The introduction of a loyalty oath for professors at the University of California was part of the nationwide search for political subversives in all key institutions in the late 1940s and early 1950s. By the early 1950s, the panic over political subversives that led to the imposition of a loyalty oath at the University of California had spilled over into a panic over "sexual perverts," an example of what Robert Corber has called the "regulatory fictions that governed the production of gender and sexual identity in the Cold War era." The brief wartime encouragement for women to take up paid work as part of the war effort was replaced by a return to a rigid separate sphere ideology in which women were presented as "naturally" heterosexual wives and mothers in the home. In the fall of 1952, Martha Deane, a tenured professor of physical education at UCLA and one of only two tenured women full professors at the university, was suspended and eventually forced into early retirement. Professors who lost their jobs because of their refusal to sign the loyalty oath at the University of California were supported by widespread protests. But no public voices were raised to defend Martha Deane. Deane's "crime" was sexual; she was accused by a neighbor of having sexual relations with another woman in her own home. This article presents Deanne's case, which provides testimony of her life and a documentation of the powerful figures that both drove her from the university and attempted to maintain silence about what happened to her. (Contains 91 footnotes.)