Kate Cooper Austin was an American journalist and advocate of feminist

Feminism

Feminism is a collection of movements aimed at defining, establishing, and defending equal political, economic, and social rights and equal opportunities for women. Its concepts overlap with those of women's rights...

 and anarchist

Anarchism

Anarchism is generally defined as the political philosophy which holds the state to be undesirable, unnecessary, and harmful, or alternatively as opposing authority in the conduct of human relations...

 causes.

Austin was raised in a Universalist and spiritualist family in Hook's Point, Iowa

Iowa

Iowa is a state located in the Midwestern United States, an area often referred to as the "American Heartland". It derives its name from the Ioway people, one of the many American Indian tribes that occupied the state at the time of European exploration. Iowa was a part of the French colony of New...

, where she married in August 1883. Around the same time, her father discovered Lucifer

Lucifer the Lightbearer

Lucifer the Lightbearer was an individualist-anarchist journal published by Moses Harman in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Originally produced by a local branch of the National Liberal League as the Valley Falls Liberal , Harman changed the title after he assumed sole editorship in...

, an anarchist/free love

Free love

The term free love has been used to describe a social movement that rejects marriage, which is seen as a form of social bondage. The Free Love movement’s initial goal was to separate the state from sexual matters such as marriage, birth control, and adultery...

 journal published by Moses Harman

Moses Harman

Moses Harman was an American schoolteacher and publisher notable for his staunch support for women's rights. He was prosecuted under the Comstock Law for content published in his anarchist periodical Lucifer the Lightbearer. He was arrested and jailed multiple times for publishing allegedly...

. Austin and her entire family were influenced by Hamon's writings, but it was the Haymarket Riot of 1886 and the ensuing reaction which brought Austin to anarchism.

A member of the American Press Writers' Association, Austin wrote for many working-class and radical newspapers. She also contributed to Lucifer and to anarchist periodicals such as The Firebrand, Free Society

Free Society

Free Society was a major anarchist newspaper in the United States at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries...

, Discontent, and The Demonstrator. Austin's interests included sexual reform and the economic status of working people. In 1897 and 1899, Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman

Emma Goldman was an anarchist known for her political activism, writing and speeches. She played a pivotal role in the development of anarchist political philosophy in North America and Europe in the first half of the twentieth century....

 visited Austin at her home in Caplinger Mills, Missouri

Caplinger Mills, Missouri

Caplinger Mills is an unincorporated community in northern Cedar County, Missouri, United States. Several homes are located in the community, along with an old mill. It is on the Sac River....

, where she gave several well-attended lectures.

"Her devotion to liberty made her an anarchist; her hostility to patriarchy made her a feminist. She was too much the former to join the organized women’s movements of her day, and too much the latter to ally with mainline political anarchists—most of them men—whose devotion to liberty often stopped short of women’s liberation."

— Miller, Howard S. Kate Austin: A Feminist-Anarchist on the Farmer's Last Frontier

External links

• "Woman", an unpublished 1901 essay by Austin at Wikisource
  Wikisource
  Wikisource is an online digital library of free content textual sources on a wiki, operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Its aims are to host all forms of free text, in many languages, and translations. Originally conceived as an archive to store useful or important historical texts, it has...
  
  

• Obituary of Kate Austin by Carl Nold