Susan Lydon

Her father was electrician Sam Goldenberg, and her mother was Eve Samberg, a singer at resorts in the Catskills Mountains; they married in 1942.

Susan Gordon Lydon (November 14, 1943July 15, 2005) was an American journalist and writer, known for her 1970 feminist essay "The Politics of Orgasm", which brought the female fake orgasm into popular discussion.

She helped start Rolling Stone magazine and covered music journalism for it, and also wrote pieces for Ramparts, Ms. and The New York Times Magazine.

Sam left to serve in the U.S. Army in Europe in 1943, and Lydon was born in November while he was away.

She was named by her mother for actress Susan Hayward.

After her father returned in 1945, the family welcomed two more daughters, Lorraine (1946) and Sheila (1949).

In 1952, they all moved to Island Park on Long Island, to live in the newly built suburbs, and they changed their surname to Gordon.

Son Ricky was born in 1956; post-partum woes added to the bouts of depression that had come over Eve in 1955.

In 1961 at age 17, Lydon was sneaking out of the house to nightclubs, and smoking marijuana.

Despite these peccadillos, she earned a full scholarship and entered Vassar College in September 1961 to study history.

At Vassar, she started taking diet pills containing amphetamine, and continued to smoke marijuana.

She met Michael Lydon, a student at Yale University.

In 1965 she graduated from college and married Michael.

Michael and Susan Lydon moved to the UK to work in journalism.

He wrote about British affairs for the American magazine Newsweek.

As a freelancer, she submitted fashion pieces for London Life magazine, the newly adopted name of the Tatler, published weekly during the Swinging Sixties.

She also wrote for The Times.

The two left London for San Francisco at the beginning of 1967, just in time to witness and report on Michael Bowen's Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, where they dropped acid (lysergic acid diethylamide or LSD) and listened to Timothy Leary tell the crowd that people living in cities should reorganize as tribes and villages.

Lydon enrolled in graduate studies at San Francisco State University, but she soon dropped out of school.

She wrote for Sunday Ramparts, a supplement of Ramparts, connecting with Jann Wenner, the arts editor.

Wenner was starting Rolling Stone, and he recruited both of the Lydons to assist with managing the project.

Michael Lydon thought he was hired as managing editor, but this position was taken by Herbert "Hirk" Williamson.

Susan Lydon refused menial, secretarial assignments suggested by Wenner and instead wrote reviews and articles.

She helped edit and produce the magazine.

She gave the magazine its slogan "All the news that fits" which she lifted from an April Fools issue of the Columbia Daily Spectator, writing "All the news that fits we print", a parody of The New York Times' slogan, "All the News That's Fit to Print".

Lydon's daughter Shuna was born in March 1968, and she left Rolling Stone, writing for a short-lived Hearst periodical titled Eye aimed at the youth market.

Helen Gurley Brown took over Eye as editor, and chastised Lydon for writing so much about sex, drugs and politics.

Lydon accepted assignments from The New York Times Magazine, and she edited a biography of Huey P. Newton for Ramparts, later recalling the day when gun-toting Bobby Seale guarded the Ramparts office building while Eldridge Cleaver was smuggled out of the country.

In late November 1968, Lydon attended the first women's liberation conference at Camp Hastings in Lake Villa, Illinois, at which 200 women's rights activists met.

Lydon separated from her husband in January 1969, taking her daughter to Berkeley to live with Ramparts contributor Tuck Weills for six months.

In December 1969 she was at the Altamont Free Concert to report on the Rolling Stones and the music scene, but she was appalled to witness there the death of the "good vibes" of the sixties.

In Berkeley, Lydon met with women feminists who were conducting a consciousness raising awareness meeting, and she was shocked to hear one woman admit to never having experienced an orgasm.

The women in the group opened up about their sexuality, and Lydon determined to write about this little-understood topic.

She proposed the idea to Ramparts' male editorial board, including Robert Scheer, who all laughed at her.

She started a newspaper for the Arica School in the 1970s.

She was a columnist for the Oakland Tribune newspaper, and she wrote two books about knitting.

She cried in the face of their ridicule, but persisted with her vision, writing the essay "Understanding Orgasm", which editor Peter Collier changed to "The Politics of Orgasm", published by Ramparts in 1970.

In 1993 she published a memoir, Take The Long Way Home: Memoirs Of A Survivor, detailing her career highs and drug-addicted lows, ending in a successful recovery.

Her memoir came one year after the book Home Fires, written by Don Katz about her birth family, the Gordons.

Lydon was born to an American Jewish family in The Bronx.