Gender Studies / History 186B: Global Feminism, 1850 to Present

Healey was born Dorothy Rosenblum in 1914 in Denver, Colorado; her mother was a founding member of the Communist Party of the United States; her parents moved to California in 1921, and Dorothy grew up in Oakland; joined Young Communist League in 1928, and was arrested during the May Day unemployment demonstrations there in 1930; left high school in 1931 to work in a cannery in San Jose; joined the Communist Party when she turned 18; became organizer of migrant farm workers, and in 1940 was appointed a deputy labor commissioner by Governor Culbert Olson; in 1945 she became the Chairman of the Los Angeles Communist Party; arrested under the Smith Act and jailed in 1952; appeared on college campuses in support of the antiwar movement in the 1960s; in 1969 she openly opposed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, effectively removing herself from the Party; following her formal resignation in 1973, she became active in the New American Movement and the Democratic Socialists of America; Marxist commentator on KPFK radio (Santa Monica) for 20 years; wrote (with Maurice Isserman) Dorothy Healey remembers: a life in the American Communist Party (1990).
Materials are in English.

Steve Louie, an Asian-American activist, compiled this collection focusing on the Asian American Movement that spanned the late 1960s and 1970s. Louie participated in the Asian American Movement across the U.S., but spent the majority of his time in California. Steve Louie was born in 1949 in San Francisco. In 1967, he was accepted to Occidental College, where he was heavily influenced by the Black Panther Party and Mao Tse-Tung, which led him to first volunteer at a community storefront in Watts and then join the Los Angeles chapter of the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA). He was a founding member of the Asian Alliance, the first Asian student group at Occidental that successfully organized the first Asian American history class and was an active member in the Third World student coalition. In 1969, during his junior year, Louie received the Richter Fellowship which enabled him to travel to San Francisco, Boston, and New York and participate in the Asian American Movement taking place in these respective cities. During his time on the East Coast, Louie met comrade and colleague, Glenn Omatsu, who was organizing at Yale. After completing his junior year, Louie left school to become a full-time organizer in the growing Asian American movement. He moved to San Francisco and initially worked with the Japanese Community Youth Council in Japantown. While working in Japantown in 1971, he helped form Joint Communications, a support program for Asian prisoners in Northern California. He also began working at the Asian Community Center in Chinatown and became an active member of organizations such as U.S.-China Friendship Association and Wei Min Shè (Serve the People), an Asian American anti-imperialist organization. In 1973, he began working on a truck dock as both a worker and a labor organizer. While he was a part of Wei Min Shè, he served as a photographer and the co-editor for the organization's publication, Wei Min. The organization operated out of the Asian Community Center, located in the basement of the International Hotel (a low-income housing building for the elderly) in San Francisco's Chinatown. The geographic location was significant not only for its proximity to the Asian community, but also as a site of struggle for tenants' rights. Louie was one of the many active community members against the eviction of International Hotel residents in 1977. While working at the Asian Community Center in 1971, Louie met his wife, Mary Chin, with whom he started a family. In addition to his work as a labor organizer and member of Wei Min Shè, Louie has worked closely with organizing Asian-American Studies centers in colleges and universities across the U.S., anti-war (Vietnam) actions, Marxist-Leninist-Mao Tse-Tung study groups, Asian-American prisoners, and Japanese-American youth. In 1997, Louie and Omatsu co-taught a course at UCLA entitled, The Asian American Movement, which examined the Movement, its legacy, and its relevance to current social struggles. They further collaborated to edit the anthology, Asian Americans: the movement and the moment, which was published in 2001 by the UCLA Asian American Studies Center Press. Steve Louie currently resides in San Francisco and is semi-retired.
Materials are in English and Chinese.

The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archive at UCLA is an outreach and collection-building partnership between the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives , the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (CSW) and the UCLA Library . These collections expand the pool of primary source materials available to researchers and to the community at large. This partnership was initiated by CSW and is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to inventory, organize, preserve, and digitize more than eighty Mazer collections pertaining to lesbian and feminist activism and writings.
COLLECTION CONTAINS AUDIOVISUAL MATERIALS: Audiovisual materials in this collection will require assessment and possible digitization for safe access. All requests to access special collections materials must be made in advance using the request button located on this page.
Collection consists of written and published materials by Judy Freespirit, as well as other materials that are part of her personal collection of political writings and community information. The bulk of the writings in this collection are focused on Freespirit's fat activism, specifically through her involvement with both Radical Therapy practices and the Fat Underground. This collection includes materials with her married name, Judith Ackerman because she continued to use it for legal purposes after her marriage.
Property rights to the physical object belong to UCLA Library Special Collections. Literary rights, including copyright, are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not hold the copyright.
Judy Freespirit was born Judith Louise Berkowitz in 1936 in Detroit, Michigan to a working class Jewish family of Eastern European descent. She often pointed to her early life as formative for her political and activist work and credited theatre and dancing as positive outlets for the frustration of being pressured to diet at the age of eight and the trauma of being an incest survivor. She attended Michigan State University for two years and majored in drama before marrying. She moved to Japan with her husband after he was drafted, giving birth to her son Joe abroad. She, Joe, and her husband moved to Los Angeles in 1960 where she finished college and began her work in the psychiatric field, completing her Master's Degree at the age of 35. Through her discovery of the Women's Liberation Movement in Los Angeles and her professional background, Judy developed and began to share her Radical Therapy skills with the feminist community in small group settings. During this period she came out as a lesbian and left her husband. Along with four others, Judy founded the Fat Underground in 1976. When she moved to the Bay Area she also founded the Fat Lip Reader's Theatre, a collective of fat women writing and performing comedic, dramatic and musical theatre. In 1978, Judy became involved in working to stop the Briggs Initiative and travelled around California raising awareness and funds for its defeat. After its defeat, she moved to the Berkeley/Oakland area and became more focused on her Jewish identity, involving herself in a Jewish Lesbian Writer's group in 1982 and performing and participating at the Jewish Feminist Conference in San Francisco. After struggling with asthma and the discovery of severe allergies, Judy became active in the disability movement, working with the World Institute on Disabilities. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Judy wrote and performed prolifically, creating one-woman shows dealing with her life as a fat, Jewish, lesbian incest survivor with disabilities. She published in journals, spoke at health conferences, provided counseling, and made people laugh. Up until her death she remained an advocate, calling for more visibility of the gay and lesbian community in elder care housing, specifically in San Francisco's The Jewish Home where she passed away in 2010.

The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archive at UCLA is an outreach and collection-building partnership between the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives , the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (CSW) and the UCLA Library . These collections expand the pool of primary source materials available to researchers and to the community at large. This partnership was initiated by CSW and is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to inventory, organize, preserve, and digitize more than eighty Mazer collections pertaining to lesbian and feminist activism and writings.
COLLECTION STORED OFF-SITE AT SRLF: Open for research. All requests to access special collections material must be made in advance using the request button located on this page. Property rights to the physical object belong to UCLA Library Special Collections. Literary rights, including copyright, are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not hold the copyright.
Maxine Spencer and Polly Taylor founded Broomstick in Berkeley, California in 1978. The idea for Broomstick was born when eight women over forty attended a Crone's Caucus and organized a loose coalition that would support, fund, and collectively address concerns specific to older women. This peer-led group would also function as a supportive network for activism. Together, Spencer and Taylor approached a newly formed feminist organization in Berkeley, "OPTIONS for Women Over Forty". They asked OPTIONS for its endorsement and financial support to create a feminist political journal for and about women over forty. In exchange, Spencer and Taylor pledged to publicize OPTIONS in the journal and promote their programs. Though OPTIONS gave initial support and funding, Broomstick grew into an independently published and funded magazine. Production of Broomstick ended in 1993 due to fiscal insolvency. As co-editors, Spencer and Taylor intended to develop and expand the mainstream feminist position in support of a growing subculture in the lesbian community that promoted a more radical feminist agenda. Broomstick would provide a unique social and political challenge to the feminist literature of its time. The magazine's staff borrowed skills learned from their earlier feminist activities in the late 1960s and early 1970s, such as consciousness raising sessions and feminist networking. Articles explored issues related to disability, lesbianism, ageism, sexism, and class struggle. Broomstick's editors and contributors hoped that the journal's content would promote a greater understanding of older women's situation. The magazine sought to honor and rescue the image of the Crone -- an old woman, often called witch, historically revered as healers and for their wisdom -- from public derision. The name Broomstick was chosen to symbolize women's shared skills and labor (homemaking), change and improvement (the new broom sweeps clean), power (the witch flies on the broom), healing (the witch as ancient healer), and speaking out about what society considers ugly. The magazine also explores a growing subculture of pagan and Wiccan spirituality, venerating the Crone.
Materials entirely in English.
These papers were originally given in 2012 to the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives on Robertson Blvd. in West Hollywood, Calif. In 2007, after the UCLA Center for Community Partnerships awarded a grant for the purpose of spotlighting the Los Angeles-themed collections in the archive, several collections fitting the profile--including this one--were sent to UCLA for processing and housing. Once at UCLA, these collections were inventoried, organized, preserved and digitized as a part of this two-year grant project. Now fully processed, they are held at UCLA and made accessible through the Special Collections Library.

Property rights to the physical object belong to UCLA Library Special Collections. All other rights, including copyright, are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not hold the copyright.

Property rights to the physical object belong to UCLA Library Special Collections. Literary rights, including copyright, are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not hold the copyright.
Gabriela Mistral was born Lucila Godoy y Alcayata on April 6, 1889 in Vicuña, Chile--one of the main cities in the valle de Elqui. Her father, Juan Jeronimo Godoy, was a school teachers in Latin, Greek, philosophy, literature and theology and her mother, Petronila Alcayaga Godoy, was a seamstress. At the age of 14, Gabriela began working as a teacher in order to help support her mother and family, since their father left when Gabriela was only 3 years old. Around this period she was beginning to write and explore the work of other authors and poets. A year after she began teaching Gabriela had her first publication, El muerte del poeta, in the newspaper, El Coquimbo. Following her publication, Mistral wrote and published several works under various pseudonyms, including Gabriela Mistral. In 1914 the Sociedad de Artistas y Escritores de Chile awarded Gabriela for her collection of poems titled, Sonetos de la muerte. After receiving national recognition she decided to stay with the name Gabriela Mistral--a fusion from the names of Italian poet Gabriela D'Annunzio and French poet Fédéric Mistral. She continued to devote herself to education, especially women's education, as a teacher and director of a girls school in Chile. She was later invited to Mexico by the Minister of Public Education, José Vasconcelos, to participate in programming Mexico's national education. Her writings achieved an international reputation after the publication of her first book Desolación in 1922. She toured the United States, Europe and Latin America establishing friendships with many contemporary writers. During her travels Gabriela published more of her poetry. She returned several times to Chile, but lived primarily in France and Italy. There she was very active with the League for Intellectual Co-operation for the League of Nations. After, Mistral worked as a professor at several prestigious universities in the United States. Later, she became Chile's ambassador and consul while staying in other parts of the world such as Brazil, Spain, Italy, Portugal and a short period in Los Angeles, California. In 1945 Gabriela Mistral received the Nobel Prize--she was the first Latin American to be awarded the prize for Literature. Due to failing health, Mistral stopped traveling and settled in New York, where she passed away on December 10, 1957.
Materials are in English and Spanish.

COLLECTION STORED OFF-SITE AT SRLF: Open for research. All requests to access special collections material must be made in advance using the request button located on this page.
Property rights to the physical object belong to UCLA Library Special Collections. Literary rights, including copyright, are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not hold the copyright.

COLLECTION CONTAINS AUDIO MATERIALS: Audio materials in this collection will require assessment and possible digitization for safe access.
The June L. Mazer Lesbian Archive at UCLA is an outreach and collection-building partnership between the June L. Mazer Lesbian Archives , the UCLA Center for the Study of Women (CSW) , and UCLA Library . These collections expand the pool of primary source materials available to researchers and to the community at large. This partnership was initiated by CSW and is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to inventory, organize, preserve, and digitize more than eighty Mazer collections pertaining to lesbian and feminist activism and writings. Property rights to the physical object belong to UCLA Library Special Collections. Literary rights, including copyright, are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not hold the copyright.
Barbara Macdonald (1913-2000) was a social worker, lesbian feminist activist and ageism activist. Macdonald's work appeared frequently in lesbian and feminist publications such as Equal Times, Lesbian Ethics, Ms., New Directions, New Women's Times, Sinister Wisdom, and Sojourner. In 1980, she covered the UN Mid-Decade Conference on Women in Copenhagen for Equal Times. In 1983, Macdonald co-authored Look Me in the Eye: Old Women, Aging and Ageism. The book combined her personal experiences of ageism with ground-breaking lesbian feminist theory, and was named by Ms. as one of 35 classics of the second wave of feminism. It also was widely anthologized for women's studies courses and was translated into Japanese in 1995. Macdonald was a frequent speaker at lesbian and feminist organizations, universities, and organizations of social workers nationally and internationally, including the UN Conference on Women at Huairou, China, in 1995. She was the keynote speaker at the National Lesbian Conference in Atlanta in 1991 and gave a plenary address at the National Women's Studies Conference in 1985. Her work was the inspiration for the First West Coast Conference of Old Lesbians in 1987. She served on its planning committee and gave the keynote address. Out of the conference came the creation of Old Lesbians Organizing for Change, a national organization seeking to end the ageism experienced by old women.
Materials are in English, with a small amount in Japanese.

Property rights to the physical object belong to UCLA Library Special Collections. Literary rights, including copyright, are retained by the creators and their heirs. It is the responsibility of the researcher to determine who holds the copyright and pursue the copyright owner or his or her heir for permission to publish where The UC Regents do not hold the copyright.
Materials are in English and Spanish.

Copyright to portions of this collection has been assigned to the UCLA Library Special Collections. The library can grant permission to publish for materials to which it holds the copyright. Commercial use may require additional rights that must be determined and obtained by the researcher. All requests for copyright permission to publish must be submitted in writing to Library Special Collections. Credit shall be given as follows: ©The Regents of the University of California on behalf of the UCLA Library Special Collections.
Finding aid available; see the Internet version cited in this record.

Elena I. Popp is a longtime activist and attorney who is dedicated to working for social change. She was born in Mexico and immigrated to Los Angeles in 1968 with her mother and two younger siblings. Elena became a community activist when a teacher brought a young UFW organizer into the classroom to talk about the dangerous conditions faced by workers in the fields. Elena enlisted in the farm workers' movement that day. Since then, she has worked tirelessly on behalf of immigrants, women, children, those that live with disabling conditions, and those that do not have a place to call home. Elena received her undergraduate degree and law degree from UCLA. Elena has worked for almost 20 years in legal services, focused primarily in the areas of Housing and Community Economic Development. From 1992 through 2004 Elena was an attorney at the Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles, a legal services program with a 72-year history of providing comprehensive legal services to low-income residents of metropolitan Los Angeles. In 1994, Elena co-founded the Healthy Homes Collaborative of Southern California an innovative coalition that addresses the health consequences of environmental hazards in childrens' environments. She created one of the first in court domestic violence prevention programs, a model being duplicated throughout the state; founded the first non-medical model outreach team to the homeless mentally ill, a project that received national recognition and has been duplicated in other parts of the country. Was a leader in the successful effort to save 1.5 million units of affordable housing. Was a key participant in creating the Los Angeles Systematic Code Enforcement Program and other key slum abatement, childhood lead poisoning prevention and asthma prevention initiatives. She has worked in the peace movement and in other projects that seek to eliminate all forms of discrimination. Elena co-chaired Lesbianas Unidas, an activist group, during the 1990s. In 2006, she ran for a State Assembly Seat in District 45, but did not win. She is currently the Executive Director of the Eviction Defense Network (EDeN) a social entrepreneurship project dedicated to increasing access to justice for low-income tenants through sliding and below market fees.
Unpublished finding aid available; inquire at Chicano Studies Research Center.

Queer Nation was a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) grassroots local organization first established in New York, which then, proliferated into many other chapters across the country including: Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Houston. The organization was well-known for its confrontational actions and public protests and was initially formed by former members of another group: ACT UP, a non-profit organization that fought HIV/AIDS discrimination. Queer Nation emerged because of the need to visibly denounce and counteract acts of violence and stereotypical portrayals of LGBT people in the media. While prior to the 1990s, the word "queer" conveyed a negative connotation and was considered a pejorative against sexual minorities, the group was able to re-appropriate the term and adopt it as a word of action.

Devra Weber is currently an Associate Professor in the History Department for the University of California, Riverside. She teaches the history of U.S. frontiers, U.S. labor history, oral history, and the history of California. Weber began her academic career at the University of Wisconsin and eventually earned her Masters degree and PhD at UCLA. Her topics of interest and research include United States West and United States labor history, with an emphasis on Mexican women, Mexicano/Chicano workers and immigration, and oral history. Weber has published numerous articles and books, including "Dark Sweet, White God: California Cotton" and "Farmworkers and the New Deal." Furthermore, Weber has worked in documentary films and as a photographer, while remaining an active member of the Los Angeles community. She has served as a member of the board of One Stop Immigration and Education Center, the Los Angeles Museum of Art, History and Culture, and is currently a member of the board of the Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research, Los Angeles. She is also an advisor of the Frente Indigena Oaxquena Binacional (Binational Indigenous Front of Oaxaca).
Unpublished finding aid available; inquire at Chicano Studies Research Center.

Tatiana Barona, aka tatiana de la tierra, artist, author, publisher and librarian, is an early pioneer of self-publishing 'zines that centered on issues of Latina Lesbians. Born in Colombia in 1961 and immigrated with her family to the United States in 1969, de la tierra spent much of her adolescence in both the Miami area and Colombia and self identifies as bi-cultural. After graduating with a B.S. in Psychology from the University of Florida in 1984, de la tierra began associating with an emerging Latina Lesbian community in Miami. As a collector of lesbian and queer materials and periodicals from both the United States and Latin America, de la tierra's collection and correspondence led her to create her own Latina Lesbian themed periodicals. In 1991 she co-founded Esto No Tiene Nombre_ (This Has No Name), and in 1995, she founded La Conmocion. She was also the editor of three issues of La Telarana. In 1998, de la tierra moved to El Paso to complete an MFA at University of Texas, El Paso, (UTEP). After completing her MFA, de la tierra moved to Buffalo to complete a MLIS at the University of New York, Buffalo. She completed her MLIS in 2000. As of 2011, de la tierra resides in Long Beach, Calif., and works as a librarian in the Inglewood Public Library System. tatiana de la tierra is an award winning writer and over 70 published articles of hers are found in publications ranging from self-published 'zines to peer reviewed journals.

Maria Acosta was born on August 15, 1906 in Mexico. Around 1914, her family moved to Columbus, New Mexico, where she would witness Pancho Villa's incursion into the United States in 1916. In 1925 she married Epimenio Duran in Los Angeles. That same year, they had a daughter, Margarita, and a year or two later, a son, Eloy. Maria filed for divorce in 1935. She worked in the garment industry and, going to night school, earned her high school diploma in 1940. She was involved with the Aliana Hispano-Americana, a mutual aid society and insurance company for Mexican Americans. She was active with the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. She served as treasurer for the Community Service Organization, a civil rights group where she worked with future congressman Edward Roybal, among others. She was so central to the CSO's operations that the group actually used her home address as its business adress for a time. In 1950 she married Charles H. Lang. At some point, they moved to Lancaster, California, where she opened a cafe called Don Carlos. She was at times the only woman on the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce. There is evidence that she remained politically active with the Chicano Moratorium in 1970. She died on February 26, 1988 in Lancaster.
Materials are in English and Spanish

In the 1970s, a federal class action lawsuit, Madrigal v. Quilligan, brought to light the coerced sterilization of Latina women at Los Angeles County-University of Southern California Medical Center. The case was brought to court by 10 Latina women against E.J. Quilligan, M.D. and other hospital obstetricians. The judge ruled against the women, however the case increased public awareness and activism of forced sterilization to minority and non-native speaking women.
Virginia Espino, earned her Ph.D. in history at Arizona State University. She currently works as an oral historian at the University of California at Los Angeles Center for Oral History Research where she is responsible for coordinating projects that document the Southern California Latina/o community. She is responsible for launching two oral history series that explore the Long Civil Rights Movement in Los Angeles: Mexican American Civil Rights Pioneers: Historical Roots of an Activist Generation and "La Batalla Está Aquí": The Chicano Movement in Los Angeles. Her research on the history of coercive sterilization at the Los Angeles-USC Medical Center provided the impetus for the documentary, No Más Hijos Por Vida/More Babies for Life, for which she is a Producer and Lead Historian. Espino has conducted extensive primary research and interviews with a number of the principals in the case, and has published her research in Las Obreras: Chicana Politics of Work and Family, edited by Vicki L. Ruiz, and Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia.
Renee Tajima-Peña, Digital Media Producer, is an Academy Award-nominated filmmaker. She was selected for the inaugural programs of the BAVC Producers Institute for New Media Technologies and the ITVS-Mozilla Foundation "Living Docs Project," where she prototyped interactive documentary projects for online digital platforms. Her film credits include her current documentary, No More Babies for Life (formerly¿Más Bebés?), and the nationally-televised PBS documentaries, Calavera Highway, "The Mexico Story" of The New Americans series, My America...or Honk if You Love Buddha, and Who Killed Vincent Chin?, and The Last Beat Movie (Sundance Channel), and The Best Hotel on Skid Row (HBO). Her films have premiered at Cannes, Sundance, Toronto, and festivals around the world. She has been awarded the Guggenheim Fellowship, a USA Broad Fellowship in Media Arts, Peabody Award, Dupont-Columbia Award, Alpert Award in the Arts, Int'l Documentary Association Achievement Award, and two Rockefeller Foundation Fellowships. She is currently a Professor in Asian American Studies at UCLA and the Director for EthnoCommunications at UCLA.
Unpublished finding aid available; inquire at Chicano Studies Research Center.