Marge Frantz

Marge Frantz (née Gelders; June 18, 1922 – October 16, 2015) was an American activist and among the first generation of academics who taught women's study courses in United States.

Born in Birmingham, Alabama, from a young age she became involved in progressive causes.

She worked as a labor organizer, agitated for civil rights, and participated in the women's poll tax repeal movement.

Margaret Louise "Margie" Gelders was born on June 18, 1922, in Birmingham, Alabama, to Esther Josephine (née Frank) and Joseph Gelders.

Her father taught physics at the University of Alabama and became involved in the Communist Party, labor organizing and the struggle for racial justice in the South.

When she turned 13, Gelders joined the Young Communist League and traveled with her father supporting leftist causes.

From a young age, she was active in protest marches and participated in rallies to repeal the poll tax as a prerequisite to voting.

After her father's near fatal beating for his civil rights work at the hands of vigilantes in 1936, Gelders appreciated the dangers of being an activist but was not dissuaded from following in her father's footsteps.

After graduating in Birmingham from Phillips High School in 1938, she spent the next two years studying at Radcliffe College.

While at university, Gelders worked for the Massachusetts chapter of the League of Women Voters.

By the late 1940s, she was being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee and in 1950, she and her husband moved to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Still active in the radical community, she was involved in anti-nuclear testing protests as well as in supporting clemency for convicted spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

At a rally protesting the arrest in 1940 of George Harris, the vice president of the Alabama branch of the Farmer's Union, Gelders and her father were arrested in Birmingham.

She was featured that year in a photograph published in the Daily Worker, participating in a Chicago march advocating for the abolition of poll taxes.

She took part in protests by organizations including the American Peace Mobilization, the American Youth Congress, the League of Young Southerners, the Southern Negro Youth Congress, as well as the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), a federation of labor unions, and the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, an organization committed to social and political reform of the South.

She left Radcliffe that year when she lost her scholarship, which she believed was because of her radical activities.

In 1941, Gelders married Laurent Brown Frantz, a native of Knoxville, Tennessee, who was also a member of the Communist Party and an activist in the League of Young Southerners and anti-poll tax efforts.

That year, she took a job working at the National Youth Administration's printing office in Birmingham and also worked at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare.

In December, she moved to Washington, D.C., and began work at the Board of Economic Warfare, a governmental agency which procured imports for production of products for both the civilian economy and the war effort.

Her husband joined the United States Navy and in May 1942, Frantz took a post at the Soviet Purchasing Commission, an organization designed to deliver American equipment to the USSR for the war effort.

In 1943, she worked for the CIO affiliate, the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union in Birmingham and then in 1944 began working full time at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Nashville.

After working as a union organizer for the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union in 1944, she was employed full time at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Nashville, as a secretary and as the editor of the organization's press organ, Southern Patriot.

From 1944 to 1946, Frantz served as secretary to James Dombrowski, the executive secretary of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, and as editor of the Southern Patriot, the official journal of the organization.

As early as 1947, she, Dombrowski, and her father were targeted for investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The couple left Nashville in 1950 after being targeted by the Ku Klux Klan and moved to Berkeley, California.

They became part of the local radical community, settled in the San Francisco Bay Area and raised their four children, Joe, Larry, Virginia, and Alex there.

In the 1950s, Frantz served as the Alameda County director of the Independent Progressive Party.

She was a supporter of the Highlander Training and Education Center and became a member of the Northern California Committee against Nuclear Testing.

She supported clemency for convicted spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and was in favor of repealing the Smith Act, which allowed for registration and deportation of any member of an organization deemed a threat to the United States, and stopping the prosecutions of those who opposed the Act.

Engstrand was a young mother with two children, a Quaker, and had been a librarian at University of California, Berkeley since 1950.

As they grew closer, the two women had lunch together regularly each week.

In 1955, Frantz met her life partner Eleanor Engstrand and the two women connected based on common interest in politics, social issues, backpacking, and bird watching.

In 1956, Frantz quit the Communist Party, because of Stalin's repression of dissidents.

From 1957, she worked as an executive secretary at the University of California, Berkeley, but after violence was used against student protesters at People's Park in 1969, she left her job and enrolled as a student.

In 1957, she became the executive secretary to Earl F. Cheit, who was in charge of the Institution of Industrial Relations on the campus of UC Berkeley.

In 1965, when Cheit was named to a new post as executive assistant chancellor, he appointed her to continue as his executive assistant.

She completed a bachelor's degree in political theory in 1972 and the following year, moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz to work on her PhD. Frantz and her husband each changed romantic partners when she moved to Santa Cruz, Eleanor Engstrand becoming her new companion.

At UC Santa Cruz, as one of the founders of the Women's Studies Department, she served on the Women's Studies Executive Committee and was a member of the Board of Directors of the Women's Center.

She taught there from 1973 to 1999 and received two teaching awards.

Her life of activism was included in the 1983 documentary film, Seeing Red.