Florence Hope Luscomb grew up in the 1890s and died in the 1980s. During her long life, she embraced and advanced a range of causes from woman suffrage to civil liberties. She was 33 years old when the Nineteenth Amendment finally enfranchised women; she was still active when American women rediscovered feminism in the 1960s and 1970s. Born in Lowell in 1887, she moved to Boston with her mother two years later when her parents separated. Her mother was an ardent and active supporter of suffrage and other radical causes, and Florence followed in her footsteps. She remembered going with her mother at the age of five to hear Susan B. Anthony speak, and she spent many Saturday mornings in the 1910s selling the suffrage paper, The Woman’s Journal, outside the Park Street Station. Florence Luscomb was among the first women to graduate from M.I.T. with a degree in architecture. From 1909 to 1917, she was a partner in a woman-owned firm in Boston, but her true love was the suffrage cause. She helped organize rallys, trolley tours and street meetings; in 1915, she logged more than 220 speeches in 14 weeks during the campaign for an amendment to the state constitution. When World War I caused a building slump, she left architecture to become executive secretary of the Boston Equal Suffrage Association. She helped organize and was president of a Boston local of the United Office and Professional Workers of America. She held paid positions with the Boston League of Women Voters, the Massachusetts branch of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, and organizations concerned with prison reform and factory safety. Beginning in the 1920s, she served on the board of civil rights, civil liberties, and other liberal organizations, including the NAACP and the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union. After her mother’s death in 1933 gave her financial independence, she became a full-time social and political activist. Florence Luscomb ran for public office four times, including a race for Boston City Council in 1922 which she lost by less than one percent. Her campaigns for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1936 and again in 1950 were meant to educate voters and expand the two-party system. In 1952, she ran for Governor of Massachusetts on the Progressive Party ticket, a third party that opposed the anti-Communist policies of the Truman administration. She fought McCarthyism and was called upon to defend herself before a committee of the Massachusetts legislature. In her pamphlet Blacklisting the Constitution, she condemned the anti-Communist investigations as un-American attempts to suppress dissent. In the early 1960s, she wrote the first anti-Vietnam War leaflet distributed in Boston, and visited both China and Cuba. When 1970s feminists turned to her as a “foremother,” she encouraged the new movement to be inclusive. Just as she had once urged labor unions to include women, in the l970s she reminded feminists to reach out to poor women and women of color. A lifelong radical, at age ninety she was living in a Cambridge commune. She died in l985 at age 98. (Born February 6, 1887, Lowell; died, October 27, 1985, Watertown. Photo courtesy of The Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College.)