Synopsis
"I grew up in the late 1940's and '50's in San Francisco, the daughter of socialists active in the labor movement and the granddaughter of Russian Jewish social revolutionaries. They were called "red", "commies", and "subversives." I am a red diaper baby, proud that my heritage is one of resistance and defiance."
Now in her early 70’s, Laura Bock looks back on her life: her family, the choices she made and the paths she took—with the last 60 years as a backdrop. She tells her very personal stories of the legacy she received, the impact of McCarthyism on her childhood, coming of age in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960’s, and how she found her voice in the second wave of the women’s liberation movement of the mid-1970’s.
Laura describes her transformation from a self-hating and hiding fat child into a proud fat woman who joined the fat liberation and size acceptance movements and performed for 18 years with a feminist theater collective she helped to found.
In 1982 she came out as a lesbian into the welcoming environment of the San Francisco Bay Area—all this, while running her own business, Bock’s Bed and Breakfast, for over 23 years in her family’s historic home on Willard Street.
She writes of losing her eyesight at the age of 25 and later her hearing and of the challenges and joys of becoming old, while remaining an activist.
"It has been my job to follow in their footsteps… And, for me, the burning question is: Did I do them proud by representing yet another radical activist generation, putting body and principles on the line?”
Readers can decide for themselves after reading this vividly written, revealing and often funny memoir.
For future readings, reviews and additional ephemera, be sure to follow "Red Daiper Daughter" on Facebook.
Review
From a blog by Carmen Lee
Laura Bock, author of Red Diaper Daughter: Three Generations of Rebels and Revolutionaries (2017), and friend Sally Goldin, at this lively book reading/discussion party. As an only child, Laura wanted to pass on her family legacy by publishing her memoir at age 70, sharing stories of her "red" grandparents who sought to overthrow the Russian czar before immigrating to the U.S., her anarchist/communist parents who were labor organizers, and her own life as "red diaper daughter" carrying the tradition of activism (as she left for college, her parents advised her, "Now, make sure you get arrested for something political, and not just for drunkenness!") through the 1960s civil rights and anti-war movements, 1970s women's liberation and disability rights, 1980s fat and LGBT liberation, etc. A self-described "groupie," Laura has been a model for community building and interdependence--running a bed and breakfast business in her family home; co-founding Fat Lip Readers Theater; joining/starting support groups for fat women, coming-out, disabled lesbian, Jewish women's study, hard-of-hearing, old lesbian grief and loss, break-up, etc. Red Diaper Daughter is accessible via Bookshare for people to read with eyes, ears or fingers.
geronature.blogspot.com/2018/06/lifelong-learning.html
From J Weekly Magazine | June 21, 2018, Review by Laura Paull
When Laura Bock was a child growing up in a radical, secular Jewish household in San Francisco in the late '40s and '50s, the conversation was always about social change.
Her parents, the offspring of Jews who left Russia before the 1917 revolution but brought to America their working-class fervor, were active in the labor movement. Bock's mother, Mini, was a member of the American Communist Party, and her father, Albert, an anarchist, distrusted all leadership... "There was a lot of argument in my household," Bock, 72, said in a phone interview from her home in a Marin retirement community. "I never got a word in edgewise. It was a little scary. I always feared our family would disintegrate."
But it did not. Her family intact, she was instead raised with the values of resistance and defiance to all forms of oppression. "I treasure and value the legacy," she said.
Although she plunged into the civil rights struggle and the early anti-war movement as a student at the University of Oregon in the early 1960s, it was not until the 1970s that she really dared to examine her identity as a woman."I found my voice, finally, in the second wave of the feminist movement," she said. Part of that examination involved her shame at being, as she put it, "a fat woman," having internalized both societal and family stigma around body size. She also came to realize and accept that she was a lesbian, a process that is poignantly described in the book. It was, in fact, because of a lesbian memoir-writing group she founded later in life that she finally decided to write the book...
Among other things, the book describes how she suddenly lost her eyesight when she was in graduate school, which cut short her aspiration to become a radical historian... The memoir's threads are tied together by the question of what she had made of her parents' legacy. "Did I follow in their footsteps? Fulfill their values? Do them proud? What choices did I make and how did they differ from those of my parents?" The nature of Bock's upbringing also meant that she would have to figure out her Jewish identity for herself. "Growing up, I knew I was Jewish, but didn't know what that meant," she said. "My parents were atheists. We had Christmas trees with red doves of peace on top. I never learned Yiddish or Hebrew. We sang labor songs. How to be Jewish? I didn't even know what to do."
In her 20s and 30s, after returning from graduate school, she visited several Bay Area synagogues including Sha'ar Zahav, San Francisco's first LGBTQ congregation.
"The problem for me was that all of these synagogues believed in God," she said. "I wanted to be Jewish but not religious."...Of all the previous traits or beliefs that marked her as a member of a marginalized group, Bock writes, disability has been the hardest one for her to accept. As a legally blind person, "I denied the extent to which I was impaired, and the degree to which I had to adjust my life. The thought of being dependent was abhorrent and so I overcompensated," she writes...
Since writing "Red Diaper Daughter," she has reunited with long-lost friends -- and made the acquaintance of many others who share a similar if not identical background.
Today, Bock groups all of the strands of her activism under the "romantic socialist" label.
"I am an ardent feminist," she writes. "I am a disabled person. I am a fat woman who has freed herself from much of her internal oppression and is working on the rest of the world. I am fiercely independent. I have a strong commitment to social change."
Also, she added, "I worry a lot." And that too, she says, is part of her legacy.
jweekly.com/.../how-a-red-diaper-baby-grew-into-.../
From Sinister Wisdom Issue 109: Hot Spots. Review by Jean Taylor
Laura Bock was born into a family of radical political activists. Her Jewish grandparents on both sides immigrated from Russia, and while struggling to make a living after they arrived in the US they were active in agitating for workers' rights. Laura's mother Mini joined the Communist Party and was an active and outspoken member and Al Bock was a Socialist Anarchist... Laura's childhood was fraught with fears: her mother dying of breast cancer, the terrors of the McCarthy era when so many people were ostracized and jailed including Laura's uncle, and being ridiculed because of her weight.
Laura became politically active herself as a student at the University of Oregon in 1963. Her parents feared for her safety; they wouldn't allow her to travel to Cuba or to join the civil rights actions in Mississippi. Instead Laura worked at a Freedom House organised by CORE, the Congress of Racial Equality, in Chicago in the summer of 1964. Bock recounts all of this family history and more in Red Diaper Daughter... Bock explores attitudes towards fat womyn and her weight starting with when she was a toddler still being fed in a high chair. Growing up to the constant refrain from her father that she was too fat, the more she dieted to appease him the fatter and more ashamed she became. The Women's Liberation Movement and a fat women's support group consciousness raising meeting at the San Francisco's Women's Centre altered Laura's perspective about her weight and the futility of dieting. At the Full Moon Cafe book store in the Castro, Laura was introduced to the words and concepts like 'fat politics' and 'fat oppression' and the document The Fat Underground. Once the WLM had her back, it was a natural progression from being shy and introverted to finding her courage and her voice, her writing skills and her flamboyant personality. Laura was one of the founding members of Fat Lip Readers Theatre in 1981. Laura's first performance was at the second Jewish Feminist Conference in 1982 and she continued being an active member in Fat Lip for eighteen years till it folded in 1999. Bock writes, "Being a Fat Lipper took me from a shy, introverted, scared, fat woman to a self-assured and confident teacher, performer, director, writer and rabble-rouser" (162).
In 1982 at the age of 36, after years of suppressing any kind of emotional response, Laura fell in love and came out as a lesbian which opened up her whole self in new and essential ways. After a series of mainly butch lovers, Laura found her life partner in the Mother Tongue Feminist Theatre Collective and began her relationship with Suzanne Gary in 2000...
To put Laura's activism into context: while all this political, performing, writing, archiving and loving work was going on, Laura had been legally blind since the age of twenty-six when suddenly and without warning, during her postgrad studies in Massachusetts, Laura lost her sight in 1971. A major strength of the book is the small segments of writing that Laura wrote for either the Fat Lip Readers Theatre, 1981 -1999, or the Old Lesbian Memoir Writing Group, 2009 - 2014, or the Mother Tongue Feminist Theatre Collective, 1999 - 2004.The story of Laura's life evolves and these segments give a more intimate and detailed view of this complex story... There are many things I haven't mentioned: Laura's FBI files, her passion for Scottish Terrier dogs, her increasing hearing loss...
There are a lot of interesting things and more to discover about Laura Bock's significant life when you read this book for yourself. Red Diaper Daughter is available in print and eBook through local bookstores and online, in addition to an audio version through Bookshare.org, made accessible for blind and print disabled readers. Red Diaper Daughter is a gratifying read. It documents important aspects of our lesbian feminist herstory and puts all this is the context of Laura's personal life.
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