When Kenneth Baldwin first met Mary Jane Lupton at a Fells Point bar in 1974, he won her over with one line: “I love your work on menstruation.”

Lupton almost fell off of her stool, Baldwin said. The Morgan State University professor and feminist scholar loved her work, too — but being recognized in public for it? By another English professor? By a man? Now that was something.

Baldwin was not alone in his admiration of Lupton’s writing, and she only grew in stature over the next several decades. She published dozens of articles on feminism, English literature, civil rights and sexuality. She wrote biographies of poets Maya Angelou and Lucille Clifton. She contributed to — and even helped found some — feminist publications across Baltimore.

She was a woman of her time and, in some ways, far ahead of her time. Those who knew her described her as someone who encouraged them to think big and go against the grain.

“She raised my consciousness about all kinds of things,” said Baldwin, her widower.

That is the legacy she leaves. Lupton died Aug. 9 after a brief illness. She was 86.

She was born Nov. 16, 1938, in rural Pennsylvania, the oldest of George and Ruth Hohman’s two children. Her father was Catholic and her mother Baptist, and Lupton grew up with complicated feelings about organized religion. She rejected it entirely in her early adulthood as she embraced the Civil Rights and feminist movements of the ’60s and ’70s.

Lupton was born with a congenitally deformed right hand, a visible difference more than a functional one. Her daughters think the disability influenced her drive to excel at everything she did. Lupton also once told The Baltimore Sun that it helped her become more accepting of other people’s differences.

Lupton always had a love of language; she majored in French and minored in Spanish at Bucknell University. After graduating in 1960, she rejected becoming a high school French teacher to focus instead on English literature. She went off to Temple University and earned a doctorate in 1968.

While at Temple, she met and married another English student, William “Bill” Lupton. The couple got pregnant early in their relationship and welcomed identical twin girls, Julia and Ellen, in 1963.

Motherhood hit Mary Jane Lupton hard, and she struggled with what is now understood to be postpartum depression. When her daughters were in grade school, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder. And yet: “She really conquered those physical and mental challenges and lived just an incredibly full life with a lot of impact on many people,” Julia Lupton said.

The Luptons moved to Baltimore in 1968 after Bill got a job at Morgan State, and Mary Jane worked for a year teaching English at Towson University. A year later, she was also hired at Morgan State, the English department’s first white woman professor.

She also quickly became involved in the city’s progressive scene, becoming a founding member of Baltimore’s Feminist Press and a contributing editor to Women: A Journal of Liberation. She explored her sexuality and became a community organizer.

Menstruation was a particular interest. One day, while sharing Bloody Marys with two other English professors, Janice Delaney and Emily Toth, she suggested they write a book about it. Delaney and Toth both thought the idea silly — but then, within weeks, found themselves poring over records and splitting up chapters to write.

“It was a brilliant idea Mary Jane had, to bring out into the open something that has been completely taboo and make fun of it,” Delaney said. “We took it seriously, but we didn’t take ourselves too seriously.”

They wrote in a casual, lighter tone, inserting some humor into the misogyny they documented.

“She had an interesting mixture of intellectual interests and a down-to-earth way of speaking,” Toth said of Lupton. “She was fascinating to talk to, because she’d be frothing along academically, and then suddenly she’d use the word ‘shit’ or something.”

“The Curse: A Cultural History of Menstruation,” came out to mixed reviews in 1976. While some thought it uncouth, others lauded the historical accounting. A New York Times review stated: “No man in his right mind can read it and emerge unaffected — especially when he realizes how many of these negative attitudes he is heir to.”

Later, Lupton followed up with another book, “Menstruation and Psychoanalysis.”

As her career took off, so did her personal life. She and William Lupton had an open marriage, and she began dating Baldwin after their chance encounter. The Luptons divorced soon after but remained friends; the trio even briefly opened a bar — The Angel — together in Upper Fells Point. For about four years, it was a gathering spot of academics, poets and anyone else who fancied beer or wine.

“I love bars. I mean, I love bars,” Mary Jane Lupton told The Baltimore Sun in 1977. “They provide a flexible, spontaneous situation, where you can wander in and out as you wish. You can get into serious conversations and you can meet new people. What other institution is there in our culture where you can make human contact without being invited?”

At the same time, Julia and Ellen were growing. Lupton was never really interested in children, her daughters said, so she treated them like little adults. She called them “the friends” instead of “the kids.” When they got their first periods, she threw them a party. They had political conversations at dinner and watched R-rated movies.

Lupton and Baldwin married in 1985, and the next few decades were a blur of research and teaching. She was especially interested in literature written by Black women, and she published a book about James Welch, a prominent Native American poet and novelist.

She never stopped writing — even well into old age — and proudly watched her daughters excel in their careers. Julia followed in her footsteps as an English professor; Ellen teaches at Maryland Institute College of Art.

“My sister and I are both frenzied academics, write all the time and publish tons of stuff,” Ellen Lupton said. “I get that from my mother.”

Mary Jane Lupton retired in 2001 and moved to Cape May with her husband. They’d start their mornings at the beach with a book, and in her spare time, she played bridge and blackjack. She joined the Macedonia Baptist Church.

She didn’t often see her six grandkids, who called her “Grandma Janey,” but she became especially close to one of them in recent years. After Blue Reinhard came out as trans and picked a new name, they began exchanging intimate emails and letters about queerness, life and love.

Once, when Reinhard was going through a particularly hard time after graduating from college, Lupton mailed them a romance novel about two girls. On the inside, in slightly shaky handwriting, she wrote that the book belonged to Blue, their chosen name.

The gesture made Reinhard tear up. They always thought of their grandmother as “this super badass feminist woman” — and now they got to experience it firsthand.

“I just felt this deep sense of being seen by her,” they said.

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