1944-2023
January 2, 2024
Amanda Sebestyen
I visited the USA for the first time in 1972, on a pilgrimage to find radical feminist writers and activists – who at that time were rare in the British women’s liberation movement. I was 26 and travelling by Greyhound bus across America.
In Boston I bedded down for the night in the Women’s Centre which was doubling as a refuge. Karen saw me there, we talked and with typical generosity she said ‘This isn’t the right place for you, come and stay at my place’! It was the beginning of many years of connection. Her marvellous, vibrant poem collection Falling Off the Roof is still a treasured item on my shelves. When I came back to the US later in the 70s and interviewed Boston feminists like Marge Piercy, Betsy Warrior and Linda Gordon, Karen was there to inform and introduce.
We also shared a history of illness. In the early 80s after many years of undiagnosed and then mis-treated endometriosis, I came to Boston for some seriously alternative health treatments. Karen not only gave me a place to stay but connected me to a brilliant homeopath who was helping her friend Lisa Leghorn. In the 80s and 90s Karen came to Europe quite often with groups of students, and stayed with me in Finsbury Park in North London. Once she had a painful asthma attack and respiratory infection lasting many days. We always had such important conversations, often sharing insights about our single lives as well as the movement in our different countries. We had both lost our younger brothers, another link.
In the 21st century things changed. Karen’s close friend and fellow poet Leah Fritz came to live in London; and I reunited with an old school friend who would become my life partner. Once I moved in with him there was less physical space for seeing Karen and probably less mental space as well. I know we both regretted this loss of connection but somehow didn’t talk about it. She was always so generous-spirited, and had survived far greater tragedies. I remember her with so much admiration. Her writing will live on.
Published by Legacy Remembers on Jun. 29, 2023.
Writer, feminist, and teacher Karen Lindsey (December 3, 1944-April 6, 2023) grew up in Queens NY. Always an activist, she moved to Boston in her twenties and became a key chronicler of the women’s movement. Starting in the 1970s as a columnist for The Boston Phoenix and later the Boston Herald American, she raised feminist issues of the day for a broad readership, as well as contributing to feminist publications such as The Second Wave and Sojourner, which was published in Cambridge from 1975 to 2002.
Lindsey constantly encouraged others to see themselves as writers, whether in the feminist writing group she held in her living room or through her formal teaching at Emerson College, their Kasteel Well program in the Netherlands, and at University of Massachusetts, Boston. She brought to her teaching both the clear-eyed focus of a journalist and the creativity of a poet. Her first published book was the1975 collection of poems Falling Off The Roof.
Lindsey’s openness about both her struggles and the things she enjoyed (watching figure skating or the wives of Henry VIII) modeled that feminism is anything but a monolithic movement. Her 1995 book Divorced, Beheaded, Survived: A Feminist Reinterpretation of the Wives of Henry VIII also showed that a feminist view of history can make lively and historically accurate reading.
Lindsey’s support of her friends and their support of her were legendary. She wrote about this often, including in her 1981 book Friends as Family. She was coauthor of several books, including of Doctor Susan Love’s Breast Book. Her commitment to writing and original thinking inspired her friends, colleagues, and students to do the same in countless books and other writings.