Joan Kennedy Taylor
Encyclopedia
Joan Kennedy Taylor was an American journalist, author, editor, public intellectual, and political activist. She is best known for her advocacy of individualist feminism
and for her role in the development of the modern American libertarian
movement.
. Her mother was actress, playwright, and poet Mary Kennedy. She grew up in New York, in suburban Connecticut, and, after her parents separated when she was six years old, around the world. Her father's biographer, James Pegolotti, writes that "[b]y 1942, owing to a peregrinating mother, Joan had attended eight different schools, in such far-flung spots as Peking, Paris, and Ellsworth, Maine, as well as New York."
After graduating from St. Timothy's School
, Taylor returned to New York to study playwrighting at Barnard College
. There she met Donald A. Cook, a psychology undergraduate at nearby Columbia University
. After their marriage in 1948, Taylor went to work as an actress on stage, radio, and television (with the usual assortment of accompanying dead-end day jobs). Much of her spare time she devoted to auditing graduate courses in psychology at Columbia, where Cook was now pursuing a Ph.D., and to dabbling in the ideas of G. I. Gurdjieff
and P.D. Ouspensky.
In the early 1950s, the Cooks hosted a series of legendary parties at their ground floor apartment on 112th Street, near the Barnard and Columbia campuses. Joyce Johnson
, in her memoir Minor Characters
, recalls the place as "like an apartment at the bottom of a well – midnight even on a sunny day. The door was never locked. You never knew whom you’d find there. Psychologists, Dixieland jazz musicians, poets, runaway girls, a madman named Carl Solomon whom an old Columbia classmate of [Donald’s], Allen Ginsberg, had met in a psychiatric ward." Nor were Solomon and Allen Ginsberg
the only Beat Generation
luminaries to attend these gatherings. There were also William S. Burroughs
, Lucien Carr
, Gregory Corso
, and Jack Kerouac
.
and Company. It was in 1957, James Pegolotti reports, when, "[a]s a publicity assistant at Knopf, Joan read an advance copy of [Ayn] Rand's
Atlas Shrugged
and found the book fascinating. She wrote a letter of appreciation to the author, who responded by inviting her to lunch. The two women established a friendship, partly because of Joan's deep interest in... 'Objectivism
.' For Joan, Rand blended literary aptitude and economic philosophy into an attractive package."
Taylor began writing about politics from her new Objectivist perspective and soon founded and edited an independent monthly political magazine, Persuasion (1964–1968), the first and only political magazine ever personally endorsed and recommended by Ayn Rand. In the December 1965 issue of The Objectivist Newsletter, Rand wrote that Persuasion "does a remarkable educational job in tying current political events to wider principles, evaluating specific events in a rational frame-of-reference, and maintaining a high degree of consistency. It is of particular interest and value to all those who are eager to fight on the level of practical politics, but flounder hopelessly for lack of proper material."
Taylor's first book, When to See a Psychologist, written with clinical psychologist Lee M. Shulman, appeared in 1968. In the early 1970s, she worked as a co-therapist with various clinicians at both the Stockbridge, Massachusetts
Free Clinic and the Austen Riggs Center
. She began studying law in a Manhattan attorney's office and worked her way up to paralegal status. She also began working on behalf of feminist causes, which had gradually attracted her interest since the early 1960s when she read The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
.
In the mid-1970s, she joined the Libertarian Party
and embarked on several years of political activism under its auspices. She helped to write the national party platform in the late 1970s, advised the party's Ed Clark
for President campaign of 1980 on feminist issues, and indefatigably promoted the ERA and abortion rights to a party membership that was not particularly receptive to feminist concerns.
In 1977, at the invitation of its editor, Roy A. Childs, Jr., Taylor joined the staff of the monthly magazine Libertarian Review
, where she began writing regularly on feminist and other topics. Two years later, she became a regular biweekly commentator on the nationally syndicated daily radio program, Byline, which was underwritten by the libertarian Cato Institute
. Soon she was writing for Reason
magazine and Inquiry Magazine
, as well as the Libertarian Review
. In the 1980s, she even spent a brief time as an editor of The Freeman
, then as now the oldest libertarian magazine on the market.
As director of the book publishing program of the Manhattan Institute
, 1981–1985, Taylor "discovered" a then virtually unknown political scientist named Charles Murray
and commissioned him to write the book that became Losing Ground (1984), editing his manuscript as it was written, arranging for its publication by Basic Books
, and masterminding the publicity campaign that made it not only a bestseller, but, according to at least one source, one of the seventeen most influential works of sociology ever published.
The last two decades of Taylor's life were devoted almost entirely to her feminist concerns. From 1989 to 2003 she served as national coordinator of the Association of Libertarian Feminists (and as editor of its newsletter), and throughout the 1990s she also served as vice president and as a member of the board of directors of Feminists for Free Expression, a group of which she had been a founding member. She taught courses at the New School (then still the New School for Social Research) - one on "Different Voices: Feminism at the Crossroads" and another on "Women and the Law." As a writer on feminist topics, she contributed to magazines and books, she lectured all over the country, and she published two books of her own, Reclaiming the Mainstream: Individualist Feminism Rediscovered (Prometheus, 1992) and What to Do When You Don't Want to Call the Cops: A Non-Adversarial Approach to Sexual Harassment (New York University Press, 1999).
Early in 2002, Taylor was diagnosed with bladder cancer. Late in 2005 she died from the effects of the cancer and related kidney failure, just short of her 79th birthday.
Individualist feminism
Individualist feminism is a term for feminist ideas which seek to celebrate or protect the individual woman....
and for her role in the development of the modern American libertarian
Libertarianism
Libertarianism, in the strictest sense, is the political philosophy that holds individual liberty as the basic moral principle of society. In the broadest sense, it is any political philosophy which approximates this view...
movement.
Early life
Taylor was born in Manhattan to prominent parents. Her father was composer, radio personality, and musical journalist Deems TaylorDeems Taylor
Joseph Deems Taylor was a U.S. composer, music critic, and promoter of classical music.-Career:Taylor initially planned to become an architect; however, despite minimal musical training he soon took to music composition. The result was a series of works for orchestra and/or voices...
. Her mother was actress, playwright, and poet Mary Kennedy. She grew up in New York, in suburban Connecticut, and, after her parents separated when she was six years old, around the world. Her father's biographer, James Pegolotti, writes that "[b]y 1942, owing to a peregrinating mother, Joan had attended eight different schools, in such far-flung spots as Peking, Paris, and Ellsworth, Maine, as well as New York."
After graduating from St. Timothy's School
St. Timothy's School
St. Timothy's School is a four-year private all-girls boarding high school in Stevenson in Baltimore County, Maryland, United States. The school is located just north of Baltimore City in Baltimore County less than a mile north of I-695, the Baltimore Beltway.-About the School:The school is a...
, Taylor returned to New York to study playwrighting at Barnard College
Barnard College
Barnard College is a private women's liberal arts college and a member of the Seven Sisters. Founded in 1889, Barnard has been affiliated with Columbia University since 1900. The campus stretches along Broadway between 116th and 120th Streets in the Morningside Heights neighborhood in the borough...
. There she met Donald A. Cook, a psychology undergraduate at nearby Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
. After their marriage in 1948, Taylor went to work as an actress on stage, radio, and television (with the usual assortment of accompanying dead-end day jobs). Much of her spare time she devoted to auditing graduate courses in psychology at Columbia, where Cook was now pursuing a Ph.D., and to dabbling in the ideas of G. I. Gurdjieff
G. I. Gurdjieff
George Ivanovich Gurdjieff according to Gurdjieff's principles and instructions, or the "Fourth Way."At one point he described his teaching as "esoteric Christianity."...
and P.D. Ouspensky.
In the early 1950s, the Cooks hosted a series of legendary parties at their ground floor apartment on 112th Street, near the Barnard and Columbia campuses. Joyce Johnson
Joyce Johnson
Joyce Johnson is an American author of fiction and nonfiction who won a National Book Critics Circle Award for her memoir Minor Characters about her relationship with Jack Kerouac.-Personal life:...
, in her memoir Minor Characters
Minor Characters
Minor Characters: A Beat Memoir is a memoir by Joyce Johnson documenting her time and affair with Jack Kerouac providing a very intimate biography of sorts for the man, along with commentary on Allen Ginsberg, among others...
, recalls the place as "like an apartment at the bottom of a well – midnight even on a sunny day. The door was never locked. You never knew whom you’d find there. Psychologists, Dixieland jazz musicians, poets, runaway girls, a madman named Carl Solomon whom an old Columbia classmate of [Donald’s], Allen Ginsberg, had met in a psychiatric ward." Nor were Solomon and Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
the only Beat Generation
Beat generation
The Beat Generation refers to a group of American post-WWII writers who came to prominence in the 1950s, as well as the cultural phenomena that they both documented and inspired...
luminaries to attend these gatherings. There were also William S. Burroughs
William S. Burroughs
William Seward Burroughs II was an American novelist, poet, essayist and spoken word performer. A primary figure of the Beat Generation and a major postmodernist author, he is considered to be "one of the most politically trenchant, culturally influential, and innovative artists of the 20th...
, Lucien Carr
Lucien Carr
Lucien Carr was a key member of the original New York City circle of the Beat Generation in the 1940s; later he worked for many years as an editor for United Press International.-Early life:...
, Gregory Corso
Gregory Corso
Gregory Nunzio Corso was an American poet, youngest of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers...
, and Jack Kerouac
Jack Kerouac
Jean-Louis "Jack" Lebris de Kerouac was an American novelist and poet. He is considered a literary iconoclast and, alongside William S. Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, a pioneer of the Beat Generation. Kerouac is recognized for his spontaneous method of writing, covering topics such as Catholic...
.
Career
In the mid-1950s, Taylor abandoned acting and went into publishing, taking a job at Alfred A. KnopfAlfred A. Knopf
Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. is a New York publishing house, founded by Alfred A. Knopf, Sr. in 1915. It was acquired by Random House in 1960 and is now part of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group at Random House. The publishing house is known for its borzoi trademark , which was designed by co-founder...
and Company. It was in 1957, James Pegolotti reports, when, "[a]s a publicity assistant at Knopf, Joan read an advance copy of [Ayn] Rand's
Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism....
Atlas Shrugged
Atlas Shrugged
Atlas Shrugged is a novel by Ayn Rand, first published in 1957 in the United States. Rand's fourth and last novel, it was also her longest, and the one she considered to be her magnum opus in the realm of fiction writing...
and found the book fascinating. She wrote a letter of appreciation to the author, who responded by inviting her to lunch. The two women established a friendship, partly because of Joan's deep interest in... 'Objectivism
Objectivism (Ayn Rand)
Objectivism is a philosophy created by the Russian-American philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand . Objectivism holds that reality exists independent of consciousness, that human beings have direct contact with reality through sense perception, that one can attain objective knowledge from perception...
.' For Joan, Rand blended literary aptitude and economic philosophy into an attractive package."
Taylor began writing about politics from her new Objectivist perspective and soon founded and edited an independent monthly political magazine, Persuasion (1964–1968), the first and only political magazine ever personally endorsed and recommended by Ayn Rand. In the December 1965 issue of The Objectivist Newsletter, Rand wrote that Persuasion "does a remarkable educational job in tying current political events to wider principles, evaluating specific events in a rational frame-of-reference, and maintaining a high degree of consistency. It is of particular interest and value to all those who are eager to fight on the level of practical politics, but flounder hopelessly for lack of proper material."
Taylor's first book, When to See a Psychologist, written with clinical psychologist Lee M. Shulman, appeared in 1968. In the early 1970s, she worked as a co-therapist with various clinicians at both the Stockbridge, Massachusetts
Stockbridge, Massachusetts
Stockbridge is a town in Berkshire County in Western Massachusetts. It is part of the Pittsfield, Massachusetts, Metropolitan Statistical Area. The population was 1,947 at the 2010 census...
Free Clinic and the Austen Riggs Center
Austen Riggs Center
The Austen Riggs Center is a psychiatric treatment facility founded in 1913 in Stockbridge, Massachusetts.-Founding – 1946:A New York City internist who repaired to the bucolic countryside of Stockbridge while suffering from tuberculosis, Austen Fox Riggs developed an innovative treatment regimen...
. She began studying law in a Manhattan attorney's office and worked her way up to paralegal status. She also began working on behalf of feminist causes, which had gradually attracted her interest since the early 1960s when she read The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan
Betty Friedan
Betty Friedan was an American writer, activist, and feminist.A leading figure in the Women's Movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the "second wave" of American feminism in the twentieth century...
.
In the mid-1970s, she joined the Libertarian Party
Libertarian Party (United States)
The Libertarian Party is the third largest and fastest growing political party in the United States. The political platform of the Libertarian Party reflects its brand of libertarianism, favoring minimally regulated, laissez-faire markets, strong civil liberties, minimally regulated migration...
and embarked on several years of political activism under its auspices. She helped to write the national party platform in the late 1970s, advised the party's Ed Clark
Ed Clark
Ed Clark is an American politician who ran for Governor of California in 1978, and for President of the United States as the nominee of the Libertarian Party in the 1980 presidential election....
for President campaign of 1980 on feminist issues, and indefatigably promoted the ERA and abortion rights to a party membership that was not particularly receptive to feminist concerns.
In 1977, at the invitation of its editor, Roy A. Childs, Jr., Taylor joined the staff of the monthly magazine Libertarian Review
Libertarian Review
Libertarian Review was a libertarian magazine published until 1981. It had been established by Robert Kephart in 1972 as a book-review magazine, initially titled SIL Book Review , then Books for Libertarians, and was renamed with the October, 1974 issue...
, where she began writing regularly on feminist and other topics. Two years later, she became a regular biweekly commentator on the nationally syndicated daily radio program, Byline, which was underwritten by the libertarian Cato Institute
Cato Institute
The Cato Institute is a libertarian think tank headquartered in Washington, D.C. It was founded in 1977 by Edward H. Crane, who remains president and CEO, and Charles Koch, chairman of the board and chief executive officer of the conglomerate Koch Industries, Inc., the largest privately held...
. Soon she was writing for Reason
Reason (magazine)
Reason is a libertarian monthly magazine published by the Reason Foundation. The magazine has a circulation of around 60,000 and was named one of the 50 best magazines in 2003 and 2004 by the Chicago Tribune.- History :...
magazine and Inquiry Magazine
Inquiry Magazine
Inquiry Magazine was a libertarian magazine published from November 1977 to 1984. It was originally published by the Cato Institute, but in February 1982 was transferred to the Libertarian Review Foundation, after the Libertarian Review was merged into Inquiry in January of that year...
, as well as the Libertarian Review
Libertarian Review
Libertarian Review was a libertarian magazine published until 1981. It had been established by Robert Kephart in 1972 as a book-review magazine, initially titled SIL Book Review , then Books for Libertarians, and was renamed with the October, 1974 issue...
. In the 1980s, she even spent a brief time as an editor of The Freeman
The Freeman
The Freeman: Ideas on Liberty is one of the oldest and most respected libertarian journals in the United States. It is published by the Foundation for Economic Education . It started as a digest sized monthly study journal; it currently appears 10 times per year and is a larger-sized magazine. FEE...
, then as now the oldest libertarian magazine on the market.
As director of the book publishing program of the Manhattan Institute
Manhattan Institute
The Manhattan Institute for Policy Research is a conservative, market-oriented think tank established in New York City in 1978 by Antony Fisher and William J...
, 1981–1985, Taylor "discovered" a then virtually unknown political scientist named Charles Murray
Charles Murray (author)
Charles Alan Murray is an American libertarian political scientist, author, columnist, and pundit working as a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington, DC...
and commissioned him to write the book that became Losing Ground (1984), editing his manuscript as it was written, arranging for its publication by Basic Books
Basic Books
Basic Books is a book publisher founded in 1952 and located in New York. It publishes books in the fields of psychology, philosophy, economics, science, politics, sociology, current affairs, and history.-History:...
, and masterminding the publicity campaign that made it not only a bestseller, but, according to at least one source, one of the seventeen most influential works of sociology ever published.
The last two decades of Taylor's life were devoted almost entirely to her feminist concerns. From 1989 to 2003 she served as national coordinator of the Association of Libertarian Feminists (and as editor of its newsletter), and throughout the 1990s she also served as vice president and as a member of the board of directors of Feminists for Free Expression, a group of which she had been a founding member. She taught courses at the New School (then still the New School for Social Research) - one on "Different Voices: Feminism at the Crossroads" and another on "Women and the Law." As a writer on feminist topics, she contributed to magazines and books, she lectured all over the country, and she published two books of her own, Reclaiming the Mainstream: Individualist Feminism Rediscovered (Prometheus, 1992) and What to Do When You Don't Want to Call the Cops: A Non-Adversarial Approach to Sexual Harassment (New York University Press, 1999).
Early in 2002, Taylor was diagnosed with bladder cancer. Late in 2005 she died from the effects of the cancer and related kidney failure, just short of her 79th birthday.
External links
- Obituary at LewRockwell.com
- Remembrance article by Charles Murray