Marge Frantz (née Gelders; June 18, 1922 – October 16, 2015) was an American activist and among the first generation of academics who taught women's study courses in United States.

Still active in the radical community, she was involved in anti-nuclear testing protests as well as in supporting clemency for convicted spies, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

She completed a bachelor's degree in political theory in 1972 and the following year, moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz to work on her PhD.

[1][2] Her father taught physics at the University of Alabama and became involved in the Communist Party, labor organizing and the struggle for racial justice in the South.

She was featured that year in a photograph published in the Daily Worker, participating in a Chicago march advocating for the abolition of poll taxes.

[4] In 1941, Gelders married Laurent Brown Frantz, a native of Knoxville, Tennessee, who was also a member of the Communist Party and an activist in the League of Young Southerners and anti-poll tax efforts.

[5][8] Her husband joined the United States Navy and in May 1942, Frantz took a post at the Soviet Purchasing Commission, an organization designed to deliver American equipment to the USSR for the war effort.

They became part of the local radical community, settled in the San Francisco Bay Area and raised their four children, Joe, Larry, Virginia, and Alex there.

[10][12][13] In 1955, Frantz met her life partner Eleanor Engstrand and the two women connected based on common interest in politics, social issues, backpacking, and bird watching.

The appointment was questioned by the California State Senate's Un-American Activities Committee, which Cheit dismissed as irrelevant given her prior tenure at the university.

Engstrand's husband died in 1967[14][17] and Frantz quit her job in 1969 after university police used violence against student protesters in People's Park.

[4] Looking for something to replace her commitment to the communist party, she attended classes offered by John Schaar and Sheldon Wolin on political theory and decided to formally enroll at UC Berkeley in 1970.

[4][21] Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, she continued her activism, speaking at events for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), warning of the dangers of returning to McCarthyism and a backlash against pacifists, while protesting nuclear testing and the removal of affirmative action legislation.