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BLANCHE WEISEN COOK
RECIPIENT OF THE 2022 EDIE WINDSOR CHAMPION FOR LGBTQIA+ EQUALITY AWARD
Blanche Weisen Cook an historian, journalist, activist and author of many books and articles, including a 3 volume biography of Eleanor Roosevelt (Penguin), The DECLASSIFIED EISENHOWER: A DIVIDED LEGACY OF PEACE AND POLITICAL WARFARE, and editor of CRYSTAL EASTMAN ON WOMEN AND REVOLUTION, which Oxford University Press recently republished.
University Distinguished Professor of History and Women’s Studies, she has had the privilege to teach at John Jay College and the Graduate Center since l968. Her journalism career has included a syndicated column, and twenty years at Radio Pacifica where she hosted interview programs originally called Activists and Agitators, subsequently Women and the World in the l990s.
As a peace activist she has worked with the Women’s international League for Peace and Freedom, and the Peace History Society for many years. She is former vice-president for research of the American Historical Association, and was chair of the Fund for Open Information and Accountability (FOIA, Inc). She was also co-founder and co-chair of the Freedom of Information and Access Committee of the Organization of American Historians, committed to end government secrecy and maintaining the integrity of the Freedom of Information Act.
She is perhaps best known for her “revolutionary” lesbian articles – “The Historical Denial of Lesbianism” and “Women Alone Stir My Imagination: Lesbianism and the Cultural Tradition” which “outed history” in l979 – and was celebrated by an AHA panel in 2010. See the Roundtable in Celebration of BWC, published in MERIDIANS, 2010