“The more things change, the more they stay the same” is an adage Liane Brandon could apply with regret to her photo exhibit “Still Marching 1970-2017,” opening Thursday at the Cambridge Main Library as part of a citywide events underscoring Women’s History Month.
Brandon, a filmmaker, photographer and retired professor of education and communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, shot the Women’s March on Boston Common in 1970. Nearly 50 years later she returned for the Boston Women’s March for America, a 2017 expression of concern over rights and safety set off by Donald Trump’s first term in office – achieved despite his hot-mic boasts about groping women and rising charges of sexual misconduct.
“We were fighting for women’s rights back then, and that’s what we’re still doing – equal pay for equal work and reproductive rights, that has not changed,” Brandon said in interview. The first march predated Roe v. Wade; the second sought to preserve the landmark decision, which was overturned in 2022.
The big difference between the 1970 and 2017 marches, marking the U.S. government’s moving rights in reverse, were size, Brandon said. A few thousand women attended the first event. Around 175,000 women and men went to the second.
Brandon’s life behind the lens took a while to come into focus. She grew up in Newark, New Jersey, playing pickup basketball with the boys. She came from limited means but her gifts as an athlete scored her a college scholarship. She quickly dropped out (something that would happen five times before Brandon would eventually finish at Boston University’s night school) and spent much of her nonmatriculating time as a lifeguard (rising to oversee 17 men) and ski instructor in Canada. She found her way into occasional stunt gigs, including as a summer aquacade performer and in ski movies.
Brandon wound up in Boston due to her friendship with hometown actress Jane Alexander, whom she met at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. Brandon become a substitute teacher in Roxbury nearly a decade before Boston’s infamous busing crisis, and later was a high school teacher in Quincy, where she was one of the first to begin work in the field of media studies – something so impactful it helped land her at UMass Amherst in 1973.
“It was tough,” she said. “We were mostly offered jobs as secretaries, teachers or nurses and encouraged to have babies, because otherwise we’d be taking jobs from men. Back then the want ads were segregated by sex, and there were no laws against sexual harassment and gender discrimination. Abortion was illegal and if women wanted to get a credit card, a man had to cosign for it.”
One of her early successes as a filmmaker was the recently restored “Anything You Want to Be” (1971), about a girl who announces she wants to run for student class president and gets booed; when she settles on running for class secretary, she is cheered. Of all the many courses Brandon took along her wending collegiate path, the only one she failed was secretarial typing, “because I really didn’t want to be a secretary,” she said.
Brandon is now a Brighton resident. During her early years in Boston, she lived on Douglass Street in Cambridge’s Central Square – a McDonald’s is there now – and, after spotting a flyer tacked to a telephone pole, joined the Bread and Roses feminist collective founded in Cambridge in 1960.
The collective organized the 1970 march to protest the lack of equality and equal rights that persisted on the 50th anniversary of the enactment of 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote.
“Still Marching 1970–2017” exhibit opening reception, 6 to 7:30 p.m. Thursday at the Cambridge Main Library, 449 Broadway, Mid-Cambridge. Free. Light refreshments provided.
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