THE VFA PIONEER HISTORIES PROJECT

Boden Sandstrom, Ph.D.

“I have been an activist since I became aware of the injustices in the world particularly against the oppression of women, girls and lesbians. I started Woman Sound in order to provide clear, inexpensive sound for as many movement rallies and events as possible. My priority was Women’s Music. When it was time to close the doors of Woman Sound, I worked on a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology so that I could teach the next generations what I had learned in these struggles for freedom and the role that music played.”

Interviewed by Mary Jean Collins, VFA Historian, June 2025

MJC:  I’ll officially start the interview with you providing your name and where you were born.

BS:  Boden Sandstrom. I was born in Rochester, New York, and I lived in Fairport, New York, which is outside of Rochester.

MJC:  So, what was your life like, your early life like? What was your family? Any ethnic points you want to make or anything like that?

BS:  Significant for me was that I grew up in the country, outside of a small town, Fairport, New York. It really shaped who I am in so many ways – my love of animals and my love of outdoor activities. I grew up with a horse, and then growing up in that small town was really wonderful, too, because we had, I think, a really good education system, and I was encouraged to play an instrument. That’s how I got into, first trumpet and then French horn, which was my introduction to music. Playing the French horn became one of the passions of my life.

MJC:  That’s a significant thing. And how did you get involved in the women’s movement? How did that start?

BS:  Wow. Okay.

MJC:  Unless there’s more that you want to say about your early life.

BS:  I ended up going to grad school for a Masters in Library Science at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor from ‘67 to ’68m which was the year that Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed. That’s when the campus blew up because we were right next door to Detroit. That’s when I really started paying attention. I just stood on the quad and took every leaflet that I could get a hold of.

Then I moved to California and got my first job as a Librarian at San Jose State. That’s where I met Rogelio Reyes, who I married, who was a political activist with the Brown Berets. He had been in the Socialist Workers Party in Boston before he moved back home to California. We were both involved in anti-war activities. He eventually got fired from San Jose State for his political activities, so we moved back to Boston so he could finish his Ph.D. in Linguistics at Harvard University. That’s how I got to Boston.

So, I was already paying attention and just so eager to learn about everything I knew nothing about what was going on in the world growing up out in the country, in New York State. Because of Rogelio’s connections, I became friends with Nancy Williamson. We lived on Fort Hill in Roxbury. Both of us were really eager to learn more about early feminism.

We joined a consciousness raising group together and it changed both our lives. We had such great discussions about our personal experiences of being oppressed as females in our society. That’s how we learned about Cell 16, which was one of the very early feminist groups in the country, but also in Boston. We  both joined that, and eventually it became Female Liberation, Boston Female Liberation. Boston was my home until 1972 when I moved to Washington, DC.  It was just an amazing time in those periods because there was so much activism.

MJC:  So, Cell 16 was your first feminist home?

BS:  Just briefly, because we became Boston Female Liberation fairly quickly after we were in Cell 16.

MJC:  What were the major activities for that group at that time?

BS:  I was just going through them. There’s this book. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to see it, that one about Boston Female Liberation Women. Nancy Rosenstock wrote about that period. She interviewed all of us, and it’s very comprehensive. It’s amazing what was packed into those couple of years. We had a big rally, 5,000 people, for the August 26th Women’s Liberation Day in Boston in 1970.

We helped organize the New England Women’s Liberation Conference, which was a new coalition. Out of that came many of the activities that we all worked on, including the National Organization for Women and our organization. The coalition expanded to over a dozen. And we organized another big rally, and that was for, I believe that was in April, in 1971. And we had several demands. So, it wasn’t a single issue.

It was abortion rights, childcare reform, and women’s equality, of course. We worked all the time, and it seemed like 24 hours a day, and we set up a Female Liberation office. We had a big focus on education, getting out leaflets and flyers and organizing teach-ins at Boston College, for example, Boston University, and Northeastern University. Cell 16 had the journal No More Fun and Games, which I recommend everyone read. It’s just unbelievable writing, early feminist writing. But we started our own journal called Second Wave, and I worked on that, which was an amazing experience, too.

MJC:  Excellent. So what year was this?

BS:  1971 was the Second Wave. So, this was between 1970 and 1972, when I left.

MJC:  Why did you leave, and what did you do when you left?

BS:  I left to move on to do political work in Washington, DC. And I became active in the Washington, DC Abortion Rights Coalition there. Before I left Boston, I was the Office Manager for the Boston Abortion Rights Coalition, but I also had been the Office Manager for the GBPAC, the Greater Boston Peace Action Coalition. So, I had become quite involved in the anti-war movement.

Around that period, I joined the YSA, the Young Socialists Alliance and Socialist Workers Party. When I first moved to DC, I started to do some work with them, but I didn’t stay very long. I was much more interested in feminism, and I found the women’s movement in Washington DC. That’s where I started to get involved and to experience women’s music for the first time via seeking out other feminists.

MJC:  Tell us about that, because that’s important to your history, obviously.

BS:  Well, the first women’s music concert I saw was Meg Christian singing at the Women’s Center, which is where the abortion group was, that I worked with. I just, as so many did, fell in love with the music. I could not believe I was hearing music written about our experiences as women and lesbians. By then, I had come out in Boston. I left my husband, as many of us did. In fact, I moved to DC with my first woman lover. Anyway, to hear women singing music that was about gay women, lesbians, as well as women’s rights was just mesmerizing.

Then I went to another women’s music concert produced by the budding Olivia Records Collective at George Washington University, which is where I saw my future spouse, Casse Culver, who sang that night. Her songs about lesbian love and spirituality captivated me. I saw a woman mixing on the stage. It was Judy DeLugasch, who later started Olivia Records in LA. I asked her how I could get to do that because I was a librarian at the time at Martin Luther King Library. I had left that out. I was bored with being a librarian, though I loved it. I missed my music because I wasn’t playing the French horn any longer.

Anyway, she said to talk with Casse Culver because she’s trying to teach someone how to do sound because she’s tired of trying to sing and do sound all at the same time. I did track her down, and she did teach me. It was just wonderful. More and more people started to hear the sound that we did. Casse and I decided to start a sound company, Woman Sound, because there was such a need for it.

MJC:  Absolutely wonderful. Woman Sound was founded here in Washington, DC?

BS:  Yes. 1975.

MJC:  1975. So, talk just a little bit about how many concerts year did you do and how did that develop?

BS:  I started out, as I was saying, mixing at Club Madame, which had a lesbian music concert every Thursday. I got to hear women singers from all over the country that way. People came, of course, and heard the sound at the concerts. Because of that, I got hired to do sound at some women’s music concerts that were being organized in a little bigger space, All Soul’s Church as well as  political groups performing there for political fundraisers and nonprofit organizations.

DC, at the time, was a very small town in a lot of ways. The political activist groups really all worked together in a lot of ways and knew each other and were very supportive of the budding women’s music industry and women’s rights movement. We started to get hired as a women’s sound company. Mostly because we did it really well and people liked our sound a lot. Our mantra was to create really listenable sound, very articulate, so you could understand all the words since it was political activism, and that was evenly distributed so everybody could hear, and for a low price, because we wanted every group that needed it to have it.

Casse and I started the sound company together. We just got to do so many different political concerts, which got us into bigger and bigger places – doing street rallies and street festivals, and eventually, it felt like we were the sound company of the DC activist community and then the city itself. In answer to your question eventually it seemed we were doing a couple events a day, every day and then many multiple day, multiple stage huge events.

 

MJC:  Where did you live in DC?

BS:  I first lived on 1744 Corcoran Street, NW in an apartment. But then I moved, and I say the address of the place, 1735 New Hampshire Ave., NW, because it’s become an address on the Rainbow History Project’s map of famous places in DC, because Casse and I started Woman Sound there. I also recorded Lucha’s first album there. It was a wonderful place to live. Casse and I lived there together. Then I moved to 19 Logan Circle, which was amazing because I was able to park my truck behind the building and run my company from there. Then I moved up to Takoma Park, MD when I was at the University of Maryland. I bought my first house with my brother, Gary. It was another great place to be – many musicians and political activists lived there. In fact, Woman Sound did the sound for their street festival every year for years.

MJC:  So, this is ’75. We’re up to ’75, are we?

BS:  ’75 is when we started. Woman Sound, which grew over the years, and the jobs got bigger and bigger through the late 1980s. I finally retired Woman Sound in 1989. I continued to do technical production for the large rallies until 2005.

MJC: You were actually able to put something together and you were able to make a living, basically?

BS:  Yes, barely, but yes, that’s what I was doing. I quit my library job – I was working at Martin Luther King Library – to work on Casse’s album, actually her first album up in Maine, 3 Gypsies. Then, yes, after my unemployment ran out, I was able to live and pay my employees. But it was a monster, of course, because of always needing equipment, needing a truck, needing to pay everybody. I didn’t have any money. I didn’t save any money.

MJC:  Well, the movement was so our lives, right?

BS:  Absolutely. We had so much fun. When we were going full steam in the ’80s and the ’90s, we literally had one or two jobs every day. For the big festivals and the big rallies, we hired other sound companies and stage companies. Actually, I got into technical production, which I did after I sold the sound company. I kept doing technical production.

MJC:  So, I assume that there were no other women running sound companies at that time. You were breaking new ground.

BS:  Yes. But there was a woman on the West Coast, Margot McFedries, who didn’t have a sound company like I did, but she started at the same time doing sound around her area in San Francisco. And we met at the National Women’s Music Festival in 1974. I wasn’t hired to do sound, but I went because I wanted to do sound there. I was really full of myself. Margot had been hired, and she was there. I talked Kristen Lems into letting me do sound as well. Margot and I ended up becoming best friends, and we’re still in touch with each other. And we did sound at all the big women’s music festivals together.

MJC:  That itself is history, isn’t it? The achievements and developing all new businesses and new realities for all of us, right?

BS:  Absolutely. I mean, I had to fight my way into the knowledge because once I realized I wanted to do sound, I went to all the different sound companies, which are all male, around the area. I said I would volunteer to help if I could learn a little. It was a big no for almost every one of them except one who said yes. They were a big sound company. They toured with big rock and roll groups, but these guys were amazing.

Casse and I would go out to their shop and learn and rent equipment from them. I’d be on the pay phone, trying to figure out how to set it up with the guy back at the warehouse. That’s a big way of how I learned. Then I started a workshop for women once it was pretty clear I could do what I was doing on how to do concert sound. I just ran into a woman the other day here at a concert who came up to me and thanked me for that.

MJC:  That’s wonderful. Do you want to name the male group that helped you?

BS:  Yes. The name of the company was National Sound, and the guys were Tony Linthicum, who’s passed, we called him Mr. Wires. He was a technical genius. And the other one was Greg Lukens, who was a genius as well, but a fabricator of sound equipment, even though he was blind. And when we first went to the warehouse, I’ll never forget, he was running a ceiling to wall saw, creating sound equipment, and we had no clue that that man couldn’t see. They really taught us a lot,

MJC:   Excellent. Well, that’s good. We credit them in our history, too. So, we’re up to 75? Where are we?

BS:  We’re getting into the ’80s. We started Woman sound in ‘75 so most of what we have been discussing progresses from there through the 1970s into the late 1980s.

MJC:  We’re getting into the ’80s. Okay. All right. So, keep us going here.

BS:  Because of our success around the DC area and also my relationship with women’s music community, we were able to do so many wonderful jobs. But one group I want to point out is Roadwork, in DC that was started by Amy Horowitz. Its whole mission was to put women on the road and to have big women’s concerts in DC. They started the festival Sisterfire, which went on for years that Woman Sound did the sound for. But because for me personally, starting at the National Women’s Music Festival, and then NWMF hired Woman Sound to come do their festival every year.

So, we would go in our truck after Sisterfire, and go to National, and then we would do… No, excuse me. First, we’d go to the Southern Women’s Music and Comedy Festival that was started by Robin Tyler in Georgia. We did her festival in the south, the Women Sound company in the truck and our workers, and then we’d go to the NWMF. Then my crew would take the truck home, and then I would fly on to Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival. So those were my summers for about 10 years. Then after Michigan, I would fly to San Francisco, stay with Margot, and then I would do sound for the West Coast Women’s Music and Comedy Festival for Labor Day, which was in Santa Barbara or up in Willets, Northern California. These were also produced by Robin Tyler.

It was heaven for me because I got to meet all those wonderful women and to mix these incredible groups, all different kinds of music. It was at the festivals where we all learned how our crafts. There were electrical engineers and carpenters and chefs, Prior we hadn’t been able to work in such an amazing atmosphere where we could really learn and share knowledge.

MJC:  Excellent. So, this is too big a question, but I’m going to ask it. So, when you think of the women’s music activity, how did it contribute to the advancement of the women’s rights movement for all of us?

BS:  Oh, tremendously. One, like I was saying, that so many of us learned our crafts and got to go out in the world and actually get jobs that we wouldn’t have been able to get. Just for the women engineers, for example, Leslie Ann Jones ended up working for Skywalker Studios. Margot worked at the Curan Theatre and finally got into the IATSE union in San Francisco; we couldn’t get into unions before that.

So just on a personal level, and there were so many of us in so many festivals, so it really catapulted women into these jobs that they didn’t have. But besides that, we were also the sound and the music for the rallies. And political rallies are so much more potent when they have music, and music that’s really important, and that says what people are thinking and need to hear politically. Kristen Lems, who started the National Women’s Music Festival, made it her mission to sing at women’s rights rallies. She traveled with the National Organization for Women at all their big political rallies. Also, Boo Price and Margie Adam made it their mission, too, to bring women’s music to the political rallies, and of course, in Washington, DC.

MJC:  So, there was a very conscious effort to integrate the music with the movement.

BS:  Yes, then we got to hear political music at the festivals. It wasn’t all folk music or about us. It was also about what was going on in the world.

MJC:  Do you think it also contributed to the modern success of women in the industry?

BS:  Absolutely. I mean, it has changed, but not necessarily as much as one would like, particularly in sound, because like I said, I kept doing technical production. I’ll never forget when I did the Million Man March in 1995.  I didn’t produce that myself. I was working with a team of the guys that I worked with whom I had developed relationships with. I was absolutely depressed that this huge rally on the mall, and there was only one other woman on the entire technical crew. I’m talking setting up stage, lighting, scaffolding, sound, was me and one woman who was working, and her role was to set up scaffolding and stuff from that company. It’s a very hard industry to break through.

MJC:  And still is, apparently, right?

BS:  Yes. I mean, it’s definitely… recording studios much better and live concert sound engineers much better, but it’s still very difficult.

MJC:  I think you worked for NOW at some point also?

BS:  Yes, I did. That’s a great story, too, because that’s another relationship that developed very early. Because of the first rally that we did, the first big rally was at the Capitol. I’m talking we, Women’s Sound, was at the Capitol, and it was for the ERA, probably one of the first rallies for the ERA. Gloria Steinem spoke. I mentioned that because she wrote a thank you letter to Woman Sound unsolicited because she was so impressed with women doing the sound and doing it well.

But there I met Alice Cohan, who was the technical producer for the National Organization Women. She managed all of their rallies and events. We really respected each other, became fast friends. We found ourselves working as a  team. I did all of NOW’s work after that, all those years, the conferences and the rallies, all the way up to 2004 for the March for Women’s Lives on the Mall first with my company Woman Sound and then as technical producer.

MJC:  What were your issues in addition to music as an expression of the movement? Were there other political issues that were particularly of interest to you, abortion?

BS:  The anti-war movement when it was going on before we ended the Vietnam War was a passion of mine. I was so proud of when I was the manager of Greater Boston Peace Action Coalition when we sent down 60 buses to the big rally in DC on April 24, 1971. Maybe it was 40. I don’t want to exaggerate. But then I felt personally responsible for that, getting them down here. So that was one. Most of my political connections were through Woman Sound when we did sound. For example, for some of the more memorable ones for me are ones that made me really appreciate what was going on in South America with the coups and the takeovers, the right-wing takeovers.

I got to learn more about how the United States was helping that effort because we would be doing sound for the groups that could not return, like Inti-Illimani and Quilapayun. We would do them several times at Lisner Auditorium. And then there were all the speeches that would tell you about what was going on. So, I felt like I had this amazing seat to learn about all these events.

I was there when the Chinese students who were attacked in Tiananmen Square fled to the US and had a rally. I was there to hear their story. I mentioned that because when I started teaching at the University of Maryland, I created courses in which I could teach about music and politics. I was able to tell their stories to my students.

MJC:  So, you were involved as an activist along the way while you were doing the music, and subsequently to giving up your business. What have you’ve been involved in in terms of the women’s rights activities?

BS:  I did get a Ph.D. in Ethnomusicology, specifically so that I could teach. I did teach at the University of Maryland, and I had a music and gender course as one of the classes. And in that period, while I was working on my dissertation, I made a documentary with my best friend who I met through the women’s music and political movements in DC, Dee Mosbacher. She was the director of Radical Harmonies.

We documented the story that I’ve been telling you about women’s music. We tried to do that to the best of our ability. The reason we did that was because as I was doing research for my dissertation, which was on the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, I discovered there was very little research. I couldn’t believe that after all these decades had passed with all this amazing Women’s Music Network that was created there was so little documentation. It was kind of underground, but it was just amazing. So, Dee and I decided to tell the story. So that was one thing. There’s been this revival of this legacy film. We just finished, frankly, a tour for this last year. And there’s so much interest from the younger people learning about this period.

But besides that, I’m here in Milton, Delaware, now. I’m active, particularly around abortion rights since Roe v. Wade got canceled. I started with other women a Reproductive Justice Task Force within the Unitarian Universalist Church, which I’m a member of. I joined that since they’re such political activists. It’s great. Through Unitarian Universalist here in Sussex County, we’re active in everything you can think of. But that has been one of the things that I’ve done.

MJC:  What are we missing? What have I not asked you about that you’d like to talk about today?

BS:  Thinking about what I’m doing now, it just occurred to me. Since I retired from Maryland, which was in 2013, I have been working on Women’s Music archives. It’s another passion of mine because I think we’ve been kind of glossed over, but I was a librarian for quite a few years in many different libraries. I really respect and like being a librarian and archiving.

It took me two years to document the work of Woman Sound.  I sent 40 boxes to the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College. It’s an Archives on Women’s Rights history. When my spouse Casse passed, I archived all of her material and digitized many of her recordings that I could find. I sent 50 boxes of her archives to Smith. So that’s the other thing I’ve been working on whenever I can. There’s still so much to be done.

MJC:  That’s excellent. I mean, preserving the history. I was able to find your movie online and all of that. I was obviously around at the time that all this activity was going on, but I was curious and interested to find out how much I could actually access because of your working to preserve of this history. Thank you for paying attention to that. I’m a history major myself, so I’m very interested, which is why I do what I’m doing. So anyway, thank you. Any final thoughts?

BS:  One story I love to tell is when we were in Boston with Female Liberation, one of the things that we did was invite Anais Nin to come speak. The reason we wanted to was that we found out the four or five of us had all read all of her journals. It was something that bonded us all together, separately from all over the country, because we just loved the way that she lived and that her writing medium was the journal. She was a model for us.

We wrote her, and amazingly, she accepted. She wanted to know who these women were who called themselves feminists, who just adored all of her diaries. She came and we organized it – Harvard, at Radcliffe, in their big auditorium, and it just sold out. She donated the proceeds to our magazine, Second Wave and then she did an interview for us. And so that was something, that was so amazing for me to be a part of.

MJC:  Wow, that was beautiful.

BS:  It was.

MJC:  And good for you for just reaching out and asking her.

BS:  I really recommend everyone read this book. It’s a book based on interviews about our work in Boston Female Liberation. It’s called Inside the Second Wave of Feminism: Boston Female Liberation, 1968 – 1972 An Account by Participants by Nancy Rosenstock because so many of those stories are in there, It was just such an intense period, and things like that were going on around the country. We weren’t alone. When we talked together, it’s like we just couldn’t believe what all we did and how much fun we had.

MJC:  Remarkable. Any thoughts about that you want to say for the future of what you’re hoping the next generation will achieve?

BS:  In my classes, I really tried to show the students that they really can change the world, and they can really affect what they want to change. And I tried to show them how it’s possible, inspire them, and get them more interested in music that way as well. Then since then, like I was saying, traveling with Radical Harmonies, we tried to do the same thing, just showing them all that we did, how much fun we had and how we did it. And they’ve really been inspired, it seems. I mean, they come up afterwards and talk to us and are just very excited about it and say that they’re going to try to keep going. Because it’s so hard now. It’s so discouraging. They get discouraged and don’t think that they can change anything.

MJC:  It’s wonderful for you to be around as an inspiration to them. That’s excellent. Good work.

BS:  We’re going to keep trying.

MJC:  Thank you so much, Boden. It’s wonderful to talk to you. And thank you for all you’ve done.

BS:  Thank you for the opportunity. I appreciate your work, too. Thank you so much.