Meadow Muska papers

Photographer Carolyn “Meadow” Muska especially well documented the alternative lesbian culture in the 1970s and 1980s. According to the biographical statement provided by Muska (see box 4 for full statement): she

"was born October 26 1952 to Bill and Martha Muska in Minnesota. Her father had an electrical contracting company and was an engineer and her mother was a housewife. Her grandmother and grandfather (Jessie and Harold Lee) provided care for her as a child -- they were both exceptionally brilliant and nurturing people. Her grandmother was a state speech champion in Michigan, and her grandfather studied to be a doctor, but during the influenza epidemic chose to be an attorney instead.

In order to get out of the house, Meadow started summer school at age 15 at the University of Minnesota and excelled academically. By age 17, Meadow was at college full-time at Morehead State College. She graduated summa cum laude from Ohio University with a BFA in photography and was highly driven to accomplish. She wanted to use photography as a venue to express herself.

At age 20, Meadow came out as a lesbian with a woman from south Chicago whom she met while looking for Amazon Bookstore in a condemned house in south Minneapolis.

After graduating from Ohio University, summa cum laude, Meadow got into a van with six other women for a solstice celebration in the mountains of New Mexico. She hitchhiked and lived on the streets of San Francisco for a number of months. She became involved with the Moonies and escaped safely back to Minnesota. She converted an old mail truck to live in and drove away for the spring.

She returned to the solstice celebration in 1975 -- she brought her camera and photographed what she saw. At community events, Meadow felt committed to making photography a process by which images were created together. This was a way of creating trust and connection.

Meadow drove to WomenSpirit near Eugene, Oregon in July of 1975. For money, Meadow emptied semi trucks at Starflower.

In the upstairs bathroom at Gertrude’s Cafe, Meadow showed women how to develop negatives and produce prints.

Meadow struggled to find a job -- without enough money to pay for a typewriter rental and paper and correction tape, she couldn’t produce a resume.

In Albany, Oregon Meadow got a job as a staff photojournalist at the Albany Democrat-Herald. The police reported that she was poor and sleeping in her truck. She found a place to rent a room. She wasn’t an easy fit for the paper. At this time, local police and the FBI were infiltrating feminist and LGBT groups; Meadow believes that she was fired, in part, because of her identity as a lesbian. Meadow was devastated. She could not find another job when other newspapers learned that she was a lesbian and had been fired.

Her grandmother and grandfather had died, and with poor career prospects at the age of 22, Meadow only had the option to re-train and support herself. She went to Dunwoody Trade School where she was the first woman to graduate both years of training in electrical and construction. She graduated second in her class.

Meadow started Women in the Trades in 1978 with a group of other women in Minnesota.

She was hired by IBM as a customer engineer and was given a branch award for simplifying their problem determination system. She was with IBM for three and a half years and then bought a small trailer and went to Tucson, Arizona for the winter.

She worked as a metal framing carpenter. After finally getting a call, she joined the St. Paul electrician’s union. She sued her union for discrimination and retaliation and won.

She re-started Women in the Trades in 1989 as an effort to improve the status of women in trade unions. This was a nonstop fight until she suffered a brain injury in 1991. She edited a resource guide for entering the trades in Minnesota. This information was often deliberately withheld from women and people of color, and it was an enormous effort to bring these resources together.

When it became possible, Meadow became a master electrician. She competed to become the master on record for three wastewater treatment plants and specialized in instrumentation. She finished her career at the St. Paul School District, where she enjoyed serving educators and students as an electrician. She retired with an injury -- she had torn the flexi carpiornor on her right arm (which her doctors disbelieved and misdiagnosed) in 2006.

Meadow met her wife, Bridget Doak, in 2008 at their Unitarian church. They were married in 2013 when five people on the Supreme Court decided they were human. They spend their retirement travelling, enjoying one another’s company, and attempting to pass the baton to people of conscience who perform acts of courage and kindness."