Roddie Minor Biography

Roddie Minor

Born: 9 April 1884 in Lawrenceville, Georgia.

Died: 7 January 1979 in Greenbackville, Accomack County, Virginia

Roddie Minor was Crowley's lover from October 1917 through the summer of 1918. Standing five-foot-eight with gray eyes and brown hair, she was described by Crowley as “physically a magnificent animal” with broad muscular shoulders and masculine features.

She was born in Lawrenceville, Georgia, on April 9, 1884, the fourth of five daughters to farmer William Jackson Minor and Elizabeth "Lide" Griffen Minor, nee Hawthorne. While a student at Columbia University, she became active in winter 1908 in New York’s suffrage movement, where she was described as a lieutenant to radical feminist activist Bettina Borrman Wells. When police refused to grant a parade permit for a Sunday demonstration, Minor told reporters, “If necessary to avoid the molestation of the police, we shall get a corpse and a coffin, or one of us will pretend she is dead, so that the procession will be a funeral march.” To avoid arrest, she was one of eight who held a “silent march” up Broadway from Union Square to the Manhattan Trade School, their numbers swelling to two thousand along the way. Encountering a crowd surrounding a Salvation Army band, Minor complained “Fine justice this. Here are persons in uniform, carrying banners and with a brass band. If they can parade, why can’t we?” The march resulted in Minor’s photograph appearing in the papers under the headline “She Wants to Vote,” and when Borrman Wells and several of her people left New York to spread their message elsewhere, Minor was placed in charge of the Progressive Woman Suffrage Union headquarters.

She graduated in 1911 from Columbia University’s New York College of Pharmacy with a Doctor of Pharmacy degree. The following year, she began working as a chemist for druggists and importers W. H. Schieffelin & Co., joined the American Pharmaceutical Association as a corresponding member, and helped found the American Women’s Pharmaceutical Association, serving as its vice president. She would soon leave her medical pathology laboratory job to become managing chemist for a large perfume manufacturer.

Because Crowley saw her carrying him out of a dry and desiccated period of his life and into a comfortable phase, he dubbed her the Camel, although she went by the nickname Eve. By early October, he was living with her in a West 9th Street studio.

On 14 January 1918, she and Crowley began the Amalantrah Working.