Kathleen Thompson (born September 12, 1946) is an American feminist, writer, and activist. She was first known for co-authoring with Andra Medea the feminist classic Against Rape (Farrar, Straus, 1974), the book that broke the silence about rape not only in the United States, but around the world. She exposed the American diet industry's exploitation of women in Feeding on Dreams (MacMillanUSA, 1994), written with psychologist Diane Pinkert Epstein. She was co-author, with pre-eminent historian Darlene Clark Hine, of A Shining Thread of Hope: The History of Black Women in America. (Broadway Books, 1998), the first narrative history of black women in America. She then collaborated with Hilary Mac Austin on three print documentaries of groups underrepresented in American history: The Face of Our Past: Images of Black Women from Colonial America to the Present (Indiana University Press, 1999), Children of the Depression (Indiana University Press, 2000), and America's Children: Repicturing Childhood from Exploration to the Present (W. W. Norton, 2001). Thompson also served on the board of senior editors with Hine, Deborah Grey White, Brenda Stephenson, and other major scholars in the field on the second edition of the landmark encyclopedia Black Women in America (Oxford University Press, 2005). In addition to these adult trade books, she has written more than one hundred books for children and young adults and has had eleven plays produced in Chicago, New York City, and other cities.