Leading into the holiday weekend, a sellout gathering of 80 attended a Sawyer Library Foundation Women’s Luncheon at Oak to Ember restaurant to benefit the Sawyer Free 2025 capital campaign to renovate and expand Cape Ann’s oldest public library. The fully philanthropic sawyerfree2025.org campaign further elevated the daytime fundraiser’s profile by formally announcing the latest gifted naming opportunities available for the new library building, which will celebrate its groundbreaking this fall.
“We’re almost 400 days into the public phase of this campaign and the overwhelming response to this event on the eve of the holiday weekend was humbling and offers a great deal of hope,” said Sarah Oaks, the Foundation’s campaign manager. “We’ve got more work to do and more ground to cover in order for this project to become a reality, but it’s becoming clear how passionately people believe that Cape Ann deserves this library.”
Community philanthropist Kate Stavis was part of the luncheon’s five-member host committee, which billed this past week’s event as an unofficial kickoff to the Cape Ann summer season. Liza Featherstone, a Manhattan-based columnist for the Jacobin and The New Republic, delivered the keynote address. She discussed the ideal of an inclusive library in a democratic society, reflecting on the novelist Virginia Woolf’s account of her humiliating experience of being excluded from Oxford University’s library, and learning that women could only enter with permission from a man.
Featherstone, who has close family ties to Cape Ann and has been a lifelong visitor to Sawyer Free Library, recalled that her own mother had a similar experience at Gloucester’s Sawyer Free Library as recently as the early 1970s—when a librarian there told her she needed her husband’s permission to apply for a library card. There was an audible gasp from the luncheon’s audience.
Featherstone, whose mother, Helen, was a writer prior to her death in 2021 while living on Eastern Point, noted that while today’s libraries are open to all, their inclusiveness “has made them a target (of book-bannings and other restrictions).” Today’s ‘gatekeepers,’ she said, know they can’t go back to the days when women weren’t allowed to use the library, so instead “they seek to abolish the library itself … But we won’t let them win.”
During the course of the event, many of those gathered exchanged stories about the role public libraries played in their personal and professional growth, and the crucial contributions of modern public libraries in support of women and girls. Gloucester attorney Meredith Fine addressed the assembly and described the life-altering role her local library played as a new home away from home after her family relocated during her middle school years. She characterized the Sawyer Free 2025 capital campaign as “the most important” fundraising effort currently underway on Cape Ann.
A LASTING LEGACY
In conjunction with the fundraising luncheon, the release of the Sawyer Free 2025 campaign’s new list of naming opportunities confirmed that nearly half of currently available donor-recognition opportunities have been reserved. That leaves 13 which remain available, including the Main Floor Reading Room, the Main Floor Atrium, the Teen Room, the Dale Avenue portico and the Fountain Plaza, among others.
Prior major gifts by donors have secured naming rights for the Children’s Room (the Institution for Savings), the Children’s Program Room (Bank Gloucester), the Teen Creation Space (Sudbay Automotive Group), the Digital Makerspace (Cape Ann Savings Bank) and the Library History Center (Gorton’s), along with several others still to be announced.
The Women’s Luncheon host committee’s members featured Stavis, Frederica Doeringer, the Vice Chair of the Sawyer Free 2025 campaign, Stephanie Cuff, Sally Bradley-Golding and Oaks. Five silent auction items were snapped up, including combinations of restaurant gift certificates, a gift certificate for Beth Williams jewelry items, Gloucester Stage Company tickets, lunch at a private club, and car service to dinner driven by mystery chauffeur in an elegant, luxury vehicle.
The event raised about $10,000 toward the construction of the new library. For more information about the new library or to get involved, visit sawyerfree2025.org.
Good Morning Gloucester 