Eva Kollisch

[1] She is best known for co-founding the pioneering Women's Studies department at Sarah Lawrence College, and her activist work in feminist, anti-war, and lesbian rights movements.

[5][2] The family reunited in 1940 in Staten Island, where Kollisch graduated from Curtis High School and worked in factories through the end of World War II.

[1][2][4] She became disillusioned and frustrated by the male leadership of the Workers Party and left it, divorcing Plastrik at the same time, in 1946 to attend Brooklyn College, where she studied German literature and science and graduated in 1951.

[1] The couple helped operate the collectively-run Cafe Rienzi in Greenwich Village, which was a popular bohemian spot frequented by writers such as Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, and Jack Kerouac.

Kollisch primarily taught Comparative Literature and German at Sarah Lawrence, and in the early 1970s, she helped found the school's Women's Studies department along with Joan Kelly, Sherry Ortner, and Gerda Lerner.

[4][8] In 1986, Kollisch's Sarah Lawrence colleague, Grace Paley, introduced her to Naomi Replansky at a Gay Women's Alternative poetry reading.