Cathy Cade, an activist and pioneering photographer who chronicled same-sex female relationships, producing a 1987 book that was hailed by feminists and gay-rights advocates as a classic, died on Nov. 16 at her home in Berkeley, Calif. She was 82.
Her death, which was not widely reported at the time, was from complications of dementia, her son Carl Cade said.
While she never broke into the mainstream, Ms. Cade was prominent in the women’s movement of the San Francisco Bay Area, where she settled in 1969, the year of the Stonewall uprising in New York City, often considered the first broadside in the battle for gay liberation.
Having spent nearly a decade working on the front lines of the civil rights movement, Ms. Cade turned to photography in 1971, the year she came out as a lesbian. Her work was featured in feminist periodicals like Off Our Backs, in gallery shows and in books on feminism and gay life.
Unable to elicit interest from publishing houses in her book, “A Lesbian Photo Album: The Lives of Seven Lesbian Feminists,” she published it herself. But that did not diminish its influence in the gay community.
“The early 1970s, when Cathy started making photographs, was a time when most people, including most lesbians, had never seen images of women in traditionally male jobs, or lesbians who were affectionate in public, or lesbian mothers with their children,” Joan E. Biren, a prominent lesbian photographer known professionally as JEB, said in an email. “Cathy broke through the walls of exclusion and erasure that had surrounded women’s existence, and portrayed us as proud and powerful.”
One of Ms. Cade’s best-known photographs, “Emerson Street Household” (1973), was featured in “On the Domestic Front: Scenes of Everyday Queer Life,” a 2015 exhibition at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art in New York.
A stately black-and-white group portrait with “American Gothic” overtones, the photo shows Ms. Cade; her partner, Kate Dolin; Ms. Dolin’s young son, Guthrie, whom Ms. Cade helped raise; and a friend from the local women’s movement, gathered in a Berkeley apartment.
The photographer, proud and solemn in overalls, stands over the other three, who sit amid everyday objects with symbolic significance: tools (Ms. Dolin was an automobile mechanic), a camera, toys and various handcrafted items.
“We wanted to present ourselves as women to be taken seriously, who had skills and who were workers, and this was showing some of our work,” Ms. Cade said in a 2015 interview with the site OutHistory. “We had grown up in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s, and women were supposed to be passive, not active. They weren’t supposed to develop a lot of skills — they weren’t to be taken seriously. We were on the brink of changing this.”
Catherine Elise Cade was born on Feb. 24, 1942, in Honolulu, the eldest of five children of William Cade, who taught engineering at the University of Hawaii at the time, and Elise (Brown) Cade, who became the director of development for a Unitarian graduate seminary in Chicago.
During Cathy’s childhood, her family moved around the Midwest before settling in Memphis, where her father designed farm equipment for International Harvester.
Attending Central High School in Memphis in 1957, she witnessed fellow students joining in chants of “2-4-6-8, we don’t have to integrate” in support of segregationists fighting the tumultuous desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Ark., where Gov. Orval Faubus had mobilized the state militia to prevent Black students from entering the school.
“In class, I stated, ‘I’m for integration,’” Ms. Cade recalled in a 2018 talk at the University of California, Berkeley. “The teacher looked like she was going to faint.”
As a student at Carleton College, in Northfield, Minn., Ms. Cade participated in an exchange program with Spelman College, the historically Black college for women in Atlanta. There, she became active in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, the Black campus organization that fought for racial justice.
After graduating from Carleton with a bachelor’s degree in sociology a year later, she went to work for SNCC full time, participating in sit-ins and protests in the South and attending the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom in 1963. She continued her activism in the latter half of the 1960s while earning a doctorate in sociology at Tulane University.
Over the years, Ms. Cade trained her lens not only on gay-pride parades but also on protests over nuclear weapons, environmental damage, labor-rights abuses and economic inequality, including the Occupy demonstrations of the early 2010s.
In addition to her son Carl, she is survived by another son, Leojo Cade, as well as her sister, Claire Cade, and her brother, William.
Ms. Cade spent her later years at Strawberry Creek Lodge in Berkeley, a senior housing community that had dozens of L.G.B.T.Q. residents.
“I have more gay men friends than I’ve ever had and more straight men friends, too,” she told OutHistory. “I think my primary identities have shifted from ‘lesbian feminist and photographer’ to ‘old and artist.’ ‘Home,’ ‘community’ and ‘activism’ are still intermingled.”
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