She was commissioned by National Geographic to write about Japan and then traveled to Soviet Russia, where she wrote for Birth Control Review, a journal that was edited by Margaret Sanger. She received a teaching degree from an Abilene college and a masters in education from the University of Chicago, where she embraced stridently leftist views on women’s rights. Gertrude was the only Beasley to take an interest in school.

Gertrude’s mother grew so wary of her alcoholic, abusive husband and the prospect of yet another baby that she pretended to take the children out to pick cotton one day and instead ran away with them to nearby Abilene, where she got a divorce - something unknown and therefore shameful in rural Texas. “She’s the forgotten woman of Texas literature.”Įdna Gertrude Beasley was born on June 20, 1892, near Cross Plains, Tex., but her father, a subsistence farmer, was restless and moved frequently, always hoping for better luck. “Gertrude Beasley belongs in the first rank of Texas writers,” Don Graham, a professor at the University of Texas who is the state’s leading literary historian, said in an interview. My First Thirty Years is profoundly human and shockingly candid, a rallying cry that cost its author her career and her freedom.

She is undaunted by authority figures but secretly ashamed of her origins and yearns to be loved. With characteristic ferocity, Beasley rejected a life of dependence, persisting in her studies and becoming first a teacher, then a principal, then a college instructor, and finally a foreign correspondent.Īlong the way, Beasley becomes a strident activist for women's rights, socialism, and sex education, which she sees as key to restoring bodily autonomy to women like those she grew up with. Her mother and sisters braved male objectification and the indignities of poverty, with little if any control over their futures. Though British Nobel Prize winner Bertrand Russell called My First Thirty Years 'truthful, which is illegal' and Larry McMurtry pronounced it the finest Texas book of its era, Beasley's words have been all but inaccessible for almost a century-until now.īeasley penned one of the most brutally honest coming-of-age historical memoirs ever written, one which strips away romantic notions about frontier women's lives at the turn of the 20th century. Shortly after its 1925 publication, Gertrude Beasley's ferociously eloquent feminist memoir was banned and she herself disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

My first thirty years gertrude beasley