A history teacher, Mara Dodge, is currently researching Anna Sullivan's life and the precedent times of the Textile Workers Union of America for a series of articles.
Anna B. Sullivan, an executive director of the Textile Workers Union of America, had allotted the union's meeting hall to the activist Margaret Sanger, a birth control and reproductive rights pioneer in Westfield.
Margaret had helped to kick off a citizen's initiative challenging the state's oppressive birth control laws.
Despite many efforts, Massachusetts would be the last state in the nation to legalize birth control, making it legal for married women in 1966 and for single women in 1973.
Sullivan was born in Holyoke in 1903 and began working in the mills at 14.
She helped organize the Skinner Mills Textile Workers Union and from 1940 to 1967 she served as executive director of the Textile Workers Union of America.
Sullivan was also active in local Democratic politics and in 1950 ran an unsuccessful campaign for Congress.
Later, from 1967 to 1972, she worked for the Massachusetts Commission Against Discrimination. She died in 1983.
Dodge for her research work would like to interview and gain information from anyone who knew Anna Sullivan, as a member of the Textile Workers Union, remembers the campaign to legalize birth control in Massachusetts or has knowledge about how women got birth control before it was legalized.
marketing@alchempro.com
