Collecting area: Social change

Alice Blake Hawes Garside, who became a prominent educator in Boston known for working with students with reading and learning challenges, was born in 1909 in New Bedford, Mass., a descendant of a whaling family with deep roots there. She graduated from Vassar College in 1930, the year she married Kenneth Garside, with whom she had three daughters before they divorced in 1956. Beginning in the early 1950s, Alice Garside worked as a reading tutor at the Cambridge School in Weston and reading supervisor in the language clinic at Mass General, where she was trained in the Orton-Gillingham method under Dr. Edwin Cole, a pioneer in the field of learning disabilities. Having also earned a master’s degree from Boston University, she trained teachers at the Carroll School from its founding in 1967, joining the school’s staff in 1976 and staying until her retirement in 1990. She was honored as the first recipient of the Alice H. Garside Award from the Massachusetts Branch of the International Dyslexia Association in 1985 and the IDA’s highest honor, the Samuel T. Orton Award, in 1987. In her retirement, she continued to consult on reading and made regular trips to the Bermuda Reading Clinic. Alice Garside passed away in 2007 at age 98.

The Alice H. Garside Papers cover Garside’s professional life as a teacher as well as her personal life. There is documentation of her extensive travels, including the six-month round-the-world trip she took not long after her divorce, as well as correspondence, photographs and photo albums, journals, ephemera, and memorabilia. The collection also includes some family history and genealogical material.

Access restrictions: Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA in advance to request materials from this collection.

In the early 1970s, the documentary filmmaker Bruce Geisler dropped out of Pomona College one semester short of graduation, drove across country, and joined the Brotherhood of the Spirit commune, then the largest commune in the eastern United States. During his four years living with the Brotherhood, later renamed the Renaissance Community, Geisler learned the craft of filmmaking, before returning west to earn an MFA at the film school of the University of Southern California. Geisler has received a number of awards as a screenwriter and filmmaker including the Grand Prize for Best Screenplay from Worldfest Houston and the Dominique Dunne Memorial Prize for Filmmaking, and, in 2007, he released his feature-length documentary, Free Spirits, about the Brotherhood of the Spirit/Renaissance Community and its ill-fated founder, Michael Metelica Rapunzel. Geisler is currently a Senior Lecturer in the UMass Amherst Department of Communication.

Documenting everyday life in a Massachusetts commune and performances by the commune bands (Spirit in Flesh and Rapunzel), the Geisler collection was assembled in conjunction with the making of the film Free Spirits. In addition to many hours of both raw and edited film footage taken by members of the Brotherhood of the Brotherhood of the Spirit and Renaissance Community, the collection includes a rich assemblage of still photographs, ephemera, and newspaper clippings relating to the commune.

Ledger, begun by George Cooley in 1843 to record the accounts of his soapmaking business in the Cabotville section of Chicopee, continued by Titus Chapin, an ardent abolitionist, and Mordecai Cough who managed the business following Cooley’s death (or departure) in 1848. The 1843 date coincides with the coming of many small businesses to Cabotville in connection with the growth of industries there at the time.

Cooley accepted goods, services and cash as payment. The most frequently accepted goods had relatively obvious value to a soap maker: grease and ashes, tallow, pork, scraps and skins, and candles. Some of the services bartered were repairing wagon, shoeing horse, fixing wippletree, making 30 boxes, and covering umbrella. The business sold gallons, bars, and cakes of soap. Mount Holyoke Seminary bought 28 “fancy soaps”. Also listed were shaving soap and hard or hand soap. In addition, sales sometimes included candles, butter, mop handles, molasses, apples and potatoes, squashes, satinet, cheese, cord wood, paint, and rosin. Some of the listings were annotated with regard to the customer’s character: Ashad Bartlett was seen as “bad and poor and fights with his wife”‘ Norris Starkwether was “an honest man”; and Miss L.B. Hunt “eloped with a man”.

An organizer, consultant, and educator in the alternative agriculture movement, Grace Gershuny has been active in the field since the 1970s when she worked for the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), developing its first organic certification program. As a leader in the movement, Gershuny helped to establish both the Organic Trade Association and the Organic Farmer: The Digest of Sustainable Agriculture. Today she continues to write and teach on the subject, serving as a faculty member at a number of colleges, most recently Green Mountain College.

The collection consists chiefly of printed material from a run of the Organic Farmer to Appropriate Technology Transfer for Rural Areas (ATTRA) publications and organizational newsletters, such as the Rural Education Center. Amongst these publications are a few small but significant groups of materials including notes from Gershuny’s role as the NOFA VT coordinator in 1979 and her drafts and notes for the second editions of The Soul of Soil.

A native New Yorker born in 1959, Al Giordano was drawn into the antinuclear movement as a teenager, becoming an important organizer for the antinuclear and environmental movements. Giordano sharpened his organizing skills through a close association with Abbie Hoffman, with whom he often collaborated throughout the 1980s. Giordano has worked as a journalist for several decades, primarily with the alternative press, founding his own periodical Narco News in 2000 and the School of Authentic Journalism in 2002. He currently resides in Mexico City.

The Giordano collection contains a miscellaneous assemblage of ephemera, publications and newspapers, reports, and a small quantity of correspondence, relating to antinuclear activism.

Barbara Gittings and her life partner Kay Tobin Lahusen were pioneers in the gay rights movement. After coming out during her freshman year at Northwestern University, Gittings became keenly aware of the difficulty of finding material to help her understand her gay identity. An inveterate organizer, she helped found the New York chapter of the early Lesbian organization, the Daughters of Bilitis (DOB) in 1957, and she became well known in the 1960s for organizing the first gay rights demonstrations at the White House and Independence Hall. Gittings later worked with organizations from the American Library Association to the American Psychiatric Association to address systematic forms of anti-gay discrimination.
The Gittings-Lahusen Gay Book Collection contains nearly 1,000 books on the gay experience in America collected by Gittings and Lahusen throughout their career. The contents range from a long run of The Ladder, the DOB magazine co-edited by the couple, to works on the psychology and sociology of homosexuality, works on religious and political issues, novels and histories by gay authors, and examples of the pulp fiction of the 1950s and 1960s.

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An environmental chemist, Ted Goldfarb was a founder of the Science for the People chapter at SUNY Stony Brook and an organizer of the group’s second trip to the People’s Republic of China in June 1978. The twelve delegates from SftP went with the intention of studying the organization of science and technology in China with respect to how it met people’s needs, and they were toured through a succession of factories, production facilities, farms, schools, and institutes in Guangzhou, Shanghai, Changsha, and Beijing, among other locations.

The nearly 400 slides in this collection were taken by Ted Goldfarb (and handful by his colleague Judith Weinstein) when they were members of the second Science for the People delegation to the People’s Republic of China in June 1978. Reflecting their interests in science and technology, the slides document a succession of factories, production facilities, schools, and institutes they visited, but include shots of typical street scenes, markets, artisans and factory workers, and tourist sites such as the Great Wall, Ming Tombs, and Forbidden City. In addition to the images of China, a handful were taken during a stopover in Delhi and Agra, India, on the way back to the United States.

2006 Valley Advocate article on LaGuer written by Goldscheider

Collection of material on Benjamin LaGuer, a Bronx-born, Puerto Rican resident of Leominster, Massachusetts who was arrested for raping and beating his elderly neighbor there in 1983. He maintained his innocence, rejecting a plea that could have released him after a couple of years. His case went to trial, and he was convicted in 1984 by an all-white jury. He was sentenced to life in prison with eligibility for parole after fifteen years. LaGuer fought to prove his innocence and while in prison, earned a bachelor’s degree from Boston University. LaGuer and his case brought together a diverse group of supporters, including Leslie Epstein, John Silber, Noam Chomsky, Ellen Story, and Deval Patrick, whose support was used against him when he ran for Governor of Massachusetts.

Eric Goldscheider was an instructor and freelance journalist who wrote for the Valley Advocate, Greenfield Recorder, Springfield Republican, Daily Hampshire Gazette, Boston Globe, New York Times, Washington Post, and several university publications. Goldscheider met LaGuer when he taught a Journalism 101 class at North Central Correctional Institute in Gardner, MA in the early 2000s. They remained in close contact after the class and Goldscheider took an increasing interest in LaGuer’s case and wrote several articles advocating for his release.

LaGuer was denied parole several times because he refused to admit guilt, and passed away from liver cancer on November 4, 2020, alone in a prison hospital. Goldscheider passed away 18 months later on May 9, 2022.

The collection consists of material that Goldscheider amassed on LaGuer’s case throughout their 20+ year friendship. It contains correspondence, legal documents, clippings, and audio-visual materials, including several dozen phone conversations between Goldscheider and LaGuer recorded on compact cassette.

1977 Spring Equinox cover of WomenSpirit

All social change and cultural movements have their associated resources for the exchange of information, ideas, stories, and art. Particularly in the women’s movement, the effort to create newsletters, journals, and other forms of information dissemination was a proactive step taken to assert women’s stories and to locate the power of the press within women-run communities. These periodicals, both large and small in scale, reveal the ways women connected to each other and to larger spiritual and cultural concepts. Local artist, activist, and feminist Jay Goldspinner was engaged with many of these communities, particularly those characterizing the spiritual elements of the women’s liberation and feminist movements, and collected and saved their periodicals. Her collection includes journals focusing on feminist linguistics, goddess myths and spirituality, Wiccan and witch traditions, progressive politics, and women’s spirituality and community in local and international settings. Each is a unique window into discourses of women’s history, feminist movements, and social change work.

The Jay Goldspinner Collection consists of issues of feminist and progressive periodicals, journals, and newsletters from over five decades, along with correspondence, ephemera, and scrapbooks from Goldspinner’s life, especially her work as a storyteller. Published titles represented include Always in Season, Goddessing, The Lonesome Node, The People’s Voice of Franklin County, Themis/Thesmophoria, Wicked Word, and an almost complete run, including the two indexes, of the seminal magazine of feminist spirituality, WomenSpirit.

Ann Gordon served as the editor of the Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton papers as a member of African American Studies department from 1982 until the project’s conclusion in 1989. While at the University, Gordon, along with John Bracey, Joyce Berkman, and Arlene Avakian planned a conference discussing the history of African American Women voting from the Cady Stanton’s meeting at Seneca Falls to the Voting Rights Act. The conference, called the African American Women and the Vote Conference, was held in 1988.

The collection is comprised of proposals, reports, meeting transcripts, and correspondence from Gordon’s work planning the 1988 African American Women and the Vote Conference. Also included is preliminary work by Gordon to organize the papers given at the conference into book form.