Visionary and activist: Kathleen Kinkade (1930–2008)

Abstract

Kathleen Kinkade (better known as Kat) died on July 3, 2008, at Twin Oaks, the intentional community near Louisa, Virginia, that she founded in 1967 with a small group of people inspired by B. F. Skinner's utopian novel, Walden Two (1948). Born December 8, 1930, Kat was not the stereotypical 1960s commune founder. Older than most, divorced, and the mother of a teen-aged daughter, she was drawn to intentional community living not from a desire to experiment with drugs and sex or escape reality but “to make a new and better society” (Kinkade, 1973, p. 1). Five years after the start of the community, she wrote,