Banned in the 1920s, a University of Chicago grad's fiery feminist memoir has been reissued, making

[TexasTowelie]

Banned in the 1920s, a University of Chicago grad’s fiery feminist memoir has been reissued, making it widely available for the 1st time


Once described as able to “fight her weight in wildcat,” University of Chicago graduate Gertrude Beasley came out swinging in her 1925 memoir, “My First Thirty Years.”

In the first sentence, she accused her father of raping her mother. By page 2, she was relating her first real memory: a sexual assault by her eldest brother when she was only about 4 years old.

Beasley’s blistering account of poverty and abuse on the Texas frontier was banned for “obscenity” in the 1920s, despite an admiring review in the New Yorker. Within two years, Beasley, a journalist with a master’s degree from the University of Chicago, was committed to a Long Island psychiatric hospital where she would remain for the rest of her life.

But against the odds, the frank and feminist book at the center of the firestorm has lived on, finding safe harbor in academic libraries, and winning ardent fans such as Larry McMurtry, author of the Pulitzer-Prize winning novel “Lonesome Dove.”

Read more: https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-feminist-classic-rediscovered-tt-1005-20211007-atz5zlduijfzhil4pwdxfen5z4-story.html