Her single mother was of Irish and Italian descent and operated a beauty parlour since the 1950s. Gottschalk grew up poor on the working-class Lower East Side, living in low-income tenement housing, one of four children (Mary, Myla, and Vinnie). Donna Gottschalk is an American photographer who was active in the 1970s and came out as lesbian around the time that Radicalesbians and the Furies Collective formed.
