Margaret Cruikshank

Margaret Louise Cruikshank (born April 26, 1940) is an American lesbian feminist writer and academic, best known for writing "Lesbian studies: present and future" and "Learning to be old: gender, culture, and aging".

She was one of the first American academics to be out during a time when gay rights were an unfamiliar concept. Cruikshank played a central role in establishing the importance of lesbian studies within both women's studies and the academy through the publication of her edited anthologies and taught Lesbian and gay literature the City College of San Francisco Castro Valencia campus.

Early life and education

Margaret Louise Cruikshank was born in Duluth, Minnesota on April 26, 1940. Her parents are George Patrick Cruikshank and Louise Marie Wimmer.

Cruikshank attended The College of St. Scholastica, obtaining her Bachelor of Arts in English in 1962. She says she started writing during her college years. In the early 1970s she came out as a lesbian within the Minneapolis lesbian-feminist community.

She received her Ph.D. in Victorian literature from Loyola University in 1969, writing her dissertation on Thomas B. Macaulay. Her first publication came in 1973, a book review in the Minneapolis Tribune. She began writing on lesbian topics in 1975, writing under her own name and various pseudonyms. She was published in a wide variety of publications like Gay Community News, Motheroot Journal, The Radical Teacher, Focus, Journal of Homosexuality and The Advocate.

Writing Cruikshank is most well-known for editing three major lesbian anthologies.

In 1980, she self-published The Lesbian Path, the first book made up entirely of short, personal narratives by lesbians. The book was re-published in 1985 by Grey Fox Press. In her papers, donated to the UCLA Library Special Collections, Cruikshank explains the three anthologies, their genesis and their inclusions. She traces their origins in the women's studies movement and through the lesbian academics' network created by the National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) and details the editorial process. After teaching English, gay/lesbian studies, and women's studies for many years, she retired from the University of Maine in 2011. She continues as a faculty associate at The Maine Center on Aging.

In 1997, she donated a selection of her archives to the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives in West Hollywood. She is a recipient of two Fulbright Fellowship senior specialist awards to conduct seminars and lectures on women and aging. The first was with University of Victoria's Centre on Aging (2007) and the second was at the University of Graz in Austria.