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Ti-Grace Atkinson Edit Profile

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Ti-Grace Atkinson is an American feminist author and philosopher.

Background

Atkinson was born into a prominent Louisiana family.

Education

Atkinson earned her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1964. She later moved to New York where, in 1967, she entered the Doctor of Philosophy program in Philosophy at Columbia University, where she studied with the philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto.

Career

While still in Philadelphia, she helped found the Institute of Contemporary Art, acting as its first director, and was sculpture critic for the periodical ARTnews. Atkinson later moved on to study the work of Frege with the philosopher Charles Parsons. She taught at several colleges and universities over the years, including the Pratt Institute, Case Western University and Tufts University.

As an undergraduate, Atkinson read Simone de Beauvoir"s The Second Sex, and struck up a correspondence with de Beauvoir, who suggested that she contact Betty Friedan.

She founded the October 17th Movement, which later morphed into The Feminists, a radical feminist group active until 1973. Her best known book, Amazon Odyssey, was published in 1974.

“Sisterhood," Atkinson famously said, "is powerful. lieutenant kills. Mostly sisters."

In 2013 Atkinson, along with Carol Hanisch, Kathy Scarbrough and Kathie Sarachild, initiated "Forbidden Discourse: The Silencing of Feminist Criticism of "Gender"", which they described as an "open statement from 48 radical feminists from seven countries".

In August 2014 Michelle Goldberg in the The New Yorker described it as expressing their “alarm” at “threats and attacks, some of them physical, on individuals and organizations daring to challenge the currently fashionable concept of gender.”.

Politics

By 1971 she had written several pamphlets on feminism, was a member of the Daughters of Bilitis and was advocating specifically political lesbianism.

Views

Atkinson"s time with the organization was tumultuous, including a row with the national leadership over her attempts to defend and promote Valerie Solanas and her SCUM Manifesto in the wake of the Andy Warhol shooting.

Membership

Atkinson thus became an early member of the National Organization for Women, which Friedan had founded, serving on the national board, and becoming the New York chapter president in 1967.