THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT
Laura Rand Orthwein, Jr., aka Laura X
“I taught women never to take no for an answer, and I taught men to always take no for an answer.”
Veteran of the anti-nuke, peace, civil rights, Free Speech, educational reform, anti-war, women’s, anti-anti-Semitism and anti-homophobia movements. Advocate for farm workers, Native Americans, ecology, disability rights, environmental health, and healthy home movements. Founder/director of the former National Clearinghouse on Marital and Date Rape. Founder and was the director of the Women’s History Research Center, in Berkeley, California.
Photo 1. Photo Credit, Noah Bergeraboutlx. Photo 2. Laura X receives the Missouri Women’s Network’s annual Award on Women’s Equality Day in St. Louis, August 22, 2015.
More About Laura X:
- Laura took the name Laura X, on September 17, 1969, to symbolize her rejection of men’s legal ownership of women and the anonymity of women’s history. which was stolen from women and girls.
- In 1969, Laura X reintroduced International Women’s Day into the U.S. and created and led the movement to create National Women’s Month, which recurs every year in March. She began collecting materials in 1964 and has been committed to this effort since then.
- In 1978, Laura X founded and directed the research and campaigns of the National Clearinghouse on Marital and Date Rape after leading the successful campaign to criminalize marital rape in California in 1979, and she served as a consultant coordinator to campaigns that in 1993 successfully eradicated exemptions from prosecution for marital, date and cohabitation rape in the remaining 44 other states.
- Laura X World Institute website including archives
- Select articles and clippings
- The Legendary Women’s Rights Activist Who Mailed Obama a Coat Hanger, by Sirin Kale, May 2016
- Opening the Information Vault: Preserving, Digitizing, and Funding the International Women’s History Periodical Archive, Ken Wachsberger, June 16, 2015
- International Collection on Femicidefrom the Leadership of Chris Domingo in Women Against Femicide and Berkeley Clearinghouse on Femicide, with Dr. Diana E.H. Russell, and Laura X, of the National Clearinghouse on Marital and Date Rape 1972-2009
- Ex-veiled prophet queen campaigns against marital rape. St. Louis Post Dispatch, March 15, 1982
- Activist says law needed to protect wives from rape. The Ithaca Journal, August 5, 1981
- Giving women back their own history. The San Francisco Examiner, May 23, 1979
- Select Veteran Feminists of America events
- Select Television interviews on Marital and Date Rape
- Cited in Barbara Love’s book, Feminists Who Changed America, pages 501-502
- Laura X Wikipedia page
