Patricia Andrea Gozemba (born 1940) is an American academic and activist. She grew up in Massachusetts and was involved in the political movements of the 1960s and 1970s, including the Civil Rights Movement, the Women's Liberation Movement and protests against the Vietnam War.
After earning her degree, she became a teacher, married, divorced, and became an activist in the LGBT and environmental movements. She was one of the founders of the women's studies program at Salem State College and its first coordinator. Gozemba served on the Coordinating Council of the National Women's Studies Association from 1979 to 1982 and was president for 1988 and 1989.
Many of her works aimed to recover the history of the LGBT community in and around Boston. Involved in the fight for the legalization of same-sex marriages, she campaigned in Massachusetts, Vermont, and Hawaii. She was the co-author of Courting Equality, a history of Massachusetts' path to legalizing same-sex marriage and several works aimed at documenting lesbian history of women before the feminist movement. Since her retirement, she has been active in environmental causes and is the current co-chair of the Salem Alliance for the Environment (SAFE).
Early life and education
Patricia Andrea Curran was born in 1940 in Somerville, Massachusetts, to Mary M. (née Sampey) and John C. P. Curran. Curran called her father "Cookie" and her mother "The Beak". When she was eleven, the family relocated to Waltham, Massachusetts, where her mother worked as a bookkeeper. Her father worked at Boston Linotype Print and at the Boston Herald in the pressroom. Growing up, Curran was close to her father, but wrote that she was estranged from her mother, who was ashamed that her daughter was a lesbian. Curran attended Emmanuel College in Boston, where she served as senior class president and graduated in 1962.
Career
Women's studies
Curran began her career as a high school English teacher at Waltham High School. In 1963, she organized women educators, encouraging them to join the teachers' union and completed her master's degree at the University of Iowa. From 1964, she taught English at Salem State College. Around 1968, Curran married and began using the surname Gozemba, but she and her husband would later divorce. She was active in the protests against the Vietnam War and the feminist movement, rallying both feminists and pacifists to join Boston protest gatherings. She was also involved in the Civil Rights Movement and as an environmental activist.
In 1971, Gozemba and other faculty members began introducing women's studies into their curricula. The subject was approved as an interdisciplinary undergraduate minor degree program in 1975. She began working as coordinator of the program prior to its full accreditation and was a leader in the drive to develop an English-language program to provide intensive training to non-native speakers of English at Salem State. In 1972 she created a slide show that was presented in local schools and community meetings to expose sexism in advertising. The following year, she and other colleagues filed a lawsuit to achieve salary equality for women at Salem State. It was eventually settled in their favor and salary discrimination was later eliminated at all Massachusetts state colleges. Also in 1973, she was a founder of the Florence Luscomb Women's Center on Salem State's campus and organized a support group for lesbians in the Salem area at the facility. Gozemba completed her EdD at Boston University in 1975, with a thesis titled The Effect of Rhetorical Training in Visual Literacy on the Writing Skills of College Freshmen. She joined the National Women's Studies Association when it was formed in 1977 and served as the New England regional representative until 1979.
LGBT activism
When three bills with impact on the LGBT community were slated to be reviewed by the Massachusetts legislature in 1978, Gozemba and eleven other activists formed the North Shore Gay Alliance and began registering voters. That year, she gave an interview about her life to the Boston Herald publicly coming out as a lesbian. Because of the shame her mother felt over the interview, Gozemba's parents moved from Waltham to Falmouth, Massachusetts. After the bills were successfully defeated, the organization turned its focus toward social and educational programs designed to bring community members together.