting book, but I'm not quite sure what to make of it.
I enjoyed the inside-the-movement looks at 60s history. Aptheker's descriptions of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley and the trial of Angela Davis are compelling. However, some of the personal is political sections seemed a bit far-fetched. Ms. Aptheker interprets what seem like normal childhood experiences through a political lens. Similar events in my life portended nothing in particular. I loved some of my grade school teachers but it wasn't an early sign of a lesbian self. I hated shopping in big department stores with my mother but my distaste was not related to a secret molestation.
A central issue of this memoir is 10 years of childhood sexual abuse by Bettina's father which she did not remember until she was forty years old. I am skeptical about recovered memories. I believe it is possible but that many reported cases are the result of therapists who believe so much in sexual abuse as the root of problems that they create memories in people at their weakest most vulnerable moments.
No matter what the truth is about the sexual abuse, Ms. Aptheker seems to have plenty of problems related to her parents and the cult-like aspects of the Communist Party. It amazed me that a woman who went to Berkeley and participated in the Free Speech Movement could remain slavishly dedicated to the Communist Party Line for so many years. Whether Ms. Aptheker really lost 10 years of memories or was the victim of falsely created memories, it seems likely that her anxiety and nervous breakdown were related to living in a setting where her beliefs were dictated. For years she managed to believe things that she could see from her own experiences were not true.
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Add Intimate Politics: How I Grew up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel, At eight years old, Bettina Aptheker watched her family's politics play out in countless living rooms across the country when her father, historian and U.S. Communist Party leader Herbert Aptheker, testified on television in front of the House on Un-Ameri, Intimate Politics: How I Grew up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel to the inventory that you are selling on WonderClubX
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Add Intimate Politics: How I Grew up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel, At eight years old, Bettina Aptheker watched her family's politics play out in countless living rooms across the country when her father, historian and U.S. Communist Party leader Herbert Aptheker, testified on television in front of the House on Un-Ameri, Intimate Politics: How I Grew up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel to your collection on WonderClub |