Kay Stockholder, a professor emerita of English and former president of the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, died of ovarian cancer June 18.
Born in Brooklyn, N.Y., Stockholder charted her own course, attending Hunter College against her mother's wishes and graduating with a BA in English literature. After a brief period when she edited a trade magazine and taught at a girls' school, she went on to get her MA in English literature from Columbia University in New York and then accepted a fellowship at the University of Washington in Seattle.
In Seattle, she began an intellectual romance with Freud and Shakespeare which lasted for the rest of her life.
By the mid-1960s, Stockholder was working full-time in English at UBC. During the next three decades she taught in the English Dept. and the Arts One program, and served terms as a member of the university Senate and the executive of the Faculty Association.
In 1991, four years prior to her retirement from UBC, she became active in the B.C. Civil Liberties Association. She was elected its president in 1995 but stepped down from that post a few months ago due to illness.
She is survived by her partner Norman Epstein, her three children, Jessica, Maia and Peter, and her former husband Fred.