Starhawk was born Miriam Simos in 1951 and raised in a Jewish family in Minneapolis and later Los Angeles, studying psychology, film and writing at the University of California, Los Angeles before turning toward feminist spirituality in the early 1970s, a period in which she was initiated into several Wiccan lineages and began teaching circles of her own in the San Francisco Bay Area. She took the name Starhawk during this period and has used it as her public and legal name ever since.
Her 1979 book The Spiral Dance, written while she was still in her twenties, set out a Goddess-centered Witchcraft explicitly framed around feminist consciousness raising, environmental awareness and collective ritual designed to be usable by circles without a formal initiator, reaching an American feminist and countercultural readership that earlier Wiccan writing, arriving mostly from England, had not spoken to directly. The book has remained continuously in print since, regularly updated, and is generally treated by scholars of contemporary Paganism as the founding text of specifically feminist Wicca in North America.