Barbara Deming (July 23, 1917 – August 2, 1984) was an American lesbian feminist and advocate of nonviolent social change.
Formation and early work, 1917–1945 Barbara Deming was born into an "upper-middle-class" family, and raised with her three brothers in Manhattan.Martin Duberman, A Saving Remnant: The Radical Lives of Barbara Deming and David McReynolds (New York: The New Press, 2011), p. 7. Her mother was Katherine Burritt, a women's suffragist who had sung professionally in her youth,John William Leonard, Woman's Who's Who of America, 1914-15 (New York: The American Commonwealth Company, 1915), p. 240. and her father was Harold Simpson Deming, described by his daughter as "a well-to-do Republican lawyer"Judith McDaniel, "Shaping the Sixties: The Emergence of Barbara Deming", in Avital H. Bloch and Lauri Umansky (eds), Impossible to Hold: Women and Culture in the 1960s (New York: New York University Press, 2005), p. 197. and a "very caring and principled man".A Saving Remnant, p. 8. Deming recognised her father as conventionally patriarchal and that she would have to escape his influence to become herself, but also considered him emotionally reliable in a way that her mother was not.A Saving Remnant, pp. 8–9.
Deming attended the Friends Seminary, a Quaker school on East 16th Street, from kindergarten to the end of high school.McDaniel, "Shaping the Sixties", p. 198.Jane Meyerding (ed.), We Are All Part of One Another: A Barbara Deming Reader (New Society, 1984), "Introduction", p. 1. The family lived nearby on East 19th Street and had a country retreat in then rural New City, Rockland County, where Deming was exposed to more bohemian influences thanks to the artists' colony that had developed along South Mountain Road.A Saving Remnant, pp. 7 and 9.
From 1934 she attended Bennington College in Vermont. She graduated in 1938 with majors in English literature and drama, and returned to New York City, where she settled in Greenwich Village.A Saving Remnant, pp. 10-11. At first, she seemed destined for a career in the theater. She had co-founded a stock company at Bennington, and served as its co-director in the summers of 1938 and 1939. In her senior year she was active on the fringes of Orson Welles's Mercury Theatre, and her first paid job after graduation was with the company. She also directed its apprentice group without pay. She briefly worked with another company as assistant director on a production of Shelley's The Cenci, which never found a backer.All details of Deming's theater work from A Saving Remnant, p. 11.
Frustrated and disenchanted by her inability to get steady theater work, she considered a teaching career. She spent the summer of 1940 at Bennington as a teaching fellow, and accepted a scholarship from Western Reserve University (now Case Western) in Cleveland, where she completed a master's degree in drama during the academic year that followed.A Saving Remnant, pp. 11–12. The disappointing program at Case Western — dominated by superficial survey courses — dampened her enthusiasm, although she did return to Bennington for a second stint as a teaching fellow in the summer of 1941.A Saving Remnant, p. 11.
In 1942 she got a job as a film analyst at the Museum of Modern Art, working on a project for the Library of Congress, which she held until funding ran out in 1945.A Saving Remnant, pp. 12. Once again unemployed, Deming was obliged to move back home with her parents, as she had in the winter of 1939–1940 and would continue to do from time to time.A Saving Remnant, p. 11, 12.
Writer, 1945–1960 Deming had been writing poetry since she was sixteen,Kimberly Hayden Brookes, "Barbara Deming", in Carol Hurd Green and Mary Grimley Mason (eds), American Women Writers, Volume 5: Supplement (New York: Ungar Continuum, 1994), p. 100. Online version at Encyclopedia.com. Accessed August 3, 2025. and had been trying to write in other forms since she graduated from Bennington.A Saving Remnant, p. 9, 11. In 1945, she decided that this would be her career.Brookes, "Barbara Deming", p. 101. Building on what she had learned from the Library of Congress project, she continued to research the movies, and started work on what became Running Away from Myself: A Dream Portrait of America Drawn from the Movies of the Forties, the first version of which she completed in 1950.Meyerding, "Introduction", p. 2. The manuscript was praised by Truman Capote (a neighbour in New City) and partly serialized in the magazine City Lights, but rejected by every publisher Deming submitted it to. It was only published — after substantial revision — in 1969.
Indeed, "most of the short stories, essays, and poetry she submitted before 1950 were rejected".A Saving Remnant, pp. 14. As the new decade began, Deming, now in her thirties, could still write: "I have a great hunger to begin to shape a life."A Saving Remnant, p. 18. She did gradually build a portfolio during the 1950s, often published in lower-profile journals and magazines, many of which would prove ephemeral. She had her greatest success as a film critic, placing pieces fairly regularly, initially in the Partisan Review and later also in Vogue and The Nation.McDaniel, "Shaping the Sixties", p. 200. Among her more prestigious credits were a short story in The New Yorker ("A Giro")"A Giro" appears in Deming's collection Wash Us and Comb Us (1972) as "An Invitation". and a substantial essay on the English playwright John Osborne in The Hudson Review.Barbara Deming, "John Osborne's War against the Philistines", The Hudson Review, Vol. 11, No. 3 (Autumn, 1958), pp. 411–419.
In a review of We Are All Part of One Another: A Barbara Deming Reader (1984), Deming's friend and former partner Mary Meigs loyally foregrounds the eighteen poems that are used to link the different sections of the anthology.Mary Meigs, "Remembering Barbara Deming", in The Women's Review of Books, Vol. 2, No. 1 (October, 1984), pp. 8–9. In 1996, other friends published I Change, I Change, a selection of Deming's love poems organised into groups dedicated to the women who inspired them.Barbara Deming, I Change, I Change: Poems by Barbara Deming, edited by Judith McDaniel (Norwich, VT: New Victoria Publishers, 1996). Yet almost none of the poems that appeared posthumously had been accepted for publication in her lifetime.Martin Duberman's suggestion that Deming had verse "accepted" by The Kenyon Review and The Hudson Review (A Saving Remnant, p. 14) appears to be based on correspondence (A Saving Remnant, p. 252, note 7). There is no sign of these poems in the journals themselves, both of which have been digitized and indexed by JSTOR.
Deming would later say that she "almost was killed as a writer in the '40s and '50s" by the struggle to break through.A Saving Remnant, p. 19. It is hardly surprisingly that editors of the era were not receptive to overtly lesbian themes, but even her more impersonal work found relatively few takers. A mounting pile of rejection slips obliged her to keep accepting "pink collar" jobs around New York City — including one as editorial assistant to novelist-journalist Bessie Breuer, "with whom she became very close, though Bessie could be notoriously difficult"A Saving Remnant, pp. 14–15. — or to rely on the generosity of her parents and of Mary Meigs. It also left her looking for challenges elsewhere. For a time she took drawing classes with George Grosz at the Art Students League. She also began to travel: to Italy, Spain, Greece and England in 1950–1951;Deming's account of this odyssey would eventually be published as A Humming Under My Feet: A Book of Travail (London: The Women's Press, 1985). to Mexico in 1953; on a tour including Japan, India and Israel in 1959; and finally to Cuba in 1960A Saving Remnant, pp. 16-18, 19, 23, 23–24. — a trip that would prove to be "the turning point" that shaped the remainder of her life.
Activist, 1960–1984
On a trip to India, she began reading Gandhi, and became committed to a non-violent struggle, with her main cause being Women's Rights. She later became a journalist, and was active in many demonstrations and marches over issues of peace and civil rights. She was a member of a group that went to Hanoi during the Vietnam War, and was jailed many times for non-violent protest.Andrejkoymasky.com
Deming believed that it was often those whom we loved that oppressed us, and that it was necessary to re-invent non-violent struggle every day.
It is often said that she created a body of non-violent theory, based on action and personal experience, that centered on the potential of non-violent struggle in its application to the women's movement.
In 1968, Deming signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.“Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” January 30, 1968 New York Post
On September 2, 1971, Deming was involved in a near-fatal car accident while driving to a conference in Georgia.A Saving Remnant, p. 151. She suffered serious internal injuries and for a time her vision was in peril. She spent four months in hospital and longer convalescing at home. She returned to limited activism, but her physical fragility was permanent, eventually prompting her move to Florida in 1977.A Saving Remnant, p. 193. "Illness holds me by the ankle," she wrote.Meyerding, "Introduction", p. 12.
In 1978, she became an associate of the Women's Institute for Freedom of the Press.
Money for Women / The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund In 1975, Deming founded The Money for Women Fund to support the work of feminist artists. Deming helped administer the Fund, with support from artist Mary Meigs. After Deming's death in 1984, the organization was renamed as The Barbara Deming Memorial Fund. Today, the foundation is the "oldest ongoing feminist granting agency" which "gives encouragement and grants to individual feminists in the arts (writers, and visual artists)".
Relationships Deming had her first serious romantic and sexual relationship at sixteen with Norma Millay, sister of Edna St. Vincent Millay, a woman her mother's age whom she had met in New City.Meyerding, "Introduction", p. 1.A Saving Remnant, p. 9. She immediately embraced her lesbianism, writing at the time "I am a lesbian. I must face it," and a few years later in 1939, "This is not the devil. It is the devil who says this is the devil." This formative relationship lasted about a year, and Deming even confessed it to her mother, who "wasn't judgmental". Other affairs followed, including a brief one in her early twenties with Lotte Lenya. Deming experimented with heterosexuality at college,A Saving Remnant, p. 10. and then for a final time in her mid-thirties, in a misadventure that convinced her once and for all that "I am not the one to unteach" men their "inanity".A Humming Under My Feet, pp. 266–267.
She had three long-term relationships. The first, beginning in the early 1940s, was with Vida Ginsberg (1920–2015),"Deaths, Vida Ginsberg Deming", New York Times, March 17, 2015. Accessed August 2, 2025. later a professor at Bard College. The second, from 1954 to 1969, was with the painter and writer Mary Meigs. Meigs was wealthier than Deming, with a comfortable private income, which gave them the freedom to pursue their political and creative interests with few financial constraints. Deming's final enduring relationship, from 1969 to 1984, was with the painter Jane Verlaine, also known as Jane Watrous Gapen.Gapen was her mother's maiden name (sic), Watrous her father's name, and Verlaine her husband's name. She used both Gapen and Verlaine in different contexts. See A Saving Remnant, p. 264, note 8.