Сюзанна Ла Фолетт: Американ журналисі және феминисткасы

American journalist (1893–1983)
Suzanne Clara La Follette (June 24, 1893 – April 23, 1983) was an American journalist and author who advocated for libertarian feminism in the first half of the 20th century. As an editor she helped found several magazines. She was an early and ardent feminist and a vocal anticommunist.

She was born in Washington state into the politically prominent La Follette family. Her father was U. S. Congressman William La Follette; her brothers were politician William Leroy LaFollette Jr. and Chester La Follette, a painter. Author Mimi LaFollette Summerskill was her niece. While living in Washington, D. C., with her family, Suzanne worked in her father's Capitol Hill office as well as that of his cousin Senator Robert M. La Follette. As a young woman still in college, she observed many of the great political and intellectual debates of the time at the home shared by the two LaFollette families.

Her full length book, Concerning Women, published in 1926, broke ground in the 1920s, but went out of print for a second time after a 1972 reprint in the Arno Press American Women series. In 1973, an excerpt entitled "Beware the State" was included in "The Feminist Papers," an anthology edited by Alice Rossi. La Follette was active in the League of Equal Opportunity, a feminist organization that, unlike the larger National Women's Party, opposed not just sex based minimum wage legislation, but all such legislation. She explained her opposition to such laws in Concerning Women. Her economic views, like those of her mentor Albert Jay Nock, were libertarian but influenced by Henry George. It is this magazine which is widely considered to be an important forerunner to the conservative National Review, founded by William F. Buckley Jr., another journal for which she was also an early contributor and managing editor. Along with her older siblings, La Follette began her formal studies at Washington State University in Pullman, Washington where her family had moved into a large house her father had built near the college. When William La Follette was elected to Congress in 1910, Suzanne moved with her family to the nation's capital and finished her studies there, graduating from Trinity College (Trinity Washington University) in 1915.

While completing her college education, La Follette was involved with many of the great events of the day. She worked in her father's congressional office as well as the office of their cousin, Senator Robert M. La Follette. For much of that period the two LaFollette families lived together in a large home that William La Follette had purchased in Mount Pleasant, Washington, D. C. Debate and conversation were encouraged at the dinner table and a steady stream politicians, writers, labor leaders, professors and other opinion makers engaged in policy and political arguments late into the evening.

After her father left Congress. she moved to New York City where she lived and worked for fifty years. She lived for most of this period in the Chelsea Hotel. Her brother Chester La Follette's art studio was upstairs from her apartment on the tenth floor. During the 1920s she spent four years as an editor for the Freeman working as a deputy to Albert Jay Nock editing and writing. When the magazine folded, she turned her talents to writing, producing award winning poetry as well as two books on very different subjects. In Concerning Women, she broke new ground as she analyzed feminism from the perspective of economic equality. Her former mentor, Nock, found the book to be brilliant and original. In Art in America she produced a monumental survey of American art from colonial times to the 20th century. The art historian, Walter Pach wrote the introduction. In the 1930s she organized a new version of the Freeman, won a Guggenheim Fellowship for study of the fine arts, lectured at the Art Students League of New York, and traveled to Mexico as a member of the Dewey Commission. La Follette served as secretary to its chairman, the philosopher John Dewey and wrote the summary of the commission's findings after conducting investigations in Mexico where Trotsky was in exile (soon after he was murdered by a Russian agent). In the 1940s and during World War II La Follette worked as director of foreign relief programs for the American Federation of Labor, focusing her efforts on keeping communists out of the American labor movement. She maintained her close relationship with Alexander Kerensky and other Russians she had befriended through the years. La Follette returned to editing in the 1950s when she and a number of old colleagues, including John Chamberlain and Henry Hazlitt produced a new version of The Freeman. In her final editorial effort she became the founding managing editor of the magazine William F. Buckley Jr. founded in 1955, The National Review. She retired from this post in 1959 at the age of sixty six. Still politically active in the 1960s, she was one of the founders of the New York Conservative Party. She ran for Congress in 1964 and lost. In her 2004 book, Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary: Completing the Twentieth Century, Susan Ware described the many intellectual gifts that made La Follette such a force among the New York intelligencia for so many decades. La Follette was "a rigorous opponent of government intervention. She was a very beautiful woman, with a hilarious sense of humor, a grammatical stickler a feminist generous and warm hearted, recalled William F. Buckley Jr., who knew her in later years."

In the 1970s, La Follette sold her Bucks County farm and left the Chelsea Hotel and New York City. She returned to the West Coast, settling in Palo Alto, not far from the Stanford University campus. She is interred in Colfax, Washington with other family members.