Obituaries - July 17, 1999

* Ruth Davidow; Documentary Filmmaker

Ruth Davidow, 87, California documentary filmmaker and one of the few women to serve in the anti-fascist Lincoln Battalion during the Spanish Civil War. Born in Russia in 1911, Davidow came to America when she was 3. Her mother, an organizer of garment workers in New York and San Francisco, took her to picket lines when she was 4. She was 25 when the Spanish Civil War erupted in 1936. Davidow went to Spain as a nurse with the Lincoln Battalion’s medical team, one of about 100 American women who fought for Spanish democracy in the war. Two years ago, when she was 85, Davidow returned to Spain for a reunion of her war comrades and was honored by the Spanish government, which made her an honorary citizen. She worked for many progressive causes over the years, leading students to Mississippi to register black voters in the 1960s and later organizing migrant workers in California. In the 1980s, after her daughter, a filmmaker, urged her to use film as a medium of protest, she began making documentaries, eventually completing 21 films on health, geriatrics, the women’s movement and other political issues. She was among the war veterans profiled in the 1991 Oscar-nominated documentary “Forever Activists: Stories From the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,” by Berkeley filmmaker Judith Montell. On June 28 in San Francisco.