Author and activist Barbara Joan Love, co-author of the originative work Sappho Was A Right-on Woman, has died.
Love was a lesbian activist, writer and editor. With the National Organization for Women, Love organized and participated in demonstrations and marches. She also worked within the organization to improve the acceptance of lesbian feminists within the organization. She helped to found consciousness-raising groups for lesbian feminists and was active in the gay liberation movement.
Love was the editor and publisher of Foremost Women in Communications: A Biographical Reference Work on Accomplished Women in Broadcasting, Publishing, Advertising, Public Relations, and Allied Professions (Foremost Americans Publishing Corporation. 1970). Her lover and fellow feminist, Sidney Abbott, was the Production Editor.
With Abbott, she co-authored the classic book Sappho Was a Right-on Woman: A Liberated View of Lesbianism, (Stein & Day 1972) which she hoped would lead to greater awareness of society’s oppression of women and lesbians. She helped in the presentation to the American Psychiatric Association (APA) which led to the removal of homosexuality from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM).
She also co-authored “Is Women’s Liberation a Lesbian Plot?”. Woman in Sexist Society: Studies in Power and Powerlessness. New American Library (1972) with Sydney Abbott, “The Answer is Matriarchy” with Elizabeth Shanklin (1983), and “There At The Dawning: Memories of a Lesbian Feminist” (2021).
Barbara Love died on November 13, 2022, at the age of 85.
