Joan Cavanagh Papers

Joan Cavanagh, 1954- , was born in Los Angeles, CA, and raised in Baltimore, MD. Her father, Paul Cavanagh, was a stage and screen actor and her mother, Catherine Luhn Cavanagh, was an aspiring actress and homemaker.

Cavanagh’s activism for social change began while in junior high and high school in Baltimore County, then continued with the Towson Peace Coalition and SDS at Towson State College (now University), which she attended for two years before “dropping out” to work full time against the U.S. war in Indochina. While in Maryland, she demonstrated for civil rights and fair housing and was active in opposition to the war and to the nuclear arms race and U.S. first strike nuclear policy. She was arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience multiple times at the White House and the Pentagon and served several jail terms of between 10 and 52 days for some of those actions while living in three resistance communities in Baltimore City (the 2020 Community, Jonah House, and Advaita House). She was a co-founder in 1976 of the Atlantic Life Community, a network of communities throughout the Northeast active in nonviolent anti-nuclear resistance. She also worked with the United Farmworkers’ Union Boycott Office in Baltimore, which led the area boycott on non-union lettuce and grapes. Much of this work is documented in her papers which are being donated to Swarthmore College or another archive in the mid-Atlantic region. [Cross-reference will be provided once these papers are donated and processed.] Cavanagh moved to New Haven, Connecticut in 1977, where she has lived since. The Joan Cavanagh Papers at Southern Connecticut State University Special Collections and Archives document the groups and endeavors with which she has been involved while living in Connecticut. Cavanagh worked for the “political arm” of the New Haven Women’s Liberation Center, the Feminist Union, from 1979 until 1982. She was a co-founder of several organizations during the late 1970s through 2024, including

• the Feminist Union Anti-Nuclear Task Force (which became an action affinity group known as Spinsters Opposed to Nuclear Genocide, or S.O.N.G.) • the Northeast Women’s Alliance Against Nuclear Weapons and Power • the Committee for Education and Defense Against Racism (C.E.D.A.R), formed to defeat the presence of the Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazis in Connecticut • the Coalition to Stop Trident • the New Haven Pledge of Resistance (against U.S. intervention in Central America) • the Coalition Against War in the Gulf (formed to oppose the first U.S. war in Iraq in 1991 and its subsequent economic sanctions against that country) • the Connecticut Peace Coalition/New Haven (formed in 1999 to oppose the brief U.S. bombing of Kosovo and the build-up to the second U.S. war on Iraq in 2003 as well as the war in Afghanistan after 9/11/2001) • the New Haven Sunday Vigil for Peace and Justice (which began in 1999 as a project of the Connecticut Peace Coalition but became its own entity in 2006, continuing to the present) and • in 2021, Progressives Against Medical Assisted Suicide, which works against legalization and normalization of medical aid in dying as a form of deadly discrimination against those already underserved by the current medical system.

Cavanagh also participated actively in organizations such as the Connecticut Network to Abolish the Death Penalty and the May Day Celebration Committee, along with a wide range of other groups and endeavors, all of which are documented in the papers held at SCSU. She also worked in New Mexico in 1989 through 1992 with A Safer Environment for New Mexicans to stop the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (W.I.P.P) and to expose the dangers of the testing of depleted uranium in Socorro, NM, conducted by contractors of the New Mexico School of Mining and Technology under the auspices of its Terminal Effects Research Analysis Group (T.E.R.A.).

Cavanagh received her B.A. from Wesleyan University in 1985, her Ph.D. in United States Social and Diplomatic History from Yale University in 1996, and her master’s in library science concentrating in archival management from Simmons College (now University) in 2002. Her doctoral dissertation, “You Can’t Kill the Golden Goose: A History of General Dynamics’ Electric Boat Shipyard in Twentieth Century New London County, Connecticut,” describes the economic dependence of the region on military spending and its implications for political and social relations, as well as on larger decisions about foreign policy. The dissertation and documents used to produce it are part of the Cavanagh Papers held at SCSU.

Cavanagh was the Project Archivist for the Greater New Haven Labor History Association from 2001 until 2006 and its Archivist and Director from 2006 until 2017. She also served as the Archivist and Librarian at the Ethnic Historical Archives Center (aka the Ethnic Heritage Center) on the campus of Southern Connecticut State University from 2006 through 2013. Her personal papers from that work are included in her papers at SCSU.