Archives West Finding Aid

Sue Davidson (March 30, 1925-September 28, 2016) was a writer, editor, and political and social activist. Davidson's political consciousness was forged by her childhood in the segregated South. From the late 1950s through the 1970s she devoted most of her time to the civil rights, peace, and antiwar movements, working with organizations such as the American Friends Service Committee, War Resisters League, and the American Civil Liberties Union in Seattle; she was also active in the Congress of Racial Equality. In 1961, Davidson helped organize one of the first "Ban the Bomb" peace marches in Seattle. In 1966, she co-organized a city-wide school boycott protesting de facto protesting racial segregation. A leader in the local movement opposing the Vietnam War, she was instrumental in organizing numerous and increasingly militant, but nonviolent, anti-war and anti-draft demonstrations. She was arrested in 1968 for participating in a sit-in at a Selective Service office. In the 1970s, she worked as a community organizer for Seattle's Model Cities program.

Davidson began her writing career at 16, when she was hired by the Galveston Daily News as a features writer and then as editor of its “Society Page”; she also published several short stories in literary journals. She received a scholarship in creative writing from Stanford University (1949-1950) and was awarded the 1950 Saxton Fellowship for young writers (other recipients included James Baldwin). In the 1950s and 1960s she turned to nonfiction, publishing articles in magazines including The Nation and The Progressive. Beginning in the 1970s, she focused mainly on women's history and women's issues, working as an editor for The Feminist Press in New York, from 1974 to 1980, as co-director of its multivolume Women's Work/Women's Lives series. In the 1990s she was invited to join PEN and organized Seattle events supporting freedom of expression for writers, including Salman Rushdie. In the 1990s she wrote a series of youth biographies on women pioneers in politics, sports, and journalism, and, with Ginny NiCarthy, the widely-read You Can Be Free-An Easy-to-Read Handbook for Abused Women, all published by Seal Press.

Born Betty Sue Davidson, on March 30, 1925, in Houston, Texas, Davidson grew up on neighboring Galveston Island, Texas, with her sister, Hortense, and parents, Isadore and Helen (Grossberg) Davidson, who owned a women's clothing store there. In 1943, she married Alex Gottfried, a lieutenant in Army Air Corps. Davidson earned a master’s degree in the humanities from the University of Chicago in 1949. She moved to Seattle in 1950, when her husband joined the political science faculty at the University of Washington. The couple had a daughter and lived the rest of their lives in Seattle. Davidson died September 28, 2016.

Adapted from Davidson’s obituary in The Seattle Times on July 1, 2018.