Collecting area: Women & feminism

I was born in Washington, D.C., in an unwed mother’s home. I spent my earliest months living with my maternal grandmother and two teenage aunts–one of whom was abusive. My mother married my step-father in 1960; I was eleven years old when I discovered he was not my biological father. My mother suffered from psychotic schizophrenia; my step-father was frequently violent in our home; my younger, half-brother struggled with a severe learning disability, early drug addiction, and later untreated paranoid schizophrenia. After years of physical and sexual abuse, I escaped my destructive, troubled family when I was fourteen–having previously run away twice. I became a ward of the state of Maryland (my family had moved into Prince George’s County when I was much younger). I lived with three foster families until I was nineteen. I was determined to use education as a way out of poverty and violence. I attended Prince George’s Community College, then the University of Maryland in College Park where I earned a BA in Hearing and Speech Sciences in 1982. I worked at the radical Maryland Food Collective from 1981 to 1984 which profoundly impacted my life: politically, socially, and sexually. In 1985, I moved to Plainfield, Vermont, where I attended graduate school at Goddard College, receiving an MFA in Writing and Women’s Literature in 1987. After teaching for five years in Boston, at Fayerweather Street School and at the Jamaica Plain Community Centers–Adult Learning Program, I went to Massachusetts College of Art, earning a BFA in Three Dimensional Fibers in 1997. I lived for a year in Germany, 1980-1981, and in Honduras, 1997-1998, where I taught cognitively disabled adults and 8th graders, respectively. In 2002, after living in Boston for four more years, I moved to Twin Oaks Community in Louisa, Virginia. During my long membership, I left twice for extended periods. In 2006-2007, I traveled for eight months in the U.S. and in New Zealand. In 2014, I spent seven months in Amherst and in Boston working on my papers, followed by four months of travel across country and back visiting loved ones as I wrote my autobiography. In the beginning of 2015, I again made Twin Oaks my home.

My collection consists of nearly 300 journals (which include copies of my letters sent), all correspondence received since 1972, many of my artist books, as well as some of my other art work. My bequest is also comprised of my educational documents, my personal health records, my photographs, some family papers, Twin Oaks ephemera, a family tree, a friendship web, a few favorite books, two interviews, etc. What I have written and saved since I was twelve years old fills 84 linear feet: it is my life’s work. I have given, and will continue to give, my papers to UMass Amherst for safekeeping and so that my life–as an incest and battering survivor, as someone raised working class, as a daughter of a mentally-ill mother, as a radical feminist, as a diarist, as an avid letter writer, as an artist, as a bisexual, as a woman who chose neither to be a wife nor a mother, as an attentive niece, as a communitarian, as a traveler, and as a devoted friend–will not be erased.

The labor educator and activist Dale Melcher was both a graduate of UMass Amherst and a longtime member of staff and faculty. Melcher began her career at UMass Amherst as a student and then staff member in the newly formed program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, before joining the Labor Relations and Research Center in 1987 as its Labor Extension Coordinator. Interested in leadership development for union women, she taught courses over the years on women and work, immigration, and race and gender. She also maintained an array of other commitments to social justice organizations, including the Northeast Summer School for Union Women, the Women’s Institute for Leadership Development (WILD), and the Professional Staff Union/MTA.

Focused on the year just prior to the Reagan era, this collection contains an assortment of manuscript and printed materials relating to Melcher’s involvement with Socialist feminism and the women’s movement, economic justice, and he movement for Puerto Rican independence. The collection includes particularly valuable materials on feminism in the Pioneer Valley and the Valley Women’s Union, records of the People for Economic Survival, and a significant body of material for the Puerto Rican Solidarity Committee.

In 1982, Steven Botkin, who had done his doctoral work in the social justice program at UMass Amherst’s School of Education, co-founded the Men’s Resource Connection (MRC) in Amherst, Mass., to promote healthy ideas of masculinity and male leadership by challenging harmful stereotypes involving violence, sexism, and oppression and creating a local network of men as well as of men and women. In 1983 MRC started a newsletter, Valley Men, which became the magazine Voice Male, with a circulation of 10,000. Incorporated as a nonprofit in 1988, MRC developed programs to serve and educate men, with a focus on violence and domestic violence in particular, notably Men Overcoming Violence (MOVE), later called Moving Forward. In 1993 the MRC changed its name to the Men’s Resource Center of Western Massachusetts, and by 2005 it was known as the Men’s Resource Center for Change. Both a social service agency and a social justice organization, MRC made an impact in communities around and far beyond western Massachusetts. It offered workshops, classes, support groups, trainings, and consultations for adult men and youths, on issues relating to violence, anger, surviving abuse, emotional well-being, race, fatherhood, sexuality, and more. In 2016, after several years of financial struggle in the wake of the recession of the late 2000s, MRC announced its plans to merge with Men’s Resources International (MRI), founded by Botkin in 2004, to form MERGE for Equality, Inc. Voice Male, now a national magazine, has a robust online presence as an independent publication.

The MRC Records span most of the organization’s history and include correspondence and memos, background reading and training material, fliers and other ephemera, annual reports, newsletters and copies of Voice Male, clippings (including Voice Male articles organized by subject), and audio and video tapes.

Known in the psychiatric survivors’ movement as Kalisa, Cynthia Miller was a radical activist on behalf of the mentally ill. An ex-patient based in New York, she became a member of Project Release in the early 1970s, one of the first wave of organizations fighting for the civil rights of mental patients and combatting forced institutionalization, and was a contributor to Madness Network News and other publications. A poet, writer, and a committed feminist and out lesbian, she took part in civil disobedience to oppose electroconvulsive therapy, working with Judi Chamberlin, George Ebert, Leonard Roy Frank, and others.

Though varied and fragmentary, Cynthia Miller’s collection is a rich resource for study of the early history of the psychiatric survivors movement and the work of one activist in resisting psychiatric oppression. The collection contains some of Kalisa’s writings and correspondence along with ephemera and a varied collection of newspapers, newsletters, and other publications relating to Project Release and several other organizations that Kalisa supported, including the Mental Patients Liberation Front and the Alliance for the Liberation of Mental Patients.

In 1661, less than a decade after the first Friends arrived in British North America, the precursor to the New England Yearly Meeting was organized as the Rhode Island Yearly Meeting. As one of approximately two dozen yearly meetings in the United States, the NEYM currently comprises eight quarterly meetings and approximately 85 monthlies, which are the basic unit of organization for the Society. Like many Yearly meetings, the NEYM has been diverse in spiritual practice, reflected in a history of separations and reunions. Most famously, Orthodox Friends in New England divided in the 1840s into the increasingly evangelically-oriented Gurneyites, who went by the name Yearly Meeting of Friends for New England (joining Friends United Meeting in 1902), and the Wilburites, sometimes called Conservative Friends. In 1945, the disparate branches formally reunited.

Consolidated beginning in the 1960s, the NEYM collection contains the official records of the New England Yearly Meeting from its founding in the seventeenth century to the present, along with records of most of its constituent Quarterly, Monthly, and Preparative Meetings and records of Quaker schools and trusts. As varied as the Quaker practice they document, these records include minutes of meetings for business; committee records; newsletters, financial records; some personal papers; printed books and serials; and an assortment of photographs, audiovisual materials, microfilm, and electronic records. Of particular note are the vital statistics recorded by the Monthly Meetings, including general information on births, deaths, marriages, membership, and obituaries, and specifically-Quaker information on removals (formal letters written as members moved from one meeting to another), denials, testimonies (beliefs and convictions), and sufferings (penalties suffered by Quakers for following testimonies). The Archives Committee of the NEYM is a partner in records management and on-going documentation of the Meeting and its constituent bodies. The collection also includes several thousand Quaker books and pamphlets, including the libraries of Moses and Obadiah Brown and several individual monthly meetings. The records of most monthly meetings in Maine are held at the Maine Historical Society, while important bodies of records are held at the Newport Historical Society (some Nantucket and Rhode Island Meetings) or at individual Monthly Meetings.

An overview of the NEYM collections and a comprehensive inventory and finding aid prepared by Richard Stattler in 1997 at the Rhode Island Historical Society are available online. Stattler’s inventory includes materials in the NEYM Collection at UMass, as well as NEYM materials held at other institutions. SCUA’s updated inventory will follow in 2017.

New Song Library letterhead

Founded by Johanna Halbeisen in 1974, the New Song Library was a collaborative resource for sharing music with performers, teachers and community activists, who in turn shared with a wide variety of audiences. Based initially in Boston, the Library was devoted to the music of social change and particularly music that reflected the lives and aspirations of workers, women and men, elders and young people, gays and lesbians, other minorities, and Third World people.

This collection contains over forty years of organizational and operational records of the New Song Library along with hundreds of sound recordings, primarily audiocassettes made at concerts, music festivals, song swaps, and gatherings of the People’s Music Network. The Library also collected newsletters and magazines on folk music, and most importantly dozens of privately produced songbooks and song indexes.

Founded in 1975 in Lebanon, NH, by Beth Dingman, Claudia McKay (Lamperti), Katie Cahill, Nina Swaim, and Shelby Grantham, New Victoria Printers became one of two all-female print shops in New England at the time. Believing strongly that “the power of the press belongs to those who own it,” they began to solicit work from non-profit and politically-oriented groups. Like its namesake Victoria Press, an 1860s women run print shop in London owned by Emily Faithful, an early advocate of women’s rights, New Victoria was also committed to feminist principles. The shop offered work and training in printing, machine work, and other traditionally male dominated fields; initially focused on printing materials from the women’s movement; and was organized as a collectively owned and democratically run organization.
Additionally, the shop functioned as a de facto women’s center and lesbian hub for Lebanon and the surrounding area, often overlapping with the lesbian social club Amelia Earhart’s Underground Flying Society, (a.k.a. the Amelia’s). The print shop was a place of education, community, creativity, and activism, and soon publishing opportunities, as the group founded New Victoria Publishers in 1976 to publish works from their community. The print shop closed in 1985, with Dingman and McKay taking over the running of the non-profit publishing company out of their home in Norwich, VT, with an emphasis on lesbian fiction in addition to other women-focused works. An early bestseller, Stoner McTavish by Sarah Dreher, put them on the map, with the company publishing over a hundred books by and about lesbians, winning three Lambda Literary Awards and several other honors.
The New Victoria Publishers Records consist of photographs, newsletters, and cards put out by the collective, materials printed by the press, marketing and promotional materials, author correspondence, graphics and cover art, book reviews, financial and legal records, histories of the organization, news clippings, and an almost full run of the books published by the company. The collection is particularly rich in documenting the work and production of a women owned business within the feminist press movement as well as the lesbian publishing industry.

Judy Norsigian is a prominent advocate for women’s reproductive health and was a co-founder of the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, better known by its later and the title of its best-known book, Our Bodies, Ourselves. Editor of each of the nine editions of the book and executive director of the collective from 2001 to 2015, Norsigian is an important public intellectual on women’s health issues and has served on numerous boards and advisory groups relating to reproductive health, contraception, and medical research.

Consisting primarily of the sort of ephemeral political literature that abounded in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the Norsigian collection offers insight into the feminist movement and the early milieu of Our Bodies, Ourselves. Many of the publications are devoted to issues in contemporary feminism or pertain to women’s conferences, however several (especially those published by the New England Free Press) take on other political and social movements.

Rob Okun, in his office.

Rob Okun is a progressive social activist, writer, and editor who has worked for equality between men and women for over 50 years. Following his awakening to the preponderance of men in leadership roles throughout the anti-Vietnam War movement, he became interested in feminism, masculinity, and gender inequality. He began to work towards promoting healthy ideas of masculinity and challenging harmful stereotypes about men through his work with Steven Botkin and the Men’s Resource Center (MRC), which was founded by Botkin in Amherst, Mass in 1982. Okun was the editor of Voice Male, the newsletter of the MRC, and also served as Executive Director. Following Voice Male’s transition to an independent magazine, he remained its editor. In addition to his work with the MRC and Voice Male, he edited the book Voice Male – The Untold Story of the Profeminist Men’s Movement which was released in 2017 and has written op-eds and commentaries in newspapers and on websites. His writing is syndicated by Peace Voice and has appeared in The San Diego Union Tribune, The Daily Hampshire Gazette, Boston Globe, Albany Times Union, Alternet, Ms., Counterpunch, Women’s eNews and more.

In addition to his work with the MRC and Voice Male, Okun served as Director of the nearly decade-long traveling art exhibition, book, and documentary film project known as Unknown Secrets – Art & the Rosenberg Era. The project dealt with the origins of the Cold War through the story of the arrest, trial, and execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were convicted of conspiring to pass atom bomb secrets to the Soviet Union and were both electrocuted in June of 1953. The tragedy was examined in the exhibit via the images and words of dozens of artists such as Picasso, Sue Coe, Arthur Miller, David Wojnarowicz, Adrienne Rich, and many others. Okun coordinated showings of the exhibit, fundraised, was the editor of the book about the exhibit, and was a co-producer/director of a 30 minute documentary film, produced by Green Mountain Post Films. A Zoom celebration of Rob’s career at the Men’s Resource Center and as editor of Voice Male magazine was held in January of 2024 and is available via You Tube.

Okun’s papers document his extensive efforts related to the Rosenberg era art exhibit through correspondence with galleries, project members, universities, donors, artists, advisory board members, and funding agencies, as well as grant proposals, posters, photographs, drafts, clippings, press releases, pamphlets, and more. The collection also includes copies of the Rosenberg anthology.

Okun’s work with the Men’s Resource Center and Voice Male is represented through clippings, correspondence, photographs, pamphlets, writings, drafts, and more. Copies of the magazine—from its newsletter days up through its redesign as a four-color magazine, and copies of the Voice Male anthology—are also part of the collection.

Temporarily stored offsite; contact SCUA to request materials from this collection.

Born into a Jewish Lithuanian family in Williamsburg., N.Y., on May 10, 1914, Phyllis Rodin was drawn to the struggle for peace and social justice from early in life. Her widowed mother set an example as an antiwar activist and advocate for women’s rights, and after marrying at age 18, Phyllis and her husband ran a dairy farm that they reorganized on cooperative principles in the 1930s. A watershed in her life came after witnessing the suffering of war first hand while engaged as a psychiatric aid worker for the Red Cross during the Second World War. From that point, Rodin was an unrelenting activist for peace, traveling internationally and remaining vocal through the McCarthy era and Vietnam War and diving headlong into the second wave of the feminist movement. Returning to school late in life, she completed an undergraduate degree at Wisconsin before moving to Amherst in 1980 to study for a doctorate in Future Studies through the UMass Department of Education. Her activism barely skipped a beat as she worked closely with Quaker groups and stalwart activists such as her friend Frances Crowe to oppose nuclear weapons and violence in all forms. Rodin died in Amherst on Jan. 2015.

The Rodin Papers are the product of a long life of a woman devoted to the struggle for peace, feminism, and social justice. Richer in documenting Rodin’s latter decades and the philosophy of world peace she honed, the collection contains an abundance of correspondence, ephemera, and audiovisual materials related to international work in peacebuilding.