Word: luscombe
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...Luscomb's recollections are the stuff of which the most absorbing memoirs are made, but she has never written down the story of her life in full. Her first contact with feminism was at the age of five in 1892 when her mother took her to a suffragette convention. In 1909 Luscomb was one of the few women graduates from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a degree in architecture. In 1910, the editors of The Woman's Journal (founded in 1840 by Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell as the news bulletin of the women's movement) decided to reach...
...Luscomb visited mainland China in 1962, more than a decade before the United States government made any attempt to normalize relations with that country. And, only seven years before, during the McCarthy era, she was summoned to appear before the Massachusetts Commission to Investigate Communism and Subversion and interrogated about her organizational activities. These had included, since 1920, executive secretaryships of the Boston League of Women Voters, the Mass. Civic League, the Joint Board of Sanitary Control supervising health and safety conditions in garment factories, and for seven years, the Mass. branch of the Women's International League for Peace...
...Luscomb was an early adherent of the Civil Liberties Union from its inception in 1920 and for many years she was vice-chairman of its Massachusetts branch. She also joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People just after it was organized and served as the Boston branch vice-chairman, working extensively with Melnea Cass (another honored grand Bostononian known today as "The First Lady of Roxbury...
...today, Luscomb does not reveal the passionate depth of her convictions all at once. She talks slowly, with the measured rhythm and varied tone of the practiced public speaker but she never talks at you. Indeed, you might be deceived, on first meeting her, into imagining that this charming old lady was taking it easy after adventures such as her 1962 trip to the World Disarmament Congress in Moscow. But the deception is short-lived. She says her time is more her own now but she still gives lectures about the history of the women's movement, her journeys...
...Luscomb's phone rings continuously. One minute it is a radio network asking her to give a broadcast. A few moments later WGBH-TV calls to finalize an interview schedule. And of course her friends call, too. For, though she has remarked of her reforming campaigns that "They are the only things that made my life interesting, that made me feel that I was a part of my times...," it is nevertheless apparent that it is people, rather than abstract political ideologies that she cares about...