Marilyn Salzman Webb

Marilyn Salzman Webb (born October 26, 1942),

Webb holds a PhD in educational psychology from the University of Chicago - successfully awarded 50 years after sexual harassment derailed her from first receiving it. She pursued her undergraduate education at Brandeis University, graduating with a BA in 1964. Later she studied at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and completed her MS degree in 1981. She had begun studies for her PhD in educational psychology at the University of Chicago in 1964, but left with only the compensatory master's degree in 1967, when her doctorate was nearly completed. After finishing her coursework and passing her preliminary examinations, she abandoned her degree after facing sexual harassment and sexual assault by professors she asked to serve on her dissertation committee. As a feminist leader, she faced New Left male chauvinism when she spoke to introduce the fledgling women's movement on January 20, 1970, to 10,000+ participants at an anti-war rally against President Richard M. Nixon's inauguration. She and feminist Shulamith Firestone were booed off the protest stage, met by cat calls, derogatory words, and a near crowd riot.

As a young feminist in the winter of 1970, Webb co-founded off our backs ("oob"), one of the first of the Second Wave feminist newspapers to appear. Ramparts magazine, The Washington Star Sunday Magazine, and has since featured in many core books and movies on the New Left and/or the women's movement, including In Our Time, The Sixties, For Women Only, Freedom for Women, Generation on Fire, Rebels with a Cause, the movie She's Beautiful When She's Angry, (Village Voice), "The Art of Dying," and "The Hospice Way of Death" (New York Magazine), "A Lover's Story: Dr. Kevorkian and the Death of Tom Hyde" (Glamour), "Special Report on Kevorkian Families" (Ladies Home Journal), and Op Ed pieces on hospice and Medicare (The New York Times) and assisted suicide (USA Today).

In addition to Goddard College, Webb has taught at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism in New York City, and at Knox College, in Galesburg, Illinois. There she began a journalism program based on the work of the muckrakers, primarily those published in McClure's Magazine, a turn-of-the 20th century progressive periodical published by S. S. McClure — a famed Knox College alumnus — who showcased investigations by Progressive Era journalists Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and others. Webb now holds the title of Knox College Distinguished Professor Emerita of Journalism. As part of Knox College's Journalism program, Webb directed students in publishing award-winning articles in professional newspapers, including the March 2011 series, "Maytag Employees in Transition," a 17-part investigation printed in the Galesburg Register-Mail on the five-year aftermath of the closure of the local Maytag Refrigeration Plant. The series won first place awards in both the Illinois Press Association and the Illinois Associated Press Editors Association, plus the coveted Sweepstakes Award for best reporting, all in competition statewide with professional journalists and newspapers.

When The Good Death: The New American Search to Reshape the End of Life was published in 1999, it garnered multiple laudatory book reviews — including those in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Kirkus Reviews, and Publishers Weekly. Webb subsequently began a two-year national stint of speaking and organizing to improve care of the dying, giving keynote addresses to medical, social work, church-based and community groups across the country, as well as granting nearly two hundred, newspaper, radio, and TV interviews.

Political activism At Brandeis, Webb was inspired by professors Eleanor Roosevelt and Herbert Marcuse, by visiting speakers Malcolm X and Tom Hayden, and by Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech when she went to the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. On January 20, 1969, Webb was tapped to be a lead speaker for women's liberation at the large demonstration during the inauguration of President Nixon, but she and other women were booed off a protest stage. She then helped encourage feminists to organize independently of the New Left. That was the same year she also co-founded oob and also began the women's studies program at Goddard.

Years of research as an investigative journalist culminated in her book The Good Death, published in 1997, on medical and legal controversies surrounding end-of-life care in the US. She spent the following several years speaking to medical, religious, and lay groups about how to improve care, and served on the boards of the Hospice Foundation, publicizing hospice care, and Compassion in Dying (now Compassion & Choices), which promotes legalizing medical aid-in-dying.

Webb is featured in the documentary She's Beautiful When She's Angry.

Personal life and education Webb was born in Brooklyn, New York, on October 26, 1942, to a middle-class Jewish family that included Russian Jewish social justice seekers on her mother's side, and conservative German-Austrian Jews on her father's side. They lived in an apartment building in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn until she was nine years old, when her parents moved her and her younger sister, Netta, to a suburban housing development in Elmont, Long Island. Webb's father, William ('Bill") Salzman, was an illustrator training to work for his uncle, Charles Mintz, one of the first animated film producers and the first employer of Walt Disney. and her father ended up manufacturing underwear with another uncle in New York's garment business.

Webb began elementary school at P. S. 181 in Brooklyn, finished in Elmont and graduated from Elmont Memorial Junior-Senior High School in 1960. She described her childhood in an interview for the Veteran Feminists of America's oral history web site. Vice Chairman of Corporate Executives Against the War in Vietnam.