Grace Paley

American short story writer, poet, teacher, feminist and "somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist".

Paley was known for pacifism and for political activism. Her fellow feminist activist Robin Morgan described Paley's activism as broadly focused on social justice: "civil-rights, anti-war, anti-nuclear, feminist, whatever needed revolution." The FBI declared her a communist and kept a file on her for thirty years.

Beginning in the 1950s, Paley joined friends in protesting nuclear proliferation and American militarization. She also worked with the American Friends Service Committee to establish neighborhood peace groups, helping found the Greenwich Village Peace Center in 1961. She met her second husband, Robert Nichols, through the anti-Vietnam War peace movement.

With the escalation of the Vietnam War, Paley joined the War Resisters League. She was arrested on a number of occasions, including spending a week in the Women's House of Detention in Greenwich Village. In 1968, she signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War, and in 1969 she came to national prominence as an activist when she accompanied a peace mission to Hanoi to negotiate the release of prisoners of war. She served as a delegate to the 1973 World Peace Conference in Moscow and was arrested in 1978 as one of "The White House Eleven" for unfurling an anti-nuclear banner that read "No Nuclear Weapons—No Nuclear Power—USA and USSR" on the White House lawn. In the 1980s Paley supported efforts to improve human rights and resist U.S. military intervention in Central America,and she continued to speak out in her final years against the Iraq War.

Among Paley's many other causes was abortion rights, part of her broader feminist work. She organized one of the first "abortion speak-outs" in the 1960s after having an abortion herself in the 1950s and then struggling to obtain a second one a few years later.