Betty A. Prashker, a pioneering woman in the book business who published the feminist classics “Sexual Politics” by Kate Millett and “Backlash” by Susan Faludi, but who also brought out racy commercial fiction by Judith Krantz and Jean M. Auel — whose frank female sexuality she viewed as no less a statement of feminist empowerment — died on July 30 at the home of a daughter in Alford, Mass. She was 99.
Her death was confirmed by her family.
The list of authors Ms. Prashker discovered, championed or positioned for best-sellerdom as a top editor and executive at two of the leading publishing houses, Doubleday and Crown (now both divisions of Penguin Random House), included plenty of men, too, among them Issac Asimov, Erik Larson, Dave Barry and Dominick Dunne.
She was a Vassar graduate whose first toehold in publishing, in 1945, as a reader of unsolicited manuscripts for Doubleday, came because men who would otherwise have taken such jobs were still at war. After marrying in 1950, she set her career aside for a decade to raise a family before rebelling at the role of homemaker.
“I suddenly realized I was going insane,” Ms. Prashker was quoted as saying in “The Time of Their Lives,” a 2008 history of publishing by Al Silverman. “I felt my entire life was constricted by when the man was coming to fix the washing machine, and the logistics of getting children here, there and everywhere.”
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Returning to the workplace, Ms. Prashker was both an early avatar of 1960s feminism and a catalyst of its advance. Doubleday rehired her, and she soon heard of a Columbia graduate student, Ms. Millett, who was working on a writing project.
