[2] Webb holds a PhD in educational psychology from the University of Chicago - successfully awarded 50 years after sexual harassment derailed her from first receiving it.
[2][5][6][7] As a feminist leader, she faced New Left male chauvinism when she spoke to introduce the fledgling women's movement on January 20, 1970, to 10,000+ participants at an anti-war rally against President Richard M. Nixon's inauguration.
She and feminist Shulamith Firestone were booed off the protest stage, met by cat calls, derogatory words, and a near crowd riot.
[8] Her focus then shifted to Second-Wave feminism and a crucial national decision ensued to separate women's movement organizing from the larger New Left.
In fall 1970, Webb also co-founded, directed, and taught in one of the first college-based women's studies programs on an American campus, at Goddard College in Plainfield, Vermont.
The most influential likely include: "Becoming the Men We Wanted to Marry,"[20] (Village Voice), "The Art of Dying,"[21] and "The Hospice Way of Death"[22] (New York Magazine), "A Lover's Story: Dr. Kevorkian and the Death of Tom Hyde"[23] (Glamour), "Special Report on Kevorkian Families"[24] (Ladies Home Journal), and Op Ed pieces on hospice and Medicare[25] (The New York Times) and assisted suicide[26] (USA Today).
There she began a journalism program based on the work of the muckrakers, primarily those published in McClure's Magazine, a turn-of-the 20th century progressive periodical published by S. S. McClure — a famed Knox College alumnus — who showcased investigations by Progressive Era journalists Ida Tarbell, Lincoln Steffens, Ray Stannard Baker, and others.
Webb subsequently began a two-year national stint of speaking and organizing to improve care of the dying, giving keynote addresses to medical, social work, church-based and community groups across the country, as well as granting nearly two hundred, newspaper, radio, and TV interviews.
At Brandeis, Webb was inspired by professors Eleanor Roosevelt and Herbert Marcuse, by visiting speakers Malcolm X and Tom Hayden, and by Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech when she went to the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Their protests garnered much press attention, but also led to decreased dosages of estrogen in the pill and the inauguration of a vital women's healthcare movement.
Years of research as an investigative journalist culminated in her book The Good Death, published in 1997, on medical and legal controversies surrounding end-of-life care in the US.
They lived in an apartment building in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn until she was nine years old, when her parents moved her and her younger sister, Netta, to a suburban housing development in Elmont, Long Island.
[39] Webb's father, William ('Bill") Salzman, was an illustrator training to work for his uncle, Charles Mintz, one of the first animated film producers and the first employer of Walt Disney.
In those three years that her family focused on her ill sister, Webb developed a strong separate life, reporting for the school newspaper and reading Nancy Drew books and biographies of future role models like Marie Curie, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Lincoln Steffens.
[2] Webb has said in interviews that her feminism began after being rejected from Little League at age nine because she was a girl, and after being kicked out of summer camp when she was caught kissing a boy behind the tennis courts.
She edited two books on the Beat Poets and artists who taught at Naropa (among them, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Diane Di Prima and John Cage) and was a reporter for the Boulder Daily Camera.