Feminist Writer Mander Dead At 67

Feminist author and professor Anica Vesel Mander died of breast cancer at her Bolinas home. She was 67. In the early 1990s, Mander went to her native Yugoslavia and interviewed Bosnian rape victims. Her interviews led an international tribunal to declare rape as a war crime. Mander co-wrote “Feminism as Therapy” in 1974 and wrote “Blood Ties, A Woman´s History” in 1976. Born in Yugoslavia, Mander fled the Nazis with her family at age 7 and in 1949, the Mander family arrived on Ellis Island.

Mander was an Italian and French professor at San Francisco University when she joined black students in a campus strike to demand ethnic studies courses. She was fired from her post. Afterward, she devoted her life to the feminist movement and to issues of gender and racial equality. Mander is survived by her two sons and a grandson.