Intimate Politics How I Grew Up Red, Fought for Free Speech, and Became a Feminist Rebel

At eight years old, Bettina Aptheker watched her family's politics play outn countless living rooms across the country when her father, historian and U.. Communist Party leader Herbert Aptheker, testified on television in frontf the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1953. Born into one of theost influential U.S. Communist families whose friends included W. E. B. Duois, Paul Robeson, and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Bettina lived her parents'olitics witnessing first-hand one of the most dramatic upheavals in Americanistory. She also lived with a terrible secret: incest at the hands of heramous father and a frightening and lonely life lived inside a home wroughtith family tensions.

Bettina F. Aptheker is professor of Feminist Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz