Suzanne La Follette was an American conservative journalist, and
an author who advocated for libertarian feminism in the first
half of the 20th century.
She
was born in Washington state into the politically prominent La
Follette family. Her father was U.S. Congressman William La Follette.
Her
full-length book Concerning Women broke ground in the
1920s, but went out of print for a second time after a 1972 reprint
in the Arno Press American Women series. In 1973 an excerpt entitled
"Beware the State" was included in The Feminist Papers,
an anthology edited by Alice Rossi.
In
the 1930's, LaFollette served as secretary for the Committee for
the Defense of Leon Trotsky, known as the Dewey Committee, for
its chairman educator John Dewey. LaFollette wrote the summary
of the Committee's findings after holding investigative meeting
in Mexico where Trotsky was in exile. Many of the committee's
members, like LaFollette, Carlo Tresca and Dewey were not Trotskyists,
but consisted of anti-Stalinist socialists, progressives and liberals.
She
helped to found the magazines The Freeman edited by Albert Jay
Nock and National Review. Sharon Presley reports (in "The
Freewoman," ) that "in 1964, when the New York Conservative
Party, of which she was a co-founder, came out in favor of anti-abortion
laws, she demanded that her name be dropped from the Party's letterhead
- and it was."
|