Kate Austin’s family settled at Hook’s Point, Iowa, when she was six years old. But she lost her mother when she was eleven and had to take care of her seven brothers and sisters. She maried in August 1883 at Hook’s Point.
At about that time, her father came across the free love paper Lucifer, which was published by Moses Hamon, and all the family enthusiastically joined the cause. But the great event in her life was Haymarket, in 1886.
An active member of the American Press Writers’ Association, she contributed to many working class and radical papers, as well as to such anarchist periodicals as The Firebrand, Free Society, Discontent, the Demonstrator and, of course, Lucifer. She also started writing in free thought publications as from 1895, but her main interest was sexual reform and the economic status of the working people. A communist anarchist, she was rather critical of the individualist school.
She often received comrades in her Missouri farm. At her death, she left 9 children aged between 19 and 10.