Ti-Grace Atkinson

Ti-Grace Atkinson, born Grace Atkinson in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1938, is an American radical feminist writer and philosopher. She is best known for her role in the second wave of feminism in New York, where she led the city chapter of the National Organization for Women before founding her own group.

From a prominent family, she studied fine arts in Philadelphia, helped establish a contemporary art institute and wrote sculpture criticism. She later entered the philosophy PhD programme at Columbia, though she never finished her dissertation, and studied the work of Frege. After reading The Second Sex, she corresponded with Simone de Beauvoir, who suggested she contact Betty Friedan. She became president of NOW's New York chapter in 1967, but in 1968 she left, frustrated by the group's hierarchy and its reluctance to address abortion and marital inequality. She then founded The Feminists, a radical group active until 1973.

Her thinking centred on critiquing patriarchal institutions and on political lesbianism, the view that feminism calls for women-centred lives. Her short, polemical writings placed her at the heart of the debates of her era. After years of little public activity, she joined a 2013 statement by other activists criticising what they saw as the silencing of debate about gender. Her legacy remains contested: some see her as a key thinker of radical feminism, others as a divisive figure whose positions moved away from the movement's mainstream.