Lauren R. Taylor papers

Lauren Taylor was born in Brooklyn, New York and moved to the Washington, DC, area when she was one and a half. Taylor matriculated at Oberlin College in 1975, attending for five semesters and completing her bachelor's degree at George Washington University in 1980. Taylor's commitment to activism began in high school, when she marched against the war in Vietnam and organized a local chapter of Youth for McGovern. She also worked at Preterm, an abortion clinic in DC, and was politically involved in college. Upon her return to DC in 1978, she again worked at Preterm and co-organized the first Take Back the Night march in DC. She went on to work for or volunteer with the Women's Legal Defense Fund, the DC Area Feminist Alliance, the Lesbian Health Center, and others. With the Task Force on Abused Women, she co-founded My Sister's Place, the first shelter for battered women and their children in DC, which opened its doors in 1979. In 1987, she was part of an affinity group arrested at the Supreme Court in a civil disobedience protest against Bowers v. Hardwick, the anti-sodomy decision, the day after the Second National March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. She was a founding member of an informal group of Jewish lesbians that began with 13 members meeting in 1981 to discuss Jewish lesbian identity and that still meets today. That group included photographer Joan E. Biren (JEB) and Evi Beck, editor of the Nice Jewish Girls anthology. They developed a lesbian haggadah, hosted the first lesbian community seder and a reading to mark the publication of Nice Jewish Girls, and raised money to send women to the first and only national Jewish lesbian conference in California in 1982. Taylor's community activism has also included organizing discussions around race and racism between feminist activists, and in 2002 founding Free Rads, a social-justice-oriented group for self-employed women which still meets todayTaylor's martial arts career began at the DC Self Defense Karate Association (DCSDKA), and by 1988 she was teaching self-defense classes. She earned a black belt in 1995. In 1997, she became a full-time self-defense instructor and freelance writer on gender-based violence. She is a founder of the Self-Defense Instructors Conference, a professional development conference for feminist, empowerment self-defense teachers. Taylor started Defend Yourself as a community self-defense program within DCSDKA and it has since become independent. - abridged version of note provided by Katie Seitz; see papers for Seitz's full biography