Boston as a Women’s City

Sarah Deutsch

This past October, Boston dedicated its first public monument to important women in its past—women more significant to its postcolonial history than Mary Dyer, the Quaker woman who was hanged as a heretic in 1660, and whose monument sits before the State House.

The new Boston Women’s Memorial is located on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall near Gloucester Street. It is a stunning interactive set of three separate statues of poet Phillis Wheatley, private politician Abigail Adams and Lucy Stone, the influential equal rights advocate who for many decades operated the American Women’s Suffrage Association office in Park Street, one of the first places claimed by women in Boston’s historic public space.

When Kate Gannett Wells, a white, wealthy Boston antisuffragist and purity reformer in 1880, wanted to signify the greatest danger shifting gender roles held, she pointed straight at the changes in women’s geography. “Women do not care for their homes as they did,” she wrote in the Atlantic Monthly. “Professional women have found that, however dear the home is, they can exist without it. The simple fact is that women have found that they can have occupation, respectability, and even dignity disconnected to the home.”

Boston women proudly led in such developments. Even when they did not abandon the home, they reimagined it. It is no accident that the term “Boston marriage” refers to women who set up house together.

By the 1890s, elite Boston women advised seduced innocents to “Shoot Your Betrayer.” Newspapers covered women’s bicycling, and women strikers took to the streets. That decade witnessed a revision of urban etiquette and gender roles debated daily in U.S. newspapers. Not only did unescorted “working girls” became familiar figures in public, but so did “New Women,” the college graduates who made “social” work—visiting, organizing, caring for neighbors—into a paid profession, sought appointive office, or joined the professions.

Alongside traditional tales of urban seduction and abandonment—now almost entirely about rural mill girls and immigrants—the papers printed stories of spunky urban sophisticates who drove off male predators with long words. So convinced was the Boston Globe of the direction of the new trend, that it printed a futuristic cartoon in 1895 depicting a twentieth-century summer resort called “The Eveless Eden,” in which solitary men and the occasional infant moped about because their professional wives were too busy in the city to join them, while an all-female orchestra played in the background.

By the 1890s, activist women had also taken over substantial parts of downtown’s Boylston Street, adjacent to our convention hotel in the Back Bay. The Women’s Educational and Industrial Union (WEIU) still has its headquarters there. The WEIU aimed to make women more self-dependent spiritually, economically, socially, and politically. Founded by professional women in 1877, it was joined by thousands of women who used it to organize women more effectively. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it literally redrew the map of Boston—publishing its own map with its headquarters, public kitchens, lunchrooms, and meeting rooms spread across the heart of the city.

In the early twentieth century, its president, Mary Morton Kehew, was a force at the State House and City Hall, and made the WEIU an effective lobby. One of her interns recalled in 1908, “During her long illness last fall and winter she of course had to be out of public affairs entirely. About the time of her recovery in the spring some man is reported to have remarked to a legislator, ‘I see Mrs. Mary Morton Kehew is recovering.’ ‘Why yes,’ said the other. ‘I believe she is. How did you know?’ ‘Because I noticed them cleaning up the State House,’ was the quite sufficient reply.”

Both black and white women belonged to the WEIU, but it was harder for black women to create respectable and safe public places for themselves. WEIU member Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin organized against the national public degradation of black women, but even she had a sense of the 1890s as a “new era”—indeed, a “Woman’s Era”—as she titled her national newspaper run out of her home in the West End, not far from Lucy Stone’s headquarters. In 1904, a black branch of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union in Boston, the Harriet Tubman Crusaders, created Harriet Tubman House in a rented South End brownstone as a residence for black women who, regardless of income, were excluded from the city’s college dormitories and respectable rooming houses. Five years later, Mrs. Julia O. Henson, active in the branch and in the black Northeastern Federation of Women’s Clubs, donated her own townhouse down the street as permanent headquarters. That remained the only public space in Boston created and run by black women for black women until 1920, when two black women’s service organizations, the League of Women for Community Service and the Women’s Service Club, both purchased club buildings a few blocks apart on Massachusetts Avenue. Like Harriet Tubman House, these club buildings were in the less desirable South End, not the Back Bay or Beacon Hill.

By 1910, the meaning of downtown space had further changed. While men still dominated, in the sense that they had more power (as employers and politicians), the tens of thousands of women store and office workers meant that downtown was no longer uncontested male space. Factory women had eaten lunches, brought from home, at their machines. Downtown workers—including the thousands working in department stores—now used their lunchtime to enjoy the commercial streets.

These trends culminated in the spring of 1913, when thousands of Boston’s female garment workers and telephone operators voted to strike. Both groups relied heavily on the Boston Women’s Trade Union League and the WEIU and in both the women workers would make use of the theater of the streets.

While the garment strikers occupied sites in the neighborhoods surrounding downtown, the telephone workers performed at the center, virtually at our convention site. The strikebreakers, in fact, were put up at the then brand new Copley Hotel. While there, they were carefully controlled by company matrons lest immorality taint corporate efforts at public relations. The union women, on the other hand, had a field day. They staged mock wrestling matches, infiltrated the hotels, and finally squared off at Young’s Hotel in the heart of the business district on April 8, 1913, against Chamber of Commerce president James J. Storrow, a Brahmin reformer. On the operators’ side was union president Annie Molloy, who would later work for the consummate Irish American machine politician, James Michael Curley. It was, in short, the male Boston Brahmins against the upstart Irish American women workers. The telephone workers scored a dramatic victory. It was an extraordinarily successful staking of a direct claim by these working-class women to Boston’s public sphere.

Not all working women would fare so well, but the area surrounding our convention site is rich with the evidence of women’s continual remaking of the city, reappropriation of urban space—in buildings and in the uses of the streets, and refusal to be denied a place in the public realm. The modern city takes its shape, in part, precisely from these contests.

You can see these nearby sites on your own by taking the self-guided Women’s Heritage Trail (an illustrated guide book is available at the tourist kiosk in the Prudential Center and at the Boston Visitors Information Center on Tremont Street near Park Street Station). Or better still, you may join the guided tour of women’s history sites scheduled on Saturday morning. The trail offers one of the best visual impressions to be had anywhere in the nation of the places in which women made history, created new public spaces for themselves and in the process changed the moral geography of a major city.

Sarah Deutsch is professor of history at the University of Arizona and cochair of this year’s Program Committee. She is author of Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870-1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).