Serene Williams: Can you tell us about yourself and describe your involvement in the field of Women’s Studies?

Mima Cataldo: I am a piece of history. I was born in 1943 so in 1963, I had just turned 20 and I was part of all of the significant events that were happening in the sixties: the Civil Rights, the anti-war, and the women’s and gay liberation movements. All of these movements did not happen at once, there is a whole history of how they emerged, but I became involved with them because my politics were moving in that direction. 

I attended the University of Michigan for college and experienced one of the first teach-ins there which introduced me to protesting the Vietnam War. After graduation I lived in New York City and worked at a psychiatric research hospital for a number of years that was part of Columbia Presbyterian Hospitals and Columbia University. At the time, Columbia was having its own uprising (1968) and as a graduate student at Teachers College, I became part of all that as well. 

There were also the consciousness raising groups happening at that time, and that’s when I began to realize that women were playing a secondary role in society.  I knew it, but I hadn’t understood it as a problem until then. Then in 1974, I began a Ph.D. in the Social Science Program at Syracuse University and during that time I worked with other women to help establish the Women’s Studies Program there.

At the time, you could minor in Women’s Studies, but today it is strong comprehensive program and you can major in it.  It’s so ironic since right up the street from where I live, Sonoma State University has disbanded their program. It’s heartbreaking now to see this trend today and see our society being torn apart with attempts to move it backwards.

Williams: I really enjoyed reading your book about the Women’s Encampment for a Future of Peace and Justice. Can you share with us how you got involved in photographing this important event?

Cataldo: I have always been a visual artist, but I knew it was very difficult to make a living as one, so I had to make a career for myself.  I started out painting and sometime in the late sixties I took up a camera. I took courses at School of Visual Arts in New York and became a black and white street photographer.  This eventually led me to document the social movements that were taking place at the time. By the time I went to Syracuse, I became part of a trend within the social sciences to use photography within academia called Visual Sociology- using my camera as a tool for research – as data collection. And for the next several decades, I became a Professor of Sociology and Psychology at area colleges in Upstate New York.  Some fifteen years later, I then earned an MLS and became a librarian, running the library program at the Onondaga Nation School near Syracuse NY and in 2001, I became the District Librarian for the Tiburon School District here in CA.

But back to photography. In the late seventies, I began a social documentary project examining activists farmers and other residents in northern New York who were protesting high voltage power lines that were planned to cross their farmlands. These folks were a generation older than me who were committing civil disobedience and spending time in jail and I photographed them, their animals and land for three years. I received a grant from Light Work (Syracuse University) which supported this project and that was when I realized I could use my camera as a tool for social and political activism.

In 1979 I married and within a few years I had two children. In 1983 the Women’s Peace Camp near Seneca Falls NY was just getting started when a photographer friend, Ruth Putter asked me to join her in documenting this event.  Ruth had been part of the Photo League, a progressive photography group in New York City during the forties, so we shared similar political views.  

We went to the camp weekly and photographed all day and through the evening.  The camp was set up to protest the storage of nuclear weapons at the Seneca Army Depot which were to be shipped to NATO bases in Europe.  Over 12,000 women came through the camp that summer, and they stayed on the land adjacent to the Depot.  The camp was modeled on Greenham Common, a protest movement by women in England who were protesting nuclear weapons at the NATO bases there.  Many were arrested.  The Seneca Peace Camp was established on land bought by women’s peace groups as a safe place from which to stage their protests most of which took place during the summer of 1983.

There were, of course, people who lived in that area and who were dependent on the Depot for their livelihoods and at times, held counter protests against Peace Camp women.  In the end, the Depot closed its doors to these weapons and the Depot moved from being a military base to another type of service industry.

Throughout the summer, Ruth and I realized the significance of the peace camp as an historical event within the peace and women’s movements, and we decided to collect other women’s work, their photographs and writing, along with peace camp literature, and we spent the next three years putting it together as a collective record of the camp.  Temple University Press published our book in 1987 and I am grateful that it told the story from the perspective of those who experienced it that summer. I am grateful too that this work was published, although I now see that I might have played a larger role in the design of the book.  

Williams: I thought the layout was really interesting and compelling to read. Especially for someone like me who did not know anything about this event. I learned a great deal about it.

Cataldo: Thank you, I appreciate that.

Williams: I’ve never heard of the Photo League from the 1940s so thank you for teaching me that. 

Cataldo: These were photographers with radical and progressive politics living in New York City, but it was before my time.

Williams: Thank you, that’s very helpful to know. Are there any other stories like that you think we should include in our proposal for an AP Women’s U.S. History course? Especially women combining social justice work with photography? That topic is not covered very much inside a high school history classroom.

Cataldo: Let me think about that. I have had a fantasy about doing a book documenting the photography of women from the sixties and seventies. There’s a book by Abigail Heyman, unfortunately it is out of print now, but she documented her life through her photographs. That’s something that I wanted to capture; to tell the story of women’s awakening of second wave feminism through their photographs.

Williams: Do you know the photographer JEB (Joan E. Biren)? 

Cataldo: Yes, she came to the camp that summer too.

Williams: I looked through her incredible photographs when I researched the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1980s at the Smith College archives last summer. I am especially interested in writing about women’s militancy on behalf of the ERA.

Cataldo: I don’t know her personally but I know her work and have seen her interviewed. She is a good person to talk with since her work focusses on women’s lives.

Williams: Are there any lesser known women you have not yet mentioned that you think we should include in the course proposal? Maybe women who have been inspirational to you?

Cataldo: Is this a semester long course or year long?

Williams: Year long

Cataldo: What have you established at this point and when does second wave feminism come into your proposal?

Williams: I will send you the full course proposal, it is very detailed. The short answer is the course begins with Indigenous societies and how women had political authority in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans. There are nine units in the course and for the second wave, there is so much information we broke it up into two units. We have one on the women’s liberation movement and one on the waves of feminism. We also have it organized by subtopics such as Chicana feminism, the fight for disability rights, Womanism, militancy for the ERA and much more. So the second wave appears in a few different units. 

Cataldo: Ok, that’s good. I would be sure to talk about Rachel Carson and the environmental movement. A lot of other movements are connected to the way the women’s movement itself was developed and what kind of operating principles it incorporated such as the idea of consensus building, cooperation and non-hierarchical systems.

There are people like Virginia Woolf who was not only a writer but also a feminist. There are Black feminists, Black poets and women who may not have identified with the women’s movement but who have made a difference.  For instance, there’s the Frances Perkins story. She had been involved with labor issues, and when she observed the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire and saw the women jumping to their deaths, it radicalized her. She eventually became the first women to hold a cabinet position under FDR (President Franklin Delano Roosevelt), and was the force behind Social Security, Workers Compensation, Federal Minimum Wage and other New Deal programs that FDR was credited with establishing. In fact, a recent Netflix film on FDR showed a still photograph of her as Secretary of Labor, but never once mentioned her role in the reform programs of the 1930’s. This is 2026 and it should not be treated like it’s a secret.

Here are my thoughts about your question to me about lesser-known people. They’re lesser known because their work has been erased or ignored.  An example is that it was Frances Perkins who pushed FDR to adopt the federal programs that saved so many from the devastating effects of the Depression, and we might ask why it is he who we remember for that and not her. 

Williams: I love that quote you gave about how lesser known women are lesser known because they are erased. We’d like to quote you on that, it’s brilliant. Do you support the creation of an AP Women’s History course? If so could you share why you support it?

Cataldo: Yes. What the women’s movement did for me was sort out what I was going to do with my life, not only to support myself but what contribution I was going to make to the world. Until second wave feminism became part of my thinking, I had always seen myself as a helper, being an assistant to somebody else who was going to get credit to what I was also contributing too.

When the second wave women’s movement was happening, I began to rethink my abilities and felt a new power that I could take charge of how I wanted to live my life. I could do things myself and not just be someone’s assistant or secretary.  If you introduce young women to see that that the world is open to them, that they can choose anything they want to do, then they will move in that direction.  I see that some young women may already feel that way, but I’m sure there are still many who don’t envision a future where they are in charge of their lives and futures. Like me, as young girls, they might see themselves as adjacent to people doing “the important work”.  So, what I appreciate about what you all are doing is giving young women a chance to see themselves and incorporate into their thinking that they have agency over their lives while they are still formulating what they are going to do with their lives.

Williams: Beautifully put! Thank you so much.