Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller (born 1943) is an American feminist, ecologist, and member of the Rockefeller family. She was a member of Cell 16, a radical feminist organization, in the 1970s. She also founded the Clivus Multrum company, which manufactures composting toilets.
Abby Rockefeller was born in 1943, the eldest daughter and second child of David Rockefeller and Margaret McGrath. She has an older brother, David Jr., and four younger siblings, Neva, Peggy, Richard, and Eileen.
She attended the New England Conservatory of Music in the early 1960s, where she encountered teachers critical of social inequality in the United States. This experience led her to embrace Marxism, the politics of Fidel Castro and ultimately radical feminism.[1]
She joined the Boston-area female liberation movement led by Roxanne Dunbar, which subsequently changed its name to Cell 16.[2] Along with the other Cell 16 members, Rockefeller promoted self-defense for women and became skilled in karate in response to the frequent street harassment and sexual assaults women endured at the time. They set up a Tae Kwon Do studio in Boston and taught hundreds of women who, in turn, taught other women, becoming pioneers in self-defense for women. Cell 16 allowed women to break free from the bonds that subjugated them to their subordinate roles.[3]
After reading Cell 16's radical feminist publication, No More Fun and Games: A Journal of Female Liberation, Rockefeller decided to join the organization. In issue six, "Tell A Woman", published in May 1973, she contributed an article called "Sex: The Basis of Sexism",[4] which posited that one driving force in sexism was male desire to access and control female sexuality for their own ends.[5] After being infiltrated by Trotskyists and FBI agents, Cell 16 disassociated from its splinter group, Female Liberation, which was providing a front for recruiting aspiring feminists to Trotskyism.[6][7][8][9]
In the 1970s, Rockefeller turned her attention to environmentalism, focusing on human waste. Rockefeller was the first American to install a composting system in her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, even though the technology had been around since the 1930s.[10] In 1973, she founded the Clivus Multrum company to manufacture composting toilets.
As of 2005, Clivus Multrum was still the "largest distributor of composting toilets for public use in North America".[10]
In 2012, Abby Rockefeller founded Churchtown Dairy, a 250-acre dairy near Hudson, New York[11], operating a biodynamic herd of 28 Brown Swiss, Jersey, and Guernsey cows.
The FBI was apparently able to recruit informers to attend meetings and report back to the FBI with ease. Bureau files contain summaries of feminist meetings with such subversive aims as, 'They wanted equal opportunities that men have in work and in society'.
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