jennifer baumgardner

jen2.jpgFor 15 years, Fargo-native Jennifer Baumgardner has made her career in New York City as a prominent voice for women and girls. After a five-year stint as the youngest editor at Ms. (1993-1997), Jennifer began writing for a diverse array of publications, doing investigative pieces for Harper’s and The Nation, exploring stories such as why younger women appear to be less pro-choice and the fact that “rape kits” are routinely lost or rendered inadmissible in sexual assault cases. She has written several commentaries for NPR’s All Things Considered. She also writes for many of the major women’s magazines (including Real Simple, Glamour, Redbook, Babble, and Elle), for which she has written about her "accidental" family, the first female deemed a sexually violent predator, and "Purity Balls."

Her first book, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future, co-authored with colleague Amy Richards, was published in October of 2000. Gloria Steinem, Eve Ensler, and Naomi Wolf (as well as thousands of young women and men who have read it and written to Jen and Amy) enthusiastically endorsed Manifesta. The book garnered dozens of reviews, including The New York Times Book Review, Jane magazine, Brill’s Content, Ms., The Village Voice, The Nation, and The New Republic. Their second book together, Grassroots: A Field Guide for Feminist Activism was published in 2005 and is now available in bookstores nationwide (FSG). Jennifer’s latest book, Look Both Ways: Bisexual Politics (FSG) was published in 2007.  In it, she tackles her own bisexuality as well as the feminist politics surrounding women who look both ways.

Since 2000, Jennifer and Amy have lectured at more than 200 colleges and high schools including Yale, Harvard, Colgate, the University of North Dakota, the University of Michigan, Mills College, Rutgers, Tulane, Vanderbilt, USC, Swarthmore, Appalachian State, and they were both fellows at Dartmouth in 2004. The near-constant touring inspired them to found Soapbox Inc: Speakers Who Speak Out, a feminist speakers’ bureau that represents two dozen prominent feminist writers and activists such as Katha Pollitt, Gloria Steinem, Irshad Manji, and Rosalind Wiseman.

Jennifer is the editor of a series of feminist classics for Farrar, Straus & Giroux, including Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex (2003) and Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (2002). Jennifer has written introductions, chapters, and epilogues for several recent books about feminism, including the introduction to a new edition of Alix Kates Shulman's bestselling Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen and (with Amy Richards) to Courtney Love's diaries entitled Dirty Blonde. She has also written liner notes for Papa, Don't Lay that S--t on Me, the 2004 Rounder Records reissue of The Women’s Liberation Rock Band’s historic 1972 recording.

In 2004, Jennifer created an "I Had an Abortion" campaign to encourage women (and men) to "come out" about their procedures. The project included t-shirts that said "I had an abortion," a film documenting women's stories of abortion, and a book called Abortion and Life (Akashic, 2008). In 2008, she began a similar awareness project called "I Was Raped" which features a documentary and a shirt.

Jennifer's work has been featured on shows from The Oprah Winfrey Show to NPR's Talk of the Nation, as well as in the New York Times, BBC News Hour, and various other venues. In 2003, the Commonwealth Club of California hailed her in their centennial year as one of six “Visionaries for the 21st Century,” commenting that “in her role as author and activist, [Jennifer has] permanently changed the way people think about feminism…and will shape the next 100 years of politics and culture.” She lives in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with her young son, Skuli.

 

For more speakers on abortion, see: Amy Richards, Gloria Feldt, Loretta Ross, Katha Pollitt, Gloria Steinem, Wyndi Anderson, Third Wave Foundation

For more speakers on queer issues, see:  T Cooper, Julia Serano, Catherine McKinley, Irshad Manji, Noelle Howey, Hanne Blank