The Setting: Political Activism in 1970s Western Massachusetts

The Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies Program at UMass Amherst (formerly called Women’s Studies -WOST) grew out of the rich terrain of feminist organizing, antiwar activism, and an array of other social change work that took place in the 1970s in western Massachusetts, the country, and the world. A pilot version of the program was officially inaugurated in 1974, but like all intellectual and political projects, its roots run much further back. Women and their allies in the university and the broader community had been holding meetings, offering courses in their own departments, facilitating workshops at community centers, and deliberating about how to translate the feminist movement(s) they were part of into an academic setting. All of this groundwork eventually resulted in a pioneering women’s studies program that has survived and thrived through its own versions of the tensions, rewards, frustrations, and transformations experienced by the larger movements in which it germinated.

The 1970s in western Massachusetts offered endless opportunities for political engagement, especially in the realms of women’s rights and feminism. Over 400 different lesbian and feminist groups are known to have existed in the area from 1968 to 1978.² In the early and mid-1970s, when WOST was taking form, one could get involved in the broader community with the Valley Women’s Center in Northampton (1970) which became the Valley Women’s Union when many of the original staff left to join the Everywoman’s Center on the UMass campus in 1972. Women could choose to join one of a number of consciousness raising groups, participate in a group establishing a free health clinic, or an auto mechanic collective. For sport, and socializing, there was the Mary Vazquez Softball League (1976), the weekly Lesbian Gardens coffee house, or the Common Womon restaurant. On campus there were various caucuses organized by women faculty in departments of which the English department’s Ladies’ Tea and Mau Mau Society (1970) was only one. These groups often formed along lines of ideology or political allegiance and their variety illustrates the fact that Western Massachusetts was fully engaged in the expansive project that was women’s liberation, from abortion service provision to socialist feminist theory, from women’s literature to politicized lesbian sexuality.

² Finding aid for Valley Women’s History Collaborative Records (MS 531). Special Collections and University Archives, W.E.B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts Amherst. http://www.library.umass.edu/spcoll/ead/mums531.htm (accessed 11/5/10).