[10/19/15: Murphy Prof. Ruth Milkman wrote a short piece commemorating Rosalyn Baxandall’s life for Jacobin Magazine. Check it out here. – Ed.]

Professor Rosalyn Baxandall died Tuesday evening. Following her retirement from SUNY Old Westbury, the Murphy Institute was very fortunate to have Ros come teach labor history. Ros was a pathbreaking feminist scholar whose activism and writing brought women into labor history and women’s work into focus for scholars across the disciplines. All of us who care about social history, labor, feminism and the role of struggle and movements in shaping the direction of our society and our studies are indebted to Ros, for her example as well as her contributions to our fields.

From the New York Times obituary, published today:

[Baxandall] helped create Liberation Nursery, the first feminist day care center in New York. As an early member of New York Radical Women and Redstockings, she picketed the 1968 Miss America pageant in Atlantic City, one of the most visible of the feminist protests of the ’60s, forever associated with a symbolic burning of restrictive women’s clothes that mainstream publications referred to as a “bra burning.”

She played a prominent role in the abortion “speakout” in the West Village in 1969, a forum at which women described in public their experiences in obtaining illegal abortions.

…

Recalling those days in an interview with the feminist activist Jacqueline Ceballos in 1991, Ms. Baxandall said, “The one thing that I do have against the books that are written is they talk about all the politics and the splits, et cetera, but they don’t talk about the joy and fun we had.” She added, “We knew were changing history, and it was terrific.”