Marge Frantz

Marge Frantz (née Gelders; June 18, 1922 – October 16, 2015) was an American activist and among the first generation of academics who taught women's study courses in United States. Born in Birmingham, Alabama, from a young age she became involved in progressive causes. She worked as a labor organizer, agitated for civil rights, and participated in the women's poll tax repeal movement. After working as a union organizer for the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union in 1944, she was employed full time at the Southern Conference for Human Welfare in Nashville, as a secretary and as the editor of the organization's press organ, Southern Patriot. By the late 1940s, she was being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee and in 1950, she and her husband moved to the San Francisco Bay Area.

Still active in the radical community, she was involved in anti-nuclear testing protests as well as in supporting clemency for convicted spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. From 1957, she worked as an executive secretary at the University of California, Berkeley, but after violence was used against student protesters at People's Park in 1969, she left her job and enrolled as a student. She completed a bachelor's degree in political theory in 1972 and the following year, moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz to work on her PhD. Frantz and her husband each changed romantic partners when she moved to Santa Cruz, Eleanor Engstrand becoming her new companion. At UC Santa Cruz, as one of the founders of the Women's Studies Department, she served on the Women's Studies Executive Committee and was a member of the Board of Directors of the Women's Center. She taught there from 1973 to 1999 and received two teaching awards. Her life of activism was included in the 1983 documentary film, Seeing Red.