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They were about 20 years apart in age, from very different backgrounds and circumstances: a young cigar-maker, a London-born son of poor Orthodox Jews who had immigrated to Boston in the 1870s; a Maine native from a prosperous Unitarian family, a widow whose daughter converted to Catholicism and became a nun. Yet David Goldstein and Martha Moore Avery made a fruitful connection with each other, first through the Socialist Labor Party movement of the 1890s, and then as crusaders for Catholicism.
Goldstein and Avery’s unlikely pairing, and careers, are the subject of an exhibit now on display through the end of February in the Burns Library Ford Tower. “A Common Cause: The Lives and Work of David Goldstein and Martha Moore Avery” consists of writings, artifacts, scrapbooks and photographs that chronicle more than half a century of their activism, which took them across the country as they spoke out on women’s suffrage, birth control, labor and union issues, the role of religion in modern society and many other topics, according to Burns graduate student assistant Richard Burley, writing in the Burns blog about the library’s collection of the Goldstein-Avery papers.
The pair’s epiphany came at the turn of the 20th century when prominent socialist George Herron left his wife and family for a younger woman, spurring Goldstein and Avery to advocate for religious moral instruction in the SLP, drawing the ire of the party leadership in the process. By 1905, both had left the SLP and converted to Catholicism, then subsequently founded the Catholic Truth Guild as a vehicle to address social and political controversies in a period of rapid cultural change.
There’s also an important Boston College connection to Avery: She went on to help establish the Philomatheia Club at Boston College, a women’s auxiliary devoted to Catholic education.
For information about Burns Library, see www.bc.edu/libraries/collections/burns.html. Read Richard Burley’s blog post about the David Goldstein and Martha Moore Avery Collection at http://bit.ly/1sGTQ9z.