Nancy Krieger on MARIE EQUI

In 1983 Nancy Krieger, a graduate student, compiled much of what was known about Marie Equi and published a biographical profile in the journal Radical America. Her research – along with that of Sandy Polishuk, Susan Dobrof, and Tom Cook – served as the basis for a number of articles, doctoral dissertations, and mentions in books for several decades. She also provided significant assistance and support to my writing a full-length biography of Equi. She opened her files and shared original documents from her research. At one point, she copied for me all 400 pages of the government’s surveillance reports on Equi and its copies of her prison correspondence.
 
Nancy Krieger is now a Professor of Social Epidemiology in the Department of Social and Behavioral Sciences at the Harvard T. Chan School of Public Health. I am grateful for all the assistance she has provided and her ongoing enthusiasm for this project. That she agreed to read the manuscript and provide a book blurb with her name on the cover brings the study of Marie Equi’s life full circle.
 
Here’s what she wrote for MARIE EQUI:

Marie Equi, “stormy petrel” of the Pacific Northwest, has found her harbor in Helquist’s richly detailed and enthralling book. He vividly narrates how, a century ago, this passionate, keen, and caring woman dared to live openly as a lesbian and to fight fiercely for social justice, as a physician, suffragist, abortionist, Wobbly, anti-imperialist, and self-named “Queen of the Bolsheviks” – enjoy!

Note: Stormy petrels are small seabirds that, in earlier days, were thought to warm seamen of imminent storms. On one occasion the radical labor activist Elizabeth Gurley Flynn wrote of her stop in Portland, Oregon for a lecture, “Here I met a stormy petrel of the Northwest, Dr. Marie Equi.”

Nancy Krieger. Photo: Harvard University.