Anica Mander, 67; Professor, Feminist Author and Activist

Anica Vesel Mander, 67, feminist author and professor whose research helped to legally classify rape as a war crime, died Wednesday of breast cancer at her home in Bolinas, Calif.

In the early 1990s, Mander traveled to her native Yugoslavia to interview Bosnian rape victims as part of a fact-finding mission. Her interviews led an international tribunal to declare rape a war crime.

Mander fled the Nazis with her family at age 7 and hid for years on an island in the Adriatic Sea. The family came to America in 1949, and her father taught at the Army language school in Monterey.

Mander herself became a professor of Italian and French at San Francisco University until she was fired for joining black students in a campus strike to demand ethnic studies courses.

After that experience, she devoted her life to the feminist movement and to issues of gender and racial equality. She co-authored “Feminism as Therapy” in 1974 and wrote “Blood Ties, A Woman’s History” in 1976, the same year she founded a division of Random House called Moon Books. Based in Berkeley, the company was considered the first feminist publishing house.