Miriam Schneir

Miriam Schneir is an American writer and feminist historian. She is known for co-authoring books with her husband Walter Schneir on the Rosenberg espionage case. She also edited feminist anthologies that presented key texts dating back to the 18th century. In addition to her books, Schneir has written articles about education, politics, and women's history for The New York Times Magazine, The Nation, Ms., and other publications.

Early life and education Miriam Blumberg was born in 1933 and grew up in Queens, New York. She was raised in a middle-class Jewish family that she later said was not very interested in the areas which would occupy much of her adult life: politics, feminism, and cultural scholarship.

After high school, she attended Antioch College as a creative writing major. She then transferred to Queens College, where she studied early childhood education in order to obtain a teaching license.

Political views While in the fourth grade, Miriam Blumberg met Cynthia Fuchs-Epstein and they became lifelong friends. Fuchs-Epstein was from a more politically engaged family than the Blumbergs, and through this friendship Miriam began to cultivate her own political activism. As a teenager, she worked for the Henry Wallace presidential campaign of 1948, and then for Adlai Stevenson in the 1952 presidential election. In the late 1950s, she and Walter were active in the Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy. The fruit of their effort was Invitation to an Inquest: A New Look at the Rosenberg-Sobell Case, published by Doubleday in 1965.

After completing the Rosenberg book, Miriam immersed herself in women's history. She worked as a research associate at the Columbia University Center for Social Sciences Program in Sex Roles and Social Change. In 1972, she compiled and edited the first of several anthologies, Feminism: The Essential Historical Writings. She contributed to the U.S. Bicentennial museum exhibit and catalogue book, Remember the Ladies: Women in America, 1750-1815. The Schneirs compared the recorded pretrial interviews of government witness Harry Gold against his testimony on the witness stand, and noticed important discrepancies. Miriam and Walter gradually reached the conclusion that the U.S. government had framed the Rosenbergs. In 1965, they published their controversial findings in the book, Invitation to an Inquest. They subsequently put out updated editions, with new material added, in 1968, 1973, and 1983.

In 1983, controversies erupted when Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton published The Rosenberg File: A Search for Truth, which attacked the theses propounded in the Schneirs' book, and defended the government's prosecution of the Rosenbergs. The two sets of authors argued about the case both in the press and in an in-person debate. Miriam was a frequent speaker about the Rosenbergs at book talks, and on radio and television.

Feminist history In a 2004 interview, Schneir recalled her initiation into feminist scholarship:In the late 60s, I began to get glimmerings of interest in the condition of women and began to reflect on the subject a bit. As time went on, I began to read about it. And the more I read, the more interested I got. I went through a personal consciousness raising.... I thought I'd do an anthology. I had been reading women's writings and I had been reading some of the history of the suffrage movement and feminist writing, and I said, "If I'm so excited by this stuff, and it's all so new to me, other people should know about it, too." and then re-issued in 1994 by Vintage Books. In 1994, she also published a follow-up anthology, Feminism in Our Time: The Essential Writings, World War II to the Present, which emphasized contemporary feminism.