Barbara Deming

Barbara Deming
BornJuly 23, 1917
New York City, U.S.
DiedAugust 2, 1984(1984-08-02) (aged 67)
Sugarloaf Key, Florida, U.S.
EducationBennington College, Western Reserve University[1]
Partner(s)Mary Meigs (1954–1969)
Jane Verlaine (1969–1984, Deming's death)

Barbara Deming (July 23, 1917 – August 2, 1984) was an American feminist and advocate of nonviolent social change.

Personal life

Barbara Deming was born in New York City. She attended a Friends (Quaker) school from kindergarten to the end of high school.[2]

Deming directed plays, taught dramatic literature and wrote and published fiction and non-fiction works. On a trip to India, she began reading Gandhi, and became committed to a non-violent struggle, with her main cause being Women's Rights. She later became a journalist, and was active in many demonstrations and marches over issues of peace and civil rights. She was a member of a group that went to Hanoi during the Vietnam War, and was jailed many times for non-violent protest.[3]

Deming died on August 2, 1984.

Relationships

At sixteen, Deming fell in love with a woman her mother's age, and thereafter she was openly lesbian.

In her mature years, she had two long-term relationships. The first, from 1954 to 1969, was with the painter and writer Mary Meigs. Deming and Meigs both came from wealthy backgrounds, which gave them the freedom to pursue their political and creative interests with few constraints. Deming's second enduring relationship, from 1969 to 1984, was with the painter Jane Verlaine, also known as Jane Watrous Gapen.[4]

Mary Meigs was acquainted with Mary McCarthy, and in 1953 the two women bought adjoining properties on Pamet Point Road on the northern outskirts of Wellfleet, Massachusetts,[5] where McCarthy's ex-husband, Edmund Wilson, also lived. McCarthy bought the larger Red House and Meigs bought the smaller Yellow House, where Deming joined her in 1954. Meigs later bought the Red House from McCarthy, and it became the couple's home, with the Yellow House retained as a studio and cottage for visitors.[6] In 1963 Wilson introduced Meigs to the Quebecois writer Marie-Claire Blais, a generation younger than Deming and Meigs, who was visiting Cambridge on a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the two fell in love.[7] Blais, who came from a working-class background and did not finish high school, "could barely speak English" at this time,[8] but Meigs was fluent in French.[9]

By the following year Blais had moved into the Yellow House as Meigs's lover. This uneasy triangle — which included a brief affair between Blais and Deming[10] — lasted for six years, from 1964 to 1969,[11] with tensions kept manageable by Deming's frequent absences on political work, and by Blais's occasional retreats to her own cabin in the woods on the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec.[12]

Nevertheless, by 1969 Deming was ready to move on. She had become re-acquainted with the painter Jane Verlaine, whom she had known slightly at Bennington, and the two formed a "permanent and unshakeable" bond.[10] In the fall of 1969, Deming quit Wellfleet to live with Verlaine and her two children in an old farmhouse near Monticello, New York.[13] In the spring of 1977 the couple moved to Sugarloaf Key, Florida, where they lived until Deming's death.[14][10] Meigs and Blais stayed on at Wellfleet, becoming embroiled in another triangle with a French writer Meigs identifies only as Andrée, before Meigs sold the Pamet Point Road properties and bought a farm near Vannes in Brittany, where the trio installed themselves in June 1971; this ménage was short-lived.[15]

Meigs was politically sympathetic but not a natural activist, being desribed by Blais as "timid" and "uncertain of herself".[16] Verlaine, in contrast, shared both Deming's values and her engagement — she was, if anything, even more radical in her feminism, or at least more pessimistic about men ever becoming genuine allies.[17] As well as painting, drawing and illustrating several books written by Deming, she was a tireless advocate for women who had endured male violence.

Political work

Deming openly believed that it was often those whom we loved that oppressed us, and that it was necessary to re-invent non-violent struggle every day.

It is often said that she created a body of non-violent theory, based on action and personal experience, that centered on the potential of non-violent struggle in its application to the women's movement.[3]

In 1968, Deming signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.[18]

In 1978, she became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press.[19]

Money for Women / The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund

In 1975, Deming founded The Money for Women Fund to support the work of feminist artists. Deming helped administer the Fund, with support from artist Mary Meigs. After Deming's death in 1984, the organization was renamed as The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund.[20] Today, the foundation is the "oldest ongoing feminist granting agency" which "gives encouragement and grants to individual feminists in the arts (writers, and visual artists)".[21][22]

Publications

  • Deming, Barbara: Prison Notes. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1966.
  • Deming, Barbara: On Revolution and Equilibrium. Liberation, February 1968. From the collection: ed. Staughton Lynd and Alice Lynd. Nonviolence in America: A Documentary History. Revised Edition. Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1995.
  • Deming, Barbara: Running Away from Myself: A Dream Portrait of America Drawn from the Movies of the Forties. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1969.
  • Deming, Barbara; Berrigan, Daniel; Forest, James; Kunstler, William; Lynd, Staughton; Shaull, Richard; Statements of the Catonsville 9 and Milwaukee 14 Delivered Into Resistance The Advocate Press: 1969.
  • Deming, Barbara: Revolution and Equilibrium. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1971.
  • Deming, Barbara: Wash Us and Comb Us. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1972.
  • Deming, Barbara: We Cannot Live Without Our Lives. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1974.
  • Deming, Barbara: A Humming Under My Feet. London: Women's Press, 1974.
  • Deming, Barbara: Remembering Who We Are. Tallahassee, FL: The Naiad Press, 1981.
  • Deming, Barbara; Meyerding, Jane (Editor): We Are All Part of One Another a Barbara Deming Reader . Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1984.
  • Deming, Barbara; McDaniel, Judith; Biren, Joan E.; Vanderlinde, Sky (Editor): Prisons That Could Not Hold . University of Georgia Press, 1995.
  • Deming, Barbara; McDaniel, Judith (Editor) I Change, I Change: Poems. New Victoria Publishers, 1996.

References

  1. ^ "Deming, Barbara, 1917-1984. Papers, 1886-1995: A Finding Aid". Archived from the original on 2015-04-02. Retrieved 2017-04-14.
  2. ^ Jane Meyerding (ed.), We Are All Part of One Another: A Barbara Deming Reader (New Society, 1984), "Introduction", p. 1.
  3. ^ a b Andrejkoymasky.com Archived April 22, 2006, at the Wayback Machine
  4. ^ Gapen was her mother's maiden name, Watrous her father's name, and Verlaine her husband's name. She used both Gapen and Verlaine in different contexts. See Martin Duberman, A Saving Remnant: The Radical Lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds (New York: The New Press, 2011), p. 264, note 8.
  5. ^ Mary Meigs, Lily Briscoe, A Self-Portrait: An Autobiography (Vancouver: Talonbooks, 1981), p.146. Marie-Claire Blais, Parcours d'un écrivain, notes américaines (Montréal: VLB, 1993), p. 61.
  6. ^ Lily Briscoe, pp.146-147. Parcours d'un écrivain, p. 61.
  7. ^ Lily Briscoe, p.122. Parcours d'un écrivain, p. 63.
  8. ^ Lily Briscoe, p.117
  9. ^ Thérèse Fabi, Marie-Claire Blais, sa vie, son oeuvre, la critique (Montréal: Agence d'ARC, 1973), p. 6.
  10. ^ a b c Martin Duberman, "The Struggles of Barbara Deming", The Gay and Lesbian Review, May–June 2020. Accessed 25 July 2025.
  11. ^ Mary Jean Green, Marie-Claire Blaise (New York: Twayne, 1995), p. 3.
  12. ^ Marie-Claire Blais, sa vie, son oeuvre, la critique, p. 9.
  13. ^ A Saving Remnant, p. 138.
  14. ^ A Saving Remnant, p. 193.
  15. ^ Marie-Claire Blais, sa vie, son oeuvre, la critique, p. 9.
  16. ^ Parcours d'un écrivain, pp. 63 and 69: "timide" and "incertain de soi".
  17. ^ A Saving Remnant, p. 172.
  18. ^ “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” January 30, 1968 New York Post
  19. ^ "Associates | The Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press". www.wifp.org. Retrieved 2017-06-21.
  20. ^ [1] Archived December 6, 2012, at the Wayback Machine
  21. ^ "Barbara Deming Memorial Fund, Inc. : Home". Demingfund.org. Retrieved 2015-09-25.
  22. ^ Dusenbery, Maya (6 December 2010). "Quickhit: Calling all Feminist Fiction Writers". Feministing.com. Retrieved 2015-09-25.
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