Collecting area: UMass history

Established in 1983 by a group of faculty and administrators in the Five College community who perceived an urgent need for increased faculty dialogue about issues involving peace, security, and the nuclear arms race. Expanded in 1984 with the support of a grant from the Ford Foundation, PAWSS continued as a multidisciplinary program that sought to engage faculty in a consideration of various perspectives on world security and to assist them with curriculum development involving these issues.

This small collection includes circular letters and flyers produced by PAWSS describing the group’s activities as well as materials used by faculty during summer institutes and to develop curriculum.

Established as a pilot project in the fall of 1974, the Women’s Studies program at UMass Amherst was proposed by the Faculty Senate Committee on Women in 1973. The committee asked for a two-year mandate to develop the pilot project into a permanent program with a major and certificate minor by the fall of 1976. Despite the steady growth of the department over the next few years, the university offered minimal financial support. There were roadblocks, too, on the way to becoming a permanent program. Even after the Faculty Senate voted to approve a five-year extension of the program, university administrators continued to delay awarding the program independent degree-granting status. Finally, on April 30, 1980, the Women’s Studies Program received the approval of the Chancellor.

This collection consists of materials displayed as part of an exhibit curated by Lisa Baskin that celebrates the history of Women’s Studies Programs at UMass Amherst and in the Five Colleges, including photographs, reports, publications, and course catalogs.

Born in Middleton, Massachusetts, in 1824, Charles L. Flint worked his way through Harvard, graduating in 1849, taught for a short time, then returned to Harvard in 1850 to enter the Law School. In 1853, he left his law practice to become secretary of the newly formed Massachusetts Board of Agriculture, remaining in that position for 27 years. He had a part in the founding of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was a member of the Boston School Committee, and as one of the founders of the Massachusetts Agricultural College, he served as secretary of the Board of Trustees for 22 years. Selected during a budgetary crisis, Charles L. Flint agreed to serve as President of Massachusetts Agricultural College without a salary. For four years he gave lectures at the college on dairy farming. Upon the resignation of President William Smith Clark in 1879, Flint was elected President, though he served only until the spring of 1880.

The Flint collection contains an assortment of photographs; reports as Secretary of the Massachusetts Board of Agriculture, 1854-1881; and printed versions of published writings.

Sylvia Helen Forman (1944 or 1945-1992) was an anthropologist and educator at the University of California – Berkeley and at the University of Massachusetts – Amherst focusing primarily on the demography, genealogy, and health outcomes of Quechua and Spanish-speaking Indigenous and Mestizo peoples in the Andean regions of Ecuador. She received her Ph.D. from UC Berkeley in 1972 for her study of law and conflict in rural highland Ecuador and the following year she joined the faculty at UMass Amherst. Soon after, she began to teach at UMass Amherst until her death in 1992 at only 48 years old. Forman’s legacy at UMass exists today through her former students, her substantial research, and her contributions to the Department of Anthropology, namely its Junior Year Writing program and the Sylvia Forman Third World scholarship fund (which was initially funded by a $100,000 grant from her estate).

Throughout the entirety of her life and her career, Forman was passionately dedicated to feminist and other social justice causes in the United States, in Ecuador, and elsewhere. From early in her career, she stood out as an advocate for her students and was instrumental in building cross-connections among anthropologists in the Five Colleges Consortium to expand opportunities for study, and she also forged strong connections with academics in the developing programs in Women’s Studies. She would later be recognized posthumously as one the founders of the Association for Feminist Anthropology in 1998.

Sylvia Helen Forman’s work in Ecuador can generally be split into two periods, the first of which corresponds roughly to 1966-1975, and the second from around 1976-1981, but she continued to work with contacts in the region long after. The former period saw more direct involvement and travel in Andean Ecuador, while the latter saw fewer trips and less extensive fieldwork. Regardless, both periods focused on similar topics of demography, genealogy, and medical experiences. Forman also did continue to travel to the region after these main research periods, but fewer materials are available from after 1981. Each series in this collection contains different parts of Forman’s work in Ecuador, her professional life, her personal life, and an array of pamphlets, postcards, and other ephemera she collected along the way. The majority of the content available is research-related and typically consists of field notes, data, diaries, and journals.

Shortly after receiving her doctorate from the University of California Berkeley in 1972, the anthropologist Sylvia Helen Forman joined the faculty at UMass Amherst. A staunch feminist and activist, Forman was known for her commitment to her students and to the political life at the university, and for her engagement in the community. She died of cancer in 1992, just 48 years old.

The nine papers in this collection were the products of studies by students enrolled in Forman’s Anthropology 497 class at UMass Amherst. All are intensive analyses of issues of race, gender, and social justice in local communities, including disability, teenage pregnancy, child care, Cambodian refugees, and attitudes toward community living and community change.

H.J. Franklin was an expert cranberry grower and a trained entomologist, whose research centered on the bumble bee. Franklin would wed these two interests in his career at the University, where he studied the cranberry pollination habits of the bumble bee and oversaw the cultivation of cranberries at the University’s Cranberry Experiment Station at Wareham, which Franklin founded and directed from 1909 until he retired in 1953. Born in Guildford, Vermont in 1883, Franklin moved to Bernardston, Mass. when he was eleven, eventually attending the University of Massachusetts, where he earned his B.S in 1903, and Ph.D in 1912. Franklin spent his career and life with cranberries, owning and managing his own bogs in three eastern Massachusetts counties and working with cranberry producers to develop the industry. Franklin died in 1958 in Wareham, Mass.

The H.J. Franklin Papers document his research on the bumble bee as well as his work with cranberry producers. In the collection are reports from the cranberry grower’s association, published articles by Franklin on cranberries and the Bombidae, and reports from the State Agricultural Board on cranberry production.

Although Henry Flagg French was selected as the first president of the new Massachusetts Agricultural College, he served in that office for barely two years. A graduate of Dartmouth and Harvard Law School, French was a strong proponent of scientific agriculture, but in 1866, after falling out with the college administration over campus design, he resigned his office, leaving before the first students were actually admitted.

The French collection includes a suitably small body of correspondence, including 16 letters (1864-1866) from French to the original campus landscape designer, Frederick Law Olmsted, and letters and reports from French to college officials, together with published writings, biographical material about French and his son, sculptor Daniel Chester French (1850-1931), and photographs. In part, these are copies of originals in the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers at American University, Washington, DC.

Alice Howell Friedman, a professor in the School of Nursing from 1967 until her retirement in 1984, was a strong advocate for the professionalization of nursing, and an activist for unionization and equitable compensation for nurses. Friedman arrived during a period of rapid growth for the School of Nursing and her push to broaden the educational content of nursing students played a significant role in the further growth and success of the program. This approach is exemplified in the International Experiences program she founded. After retirement, Friedman remained very involved in the field of nursing and, among many significant activities, focused on the history of nursing, becoming a tireless lay-archivist, forming the Nursing Archives at Boston University and developing the School of Nursing collections at UMass Amherst.

The Alice Howell Friedman papers document Friedman’s time as an Assistant Professor in the School of Nursing at UMass and her work as a labor activist, including lecture notes, publications, correspondence, clippings, and biographical materials.

Born in June 1922, Harvey Friedman attended Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts, and enrolled in the Boston University School of Law in 1941. After serving as a non-commissioned officer with an Army medical unit in France from 1942-1946, Friedman returned home to Massachusetts and became a member of the bar in 1948. For the next fifteen years, he was the Assistant New England Director for the Amalgamated Clothing Worker Union, AFL-CIO. After refusing the position several times, Friedman accepted an offer from the University of Massachusetts Amherst to become Assistant Director of the Labor Relations and Research Center in 1965, earning promotion to Director in 1970. During his tenure at UMass, Friedman taught classes in Political Science, Legal Studies, Government, and Education. He retired from UMass in 1990 and passed away in 1992.

The Friedman Papers contain correspondence, newsclippings, and course materials dating from Friedman’s time at UMass. Also included are materials related to unions with which Friedman worked and documentation of his relationship with the American Arbitration Association.

A professor of design in the Department of Art, Architecture, and Art History, Arnold Friedmann worked throughout his career to professionalize interior design and enhance the quality of daily life through good design. Born into a “gut Buergerlich” Jewish family in Nuremberg, Germany, in 1925, and raised in comfortable circumstances, Friedmann’s life was deflected by the political turmoil of the twentieth century. After Kristallnacht drove home the political realities of the Nazi era, Friedmann’s father used connections to secure permission for the family to emigrate to Palestine, where, impoverished and with his education disrupted, Arnold apprenticed to a cabinetmaker. Following service in the British army and later the Israeli army, Friedmann resumed his education, entering the Pratt Institute to study interior design. Earning both his bachelors and masters degrees (his doctorate from the Union Institute followed in 1976), Friedmann freelanced in interior design and furniture design while teaching at Pratt, eventually becoming chair of his Department. From 1972 until his retirement in 1990, Friedmann served as Professor of Design at UMass Amherst. A founding member of the Interior Design Educators Council, Friedmann was recognized within the profession as an honorary fellow of the Design Institute of Australia (1985) and as a recipient of the IKEA Award (1989).

The Friedmann Papers contain a wealth of unpublished and published writings by Friedmann on design, stemming primarily from his years at UMass Amherst. A small sheaf of photographs depicting his design work, and a series of Department of Interior Design newsletters from Pratt, 1963-1967.