Bettina Fay Aptheker (born September 13, 1944) is an American political activist, radical feminist, professor and author. Aptheker was active in civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and has since worked in developing feminist studies. Biography Early years and education Aptheker was born in Fort Bragg, North Carolina, to a Jewish family, Fay Philippa Aptheker and Herbert Aptheker, first cousins who had married in Brooklyn. Both parents were political activists; her mother, who had been married before and was ten years older than her husband, was a union organizer. Her father was a Marxist historian, whose first book about slave revolts overturned previous conceptions of enslaved African Americans. He was a major figure in changing the writing of African American history. Bettina was raised in Brooklyn, New York, where her Jewish parents, children of immigrants, had grown up. Her first job as a teenager was in the home of W.E.B. Du Bois, who was a good friend of her father. Aptheker obtained her undergraduate degree from the University of California, Berkeley. As an activist in the W.E.B. Du Bois Club of the Communist Party USA, she was a leader in the Berkeley Free Speech Movement during the fall of 1964. Ten years later, she partially retired from political activism and returned to academia for graduate work. In 1976, she completed her master's degree in communications at San José State University, and started teaching there. Political career Aptheker was a delegate to the June 1964 founding convention of the W.E.B. DuBois Clubs, a Communist Party-sponsored youth organization, held in San Francisco. She rose in influence to become a member of the governing National Committee of the CPUSA. She was remembered by the California party leader Dorothy Healey in her 1990 memoir as "one of the liveliest of the young people who rose to prominence in the party in the 1960s, and also one of the warmest human beings I've ever met." In 1968, the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia divided the 120-member leadership of the CPUSA. All but three of the National Committee, headed by party leader Gus Hall, backed the intervention of Soviet tanks. A meeting of the National Committee held over the Labor Day weekend backed Hall by a margin of five-to-one. Bettina Aptheker denounced the invasion, however, and voted with the minority; she opposed her father Herbert Aptheker over this issue. One of the CPUSA's