Heather Booth (born December 15, 1945) is an American civil rights activist, feminist, and political strategist who has been involved in activism for progressive causes. During her student years, she was active in both the civil rights movement and feminist causes. Since then she has had a career involving feminism, community organization, and progressive politics.
Booth was born in a military hospital in Brookhaven, Mississippi, on December 15, 1945, during a period in which her father was serving as an Army doctor. Soon after her birth, her family moved to Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, where she received her elementary education in P.S. 200 in the Bath Beach neighborhood. Later, she attended high school in Long Island's North Shore after her family had moved to that upscale area. She has two brothers, David and Jonathan. Booth said that she grew up in a warm, loving, and supportive family, and that her parents taught her the importance of recognizing injustice and acting to correct it. From her Jewish upbringing, Booth learned to take on responsibility for building a society that reflected these goals.
After her family had moved to Long Island, Booth's mother, using Betty Friedan's 1963 book The Feminine Mystique, made her aware of the growing discontent of prosperous suburban housewives with the conventionally narrow lives they led. In high school, she joined a sorority and the cheerleading team but left both of them when she came to believe that their members were discriminating against students who did not lead their privileged lives. She began leafleting against the death penalty. In 1960, she joined the Congress of Racial Equality in a protest against the segregationist policies of the Woolworth's chain.
Upon graduating from high school in 1963, Booth spent the summer traveling in Israel and that fall enrolled as a freshman at the University of Chicago. She chose that school in part because it had no sororities and deemphasized sports. In college, she quickly immersed herself in political activism, In 1967, she received a Bachelor of Arts degree in social sciences, then in 1970, a Master of Arts degree in educational psychology, both from the University of Chicago.
She and Paul Booth married in July 1967, shortly after she graduated from college. They had met at a sit-in protesting the University of Chicago's cooperation with the policies of the U.S. Selective Service System whose local boards were then drafting men to serve in the Vietnam War. Later that year, she was arrested during a protest at the U.S. Army induction center in Chicago. The couple had two sons, Eugene Victor Booth (born in 1968) and Daniel Garrison Booth (born in 1969).
One of the founders of Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), Paul Booth was national secretary of the organization when they met. He helped organize the 1965 March on Washington for Peace in Vietnam, subsequently became president of the Citizen Action Program in Chicago (a group formed in 1969 by members of Alinsky's Industrial Areas Foundation), and was later a director of the Midwest Academy. Beginning in the 1980s, he held a series of positions within the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees union. In 2017, by then executive assistant to the union's president, he retired, continuing his political engagement by supporting Heather Booth in her work. He died January 17, 2018, from complications of chronic lymphocytic leukemia.
Booth's opposition to racial discrimination began when she was still in elementary school. She defended an African-American fellow student who was being attacked for allegedly stealing another student's lunch money. It was soon discovered that the girl who made the accusation had put the money in her shoe and forgotten it. In a 1985 interview, Booth said "I remember having the feeling that you don't do this to people." While in high school, she joined the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) to help protest Woolworth's lunch counter segregation in the South. In 1963, soon after enrolling in college, she became head of a group, called Friends of SNCC, which was organized on campus to support the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. She also became student liaison to the Chicago Council of Community Organizations (CCCO), which was then protesting school segregation in the city. As CCCO liaison, she helped coordinate Freedom Schools in the Chicago's South Side.
In 1964, Booth joined the Freedom Summer project in which volunteers from Northern and Western colleges and universities worked to register Black voters and set up Freedom Schools and Libraries in Mississippi. She was arrested for the first time while she was carrying a sign saying "Freedom Now!" during a peaceful demonstration in Shaw, Mississippi. In an interview conducted in 1989, she said that the experience had reinforced her commitment to the civil rights movement. Confronted by the violent resistance of white Mississippians, she feared for her own life, but also realized that she could leave whenever she wished and was awed by the extraordinary heroism of the Black residents with whom she worked. "They had a quiet heroism," she said, "not just by standing up to bullets, but by day to day being willing to go and talk to their neighbors, have meetings in their churches, take people into their homes." She said the work was full of tiring and frustrating tasks, but recognized that mundane everyday work is what brings meaningful change.
In 1965, Booth was again arrested while demonstrating at banks that were providing financial support for the apartheid regime in South Africa. Shortly afterward, she helped form a number of local groups that sought to learn about urban problems and find ways to overcome them. She left SNCC in 1967 when its leaders no longer welcomed whites as members. She then devoted more of her time to issues related to feminism and the anti-war movement.
In 1965, she began to set up consciousness raising groups that focused on inequality between the sexes. These small groups of women met regularly to speak about incidents, both minor and more serious, that seemed to be unique but often proved to be shared by other women as well. In a pamphlet published in April 1968, Booth and two co-writers noted a tendency for women to "see their problems as personal ones and thus blame themselves." In discovering how many ostensibly unique concerns were actually common ones, members gained a sense of the collective influence they might exert toward changing the unfair practices and dismissive attitudes they had previously accepted as cultural norms.
Booth also helped to organize a course on women's studies, began to coach women who were uneasy about speaking up in class, and conducted a study on the disparity of treatment between male and female students in the classroom. Noticing a similar unequal treatment among student activists, she founded a campus group, the Women's Radical Action Program, to document and counter the ways in which women were relegated to subordinate roles in national organizations such as Students for a Democratic Society and SNCC. In 1967, Booth joined with other activists to form the Chicago West Side Group, which was reported to have been "the first women's liberation group in the country, with the primary goal of raising the consciousness of its members."
In 1965, a fellow student asked whether Booth could help his sister who was so greatly distraught about an unwanted pregnancy as to consider killing herself. By contacting the medical arm of the civil rights movement, she was able to refer the woman to a reputable doctor who was willing to perform an abortion. As word quietly spread throughout the university community she was asked to make more referrals to the same doctor. In complying, she made sure that he would not only treat them, but also make sure the patients made a successful recovery. The Jane Collective, or simply Jane, emerged from this early start. Booth formed it by involving like-minded students in a clandestine organization for evaluating doctors, counseling women who contacted them, performing referrals, and conducting follow-up discussions by phone. By 1969 this group, calling itself the Abortion Counseling Service of Women's Liberation, began to advertise in student and underground newspapers, advising pregnant women who needed help to "Call Jane." The Jane Collective disbanded following the Roe v. Wade decision of the U.S. Supreme Court on January 22, 1973, which effectively legalized abortion throughout the country.