A Wild and Precious Life

Edie Windsor became internationally famous when the Supreme Court ruled in her favour in her case seeking recognition from the US government for her marriage to her partner Thea Spyer. The ruling set the stage for marriage equality in the United States and catapulted Edie into the spotlight. While Edie embraced her role as a leader in the LGBT community, she had been living a groundbreaking life for decades. In this memoir, which she began before her passing in 2017 and completed by her co-writer, Edie recounts her childhood in Philadelphia, her realisation that she was a lesbian, and her active social life in Greenwich Village's underground gay scene. Edie was also a trailblazer for women in technology - after working on the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's UNIVAC computer, she achieved the highest technical ranking possible at IBM and was instrumental in developing their early PC software. In the mid 1960s Edie met Thea Spyer, an expat from a Dutch Jewish family that fled the Nazis, and a widely-respected psychologist. Their partnership lasted forty-four years, until Thea’s death in 2009. Edie found love again, marrying Judith Kasen-Windsor in 2016. This is a remarkable portrait of an iconic pioneer in civil rights, gay life in the second half of the twentieth century, and the rise of LGBT activism.