Jo Freeman

Jo Freeman
Jo Freeman at September 2006 peace protest at U.S. Congress
Native name	Jo Freeman
Born	(1945-08-26) August 26, 1945 (age 71) Atlanta, Georgia
Academic background
Alma mater	University of Chicago
Thesis title	The politics of women's liberation: a case study of an emerging social movement and its relation to the policy process
Thesis year	1973
Academic work
Main interests	Feminist, political science, law

Jo Freeman (born August 26, 1945) is an American feminist, political scientist, writer and attorney. As a student at the University of California, Berkeley in the 1960s, she became active in organizations working for civil liberties and the civil rights movement. She went on to do voter registration and community organization in Alabama and Mississippi and was an early organizer of the women's liberation movement. She authored several classic feminist articles as well as important papers on social movements and political parties. She has also written extensively about women, particularly on law and public policy toward women and women in mainstream politics.

She was born in Atlanta, Georgia in 1945. Her mother Helen was from Hamilton, Alabama, and had served during World War II as a first lieutenant in the Women's Army Corps, stationed in England. Soon after Jo's birth she moved to Los Angeles, California where she taught junior high school until shortly before her death from emphysema. Freeman attended Birmingham High School, but graduated in the first class of Granada Hills High School in 1961. She received her BA with honors in political science from UC Berkeley in 1965. She began her graduate work in political science at the University of Chicago in 1968 and completed her PhD in 1973. After four years of teaching at the State University of New York she went to Washington, DC as a Brookings Fellow and stayed another year as an American Political Science Association Congressional Fellow. She entered New York University School of Law in 1979 as a Root-Tilden Scholar and received her JD degree in 1982. She was admitted to the New York State Bar in 1983.