Miss Luscomb Takes a Stand

Boston's Florence Luscomb is the very model of a modern revolutionary. Last spring she stood shoulder to shoulder on a Moratorium Day platform with Abbie Hoffman and the Black Panthers. Only a month ago she was marching in Cambridge to protest the Government's treatment of Angela Davis. Only last week she delivered the welcoming address to a feminist rally on Boston Common and she is slated at the Washington antiwar rally on April 24. An ardent Women's Liberationist, she makes frequent speaking appearances at high schools and colleges, arguing for abortion on demand and job equality.

Miss Luscomb also favors "cooperative living" and indeed lives in a Cambridge commune with seven other women and men. None of this activity would be very unusual were it not for the fact that Florence Luscomb is 84.

Miss Luscomb is hardly a Jenny-come-lately to the barricades, a dotty old lady off on a senile lark. Her present politics and life-style are merely extensions of a lifelong devotion to progressive causes, and she conducts her activist's life with grace and dignity. The commune--or "co-op," as the residents prefer to call it--is quiet and orderly; each member has his or her own room and is free to come and go at will. Says Michael Widmer, 32, a Boston journalist and founder of the commune: "At first we were kind of surprised she even had the gumption to come around. Most of us were a little cowed by her at first. There was some difficulty adjusting to an older woman. She seemed to everyone like a mother." Miss Luscomb, who never married, thoroughly enjoys communal life. "I have no living relative," she explains. "I have lived in an apartment by myself, and it's very lonely. You come home at night to a dark house and cook your meal with no one to talk to. That's not a human life. A human life requires human contact."

Her training in protest began early. In 1892, when she was only five, her mother took her to a women's suffrage convention. She still remembers being moved by a Susan B. Anthony speech. "All through my girlhood," she recalls, "I ushered at suffrage meetings and distributed leaflets." She graduated from M.I.T. with a B.S. in architecture in 1909. She worked as a draftsman until World War I, when she became a full-time feminist. She carried the movement to rural Massachusetts, making "222 speeches in 14 weeks."

Shrewd Sense. After women gained the vote in 1920 Miss Luscomb became a charter member of the League of Women Voters. She cast her first presidential ballot in 1920 for Socialist Candidate Eugene Debs. Soon she was involved in the labor movement, inspecting the shops operated by the garment trade. Miss Luscomb's shrewd sense of revolutionary tactics--which are still being copied by her spiritual descendants-- helped rectify dismal working conditions. "I got four women who were distinguished Bostonians to go to the factories with me. When the newspapers printed their report, believe me, the state officials came down and cleaned up immediately."

Donning a gas mask to protest police gassing tactics, she joined longshoremen picket lines with Zara du Pont, an activist member of the chemical clan. She also conducted campaigns in behalf of the League of Nations, and once ran for Congress on a pro-labor ticket against John McCormack.

A 1935 trip to the Soviet Union, coupled with her tireless involvement in then radical movements, brought her before a state commission investigating Communism during the McCarthy era. She denounced the commission and refused to testify. "I simply told them that my business was none of their business." In 1962, while attending a disarmament conference in the Soviet Union, she wangled a Chinese visa and visited the mainland.

For all her revolutionary fervor. Miss Luscomb lacks the sense of frustration that impels many of her younger colleagues to violence. She decries the recent tactic of Boston feminists, who took over a Harvard building tor rap sessions and judo lessons. "If they have a right to take over a Harvard building for their cause," she says, "then so do the John Birchers."

Even so doughty an activist as Miss Luscomb has to say no once in a while though. Soon she plans to withdraw temporarily from the commune and retire, as she does each summer, to the solitude of her one-room cabin in the New Hampshire woods. There she can light her kerosene lamp, read the Guardian and her books about Karl Marx, and look across her vegetable garden to nearby Mount Chocorua--a 3,475-ft. peak she scaled four years ago.

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