SSC-MS-00633
1975 - 2021
Alison Bechdel is a lesbian cartoonist best known for her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. The collection documents her illustrative and written works.
SSC-MS-00587
1944 - 2019
Joan E. Biren, known as JEB, is a filmmaker, photographer, and lesbian activist who has been professionally known for documenting lesbian lives and communities since the 1970s.
SSC-MS-00595
1890 - 2007
Molly Malone Cook was an American photographer. She had relationships with the playwright Lorraine Hansberry and the poet Mary Oliver.
SSC-MS-00309
1960 - 2009
Musician, theatre worker, and photographer Diana Davies became a photojournalist in the 1960s. One of the principal documentarians of the second-wave women's movement the U.S., she also photographed in Africa, Central America, the Middle East, and Europe. She documented the civil rights and peace movements, poor people's and welfare rights movements, and farmworkers' struggles.
SSC-MS-00797
1971 - 2018
Photographer Carolyn “Meadow” Muska especially well documented the alternative lesbian culture in the 1970s and 1980s.
MRBC-MS-00455
2015 - 2023
Brooke Palmieri describes themself as "a writer, printmaker, and sculptor working at the intersections of history, memory, and gender-bending alternate realities." Prints and printed ephemera created by Brooke Palmieri, mostly under the name of their company Camp Books. The primary focus of the works is queer history and politics.
SSC-MS-00378
1970 - 1979
This collection consists of 70 photographs of lesbian feminist activists: Jan Roby, Jill Johnston, Alida Walsh, Sidney Abbott, Dianne Brenner, Phyllis Birkby, and others.
SSC-MS-00513
1975 - 2007
Jennifer Abod (1946- ) is an audio and video documentarian. In 1988, Jennifer Abod created Profile Productions to produce and distribute media featuring feminist activists and cultural workers, particularly women of color and lesbians who influence broad constituencies.
SSC-MS-00710
1977 - 2014
The collection contains the professional papers and writings of Carolyn Gage, a lesbian feminist playwright who also acts and directs and treats her art as activism.
SSC-MS-00534
1951 - 2017
Jezebel Productions is an independent film production company, founded in 1984 by Greta Schiller and Andrea Weiss, who were early pioneers of LGBT and feminist filmmaking.
SSC-MS-00472
1910 - 2013
Amateur theatre director, playwright, and author, who was prominent in the New York lesbian community in the 20th century.
SSC-MS-00740
1950 - 2021 (Majority of material found within 1980-2013)
Diane (Dee) Mosbacher is an activist, filmmaker, and practicing psychiatrist. Her production company, Woman Vision, has produced films with themes touching on homophobia in various contexts, women's history, and the lived experiences of people who are gay and lesbian. Her partner is Nanette K. Gartrell.
SSC-MS-00571
1992 - 1993
Tribad Productions was an all-women's theatrical company that produced plays written by women, for women. It was open to all women and was comprised primarily of lesbians.
MRBC-MS-00014
1860 - 2003 (Majority of material found within 1913-63)
Frederick Newton Arvin, Jr. was an English professor at Smith and one of the foremost literary biographers in American literature. Although Arvin was a brilliant scholar, his personal life was deeply troubled. Shame over his own homosexuality tormented him for his entire life, with the possible happy exception of his three-year relationship with Truman Capote, after which the two remained close friends. In 1960, police raided Arvin's home and confiscated thousands of pictures of male models that were considered pornographic. He was charged with possession and distribution of pornographic materials and though he initially pleaded innocent, he later accepted a finding of guilty. His arrest, and the confiscation of his journals, led to the arrests of several other men in the community including two colleagues at Smith College. The Board of Trustees voted to have Arvin 'retired' in 1960 to the vehement protest of prominent faculty, colleagues and alumnae.
Related collections:
SSC-MS-00630
1907 - 2017
The collection contains materials documenting Clausen's career as feminist poet, novelist, and writer of non-fiction; her participation in feminist, social justice, anti-nuclear, prison reform, and gay rights activism; and her family life and her relationship with former partner, Elly Bulkin.
SSC-MS-00572
1924 - 1996
Alma Routsong (pseudonym Isabel Miller) was a novelist best known for her lesbian fiction, including Patience and Sarah. Alma joined the Gay Liberation movement in 1970 and was active in the lesbian communities of New York City and mid-Hudson Valley region of New York. She spent time at Kate Millett's Artist Colony and was an officer of the Daughters of Bilitis. She lived in Poughkeepsie New York with her partner Julie Weber.
SSC-MS-00826
1950 - 2019
Casse Culver was a lesbian folk singer/songwriter in the women’s music movement during the 1970s. She worked with her partner Boden Sandstrom.
SSC-MS-00523
1941 - 2003
Kay Gardner was committed to making and promoting women's music, and was a founding member of the feminist lesbian band, Lavender Jane (1972), and of Women With Wings, a sacred singing circle. She also founded and recorded works with the New England Women's Symphony, in addition to being a prolific composer and recording artist in her own right.
SSC-MS-00770
1977 - 2015
First held in 1976 in Oceana County, Michigan, the Michigan Womyn's Musical Festival (also known as MichFest or MWMF) was entirely staffed, built, attended, and run by women. Every August, for forty consecutive festivals, thousands of women would travel from around the country to spend several days in what so many would describe as the safest and freest environment women, especially lesbians, have ever experienced. The last few years of the MWMF were marred by controversy over the barring of trans women by organizers; some in the LBGTQ community protested the exclusion.
SSC-MS-00745
1941 - 2017
The collection documents the history of Woman Sound (later City Sound Productions), the first all-woman sound company founded by Sandstrom and her partner, Casse Culver, in 1975.
SSC-MS-00552
1964 - 2007
The Women's Music Archives records and collected music consists of materials collected and recorded in order to document "woman-identified, woman-made music, primarily, though not exclusively feminist and lesbian in orientation" that "evolved as a definite entity" from the early 1970s.