Sharon Presley is the co-founder and former co-proprietor of Laissez Faire Books, the world’s largest libertarian bookstore.  She is the founder and Executive Director of Resources for Independent Thinking, a nonprofit educational organization, and the National Coordinator of the Association of Libertarian Feminists.  She is the co-founder of the coalition group, Autonomy in the Family.

She has written and spoken extensively about libertarian and anarchist feminism as well as resistance to authority. Combining these interests, she has also written and spoken on women resisters to authority. She has co-edited an anthology of the works of 19th /early 20th century anarchist feminist and resister to authority Voltairine de Cleyre, entitled Exquisite Rebel, published in 2005 by SUNY Press. She is currently working on an anthology of American women resisters to authority.


Her Ph.D. in social psychology is from the City University of New York Graduate Center where her mentor was Stanley Milgram, author of the classic study, Obedience to Authority. She now teaches psychology at California State University, East Bay (formerly Hayward). She is currently working on a practical book on dealing with authority, tentatively entitled Standing Up to Experts and Authorities: How to Avoid Being Intimidated, Abused and Manipulated, to be published by Solomon Press in 2008 .