Davis served as a professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz and was a director of the school’s Feminist Studies department. She was prosecuted and acquitted in a federal trial involving the armed take-over of a courtroom in California in 1970. Ronald Reagan requested that Davis be barred from teaching at any university of California in 1969 due to her membership in the Communist Party. Davis served as a candidate for Vice President for the party twice in the 1980s. She has also authored several books.