Joan Kennedy Taylor (December 21, 1926 – October 29, 2005) was an American journalist, author, editor, public intellectual, and political activist.

Her father's biographer, James Pegolotti, writes that "[b]y 1942, owing to a peregrinating mother, Joan had attended eight schools, in such far-flung spots as Peking, Paris, and Ellsworth, Maine, as well as New York.

After their marriage in 1948, Taylor went to work as an actress on stage, radio, and television (with the usual assortment of accompanying dead-end day jobs).

Much of her spare time she devoted to auditing graduate courses in psychology at Columbia, where Cook was now pursuing a Ph.D., and to dabbling in the ideas of G. I. Gurdjieff and P. D.

Psychologists, Dixieland jazz musicians, poets, runaway girls, a madman named Carl Solomon whom an old Columbia classmate of [Donald's], Allen Ginsberg, had met in a psychiatric ward.

It was in 1957, James Pegolotti reports, when, "[a]s a publicity assistant at Knopf, Joan read an advance copy of [Ayn] Rand's Atlas Shrugged and found the book fascinating.

She also began working on behalf of feminist causes, which had gradually attracted her interest since the early 1960s when she read The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan.

During the Vietnam War, Joan was part of a group of Objectivists that put together a conference in Washington, DC, in an effort to end the military draft.

In 1977, at the invitation of its editor, Roy A. Childs, Jr., Taylor joined the staff of the monthly magazine Libertarian Review, where she began writing regularly on feminist and other topics.

Two years later, she became a regular biweekly commentator on the nationally syndicated daily radio program, Byline, which was underwritten by the libertarian Cato Institute.