She attended Carleton College in Minnesota in the fall of 1959 and Spelman College through the domestic exchange program in 1962. In 1957, Cade's family relocated to Memphis, Tennessee, where she attended Central High School.

She lived for a time in the suburbs of Chicago. Cade was born in 1942 to a Midwestern family, and is the oldest of five children.

Transcript: 81 pages sound file : digital preservation master, WAV files (96 kHz, 24 bit)īiographical Note Cathy Cade is a prominent political photographer and activist. As Lois Rita Helmbold writes in A Lesbian Photo Album, noting the myriad forms a community can take, “We create families by choice, rather than by kinship or birth.Sheila Michaels civil rights organization oral history collection Instead, she documents a network of support groups for lesbian mothers for whom family is a fluid concept. The emphasis in Cade’s work is not to show modified nuclear families with a second woman replacing the role of the father. They also portray family portraits and scenes of domestic life-the women’s parents, grandparents, siblings, and children, as well as their lovers and friends. Cade’s blackand-white images instead depict protests, a bare-breasted woman wielding a hammer, and a lesbian performance group called Fat Chance. At the time, most lesbians could only see themselves in porn or other sexualized contexts. “The photos made especially for this book were selected to show the complexity of each woman’s life, our range of roles, how different we look in various situations,” Cade writes in the book’s preface. In A Lesbian Photo Album: The Lives of Seven Lesbian Feminists (1987), Cade, who has two sons herself, traces the lives of seven women-all born during the mid-i930S to mid-i940S and of different backgrounds and races-from childhood to maturity. Three weeks after coming out, Cade thought decisively to herself, ‘Wow, I can get pregnant.” She saw photography as a way to contribute to the women’s movement and embarked on a long-term project consisting of photographs and interviews centered around lesbian motherhood.

“But when I was there in the ’60s, I didn’t think I could become a photographer because I was a woman.” In San Francisco, Cade saw women pursuing typically masculine trades, such as carpentry and auto repair, and decided to take a few lessons with photographer Bill Light. “I got the idea to be a documentary photographer from being in the civil rights movement and seeing how effective the photographs taken were,” she said. At the time, Cade was living in San Francisco and was already a seasoned activist. “I began making photographs and came out as a lesbian in that wonderful spring of 1971,” the photographer Cathy Cade once wrote in an artist’s statement.

A Lesbian Photo Album by Cathy Cade