by ANDREA WOLANIN
with photography by ANDREA WOLANIN and MEREDITH NIERMAN
In 1920, the United States saw the passage of the 19th Amendment, which ruled that women had the right to vote. One hundred years later, PBS and WGBH are celebrating that landmark amendment, and the feminist movement that followed, through an expansive slate of programming — including American Experience’s The Vote. In order to find and explore our own local history in the campaign for women’s suffrage, we decided to take a trek around the greater Boston area, visiting historic sites along the way.
Boston
Faneuil Hall Marketplace may be a tourist destination these days, but on the night of May 22, 1901, 400 men and women gathered at the site for the 35th annual banquet of the New England and Massachusetts Women’s Suffrage Association. A key speaker of the night was Maria Louise Baldwin, a suffragette and educator. Of African American and Haitian descent, Baldwin gave “one of the best speeches of the evening,” per the Boston Globe, talking to the audience on the importance of teachers in social reform. The subject was dear to Baldwin’s heart: she had begun her career as the only Black educator in the Cambridge Public Schools. Ranking among the top teachers in the city, Baldwin swiftly climbed the ranks, becoming Principal and eventually Master of the all-white Aggasiz School (now known as the Maria L. Baldwin School). During this time, Baldwin also co-founded Women’s Era with Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin. The first Black women’s club in Boston, the group published a monthly eponymous newspaper, which took on issues related to suffrage and race.
Photo credit: Meredith Nierman
Elizabeth Buffum Chase, an abolitionist and suffragette, kicked off 1831 in a big way: by attending the first meeting of the New England Anti-slavery Society at Boston’s Museum of African American History, then the Belknap Street Church. She and her family participated in the society and opened their home as a Station in the Underground Railroad. They also spoke out ardently against Abraham Lincoln’s delay in abolishing slavery. But abolitionism wasn’t Buffum Chase’s only ambition; she also served as the president of multiple suffragette societies, including the Rhode Island Woman Suffrage Association, the American Women’s Suffragist Association, and the Rhode Island Equal Suffrage Association. Speaking at the Rhode Island State House for suffrage, she said: “We demand suffrage for women on the ground of the essential principles of our national system, that there can be no government without the consent of the governed.” Though she wouldn’t live to see the passage of the 19th amendment, she worked tirelessly for the cause.
Photo credit: Meredith Nierman
Heading north up Charles Street, we’ll soon find ourselves at what is now known as the fun and funky Liberty Hotel. But the building at 215 Charles Street in Boston was once known as the Charles Street Jail, where the city housed a number of high-profile male inmates over the years — including Sacco and Vanzetti, James Michael Curley and Malcolm X — as well as a number of suffragettes. Women were kept in the jail for various protest actions throughout the city, but a particular incident in 1919 saw them arriving en masse. That year, Woodrow Wilson landed in Boston on his way back to the U.S. from Europe. While President Wilson may be considered reformist in his time, his stance on suffrage was anything but a new freedom. The president spoke in support of women’s right to vote, but he was slow to act on pushing that right into law — and that did not go unnoticed. Women from all over the state congregated to protest his arrival in Massachusetts, and many were taken off to the Charles Street Jail, where they were imprisoned for eight days after refusing to pay the five dollar fines served to them. These women included Katharine Morey of Brookline, Josephine Collins of Framingham, Camilla Whitcomb of Worcester, Martha Foley of Dorchester, and Rosa M. Heinzen Roewer of Belmont.
Photo credit: Meredith Nierman
Cambridge
Crossing the river into Cambridge, we find ourselves at MIT, well-known as the state’s technology and research hub along the Charles. But less well-known is the institute’s involvement with the suffragettes of Boston, educating a notable number of them. Two graduates of the institute were Mary Hutcheson Page, a suffragette who lived most of her life in Brookline, and Florence Luscomb of Boston. Hutcheson Page was one of five women to graduate the university in 1888, studying biology and chemistry. As a suffragette, Hutcheson Page seems to have been tireless — she founded the Brookline Equal Suffrage Association and the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government, along with serving as chair or president on three more suffrage associations and working on campaigns in Arizona, Colorado, Oklahoma, and Europe. Hutcheson was not a public speaker, instead focusing her efforts on fundraising and writing, best known for her work The Subjugation of the Sex. Luscomb, on the other hand, was an avid speaker, once giving over 200 speeches in just three and a half months. Raised by suffragette Hannah Skinner Luscomb, Florence Luscomb was involved with the movement from childhood, attending suffrage events, selling pro-suffrage newspapers at the Park Street "T" Station, and becoming the Executive Secretary of the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government. Her ties to MIT? In 1909, she was one of the first ten women to receive an architecture degree from the school.
Photo credit: Meredith Nierman
Watch an interview with Florence Luscomb on WNED’s WOMAN here.
Tucked into the neighborhood behind MIT, we find another location important to the suffragette movement. Today, the Margaret Fuller Neighborhood House is a Cambridge organization that seeks to improve economic and social inequities through programs for children and adults. But this home once served as the birthplace for women’s rights advocate and transcendentalist Margaret Fuller. Fuller herself may not have been a suffragette in the true sense of the word, but her work in the service of women’s rights inspired many of those who would lead the charge for suffrage. Frustrated by the lack of formal education for women in Boston and Cambridge, Fuller started a series of “conversations” in 1839, classes designed to compensate for women’s lack of access to formal education. A year later, she became editor of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s publication The Dial. Her feminist work, Woman in the Nineteenth Century was published within the pages of that journal in 1843. 1844 saw her become the first full-time book reviewer in the U.S. with her appointment to The New York Tribune; and she made history again in 1846 when she became the first female foreign correspondent, again for the Tribune. We can’t help but think she would be proud of the way her spirit lives on in the organization named for her.
Photo credit: Meredith Nierman
Continuing west across the city, it’s not long before we find ourselves at Mount Auburn Cemetery, a national historic landmark, as well as the resting place of many well-known Bostonians. Julia Ward Howe (Lot 4987) and Margaret Fuller (Lot 2250) each have memorials here, but today we’re here to visit the gravesite of George Lewis and Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin. St. Pierre Ruffin was the co-founder of Woman’s Era (with Maria Louise Baldwin, whom we discussed earlier), the club and publication that promoted civil rights in Boston. But like many of the women on this list, Ruffin was also a member of many of the city’s suffrage associations, seeing the abolition of slavery and suffrage as commensurate fights for equality: "[W]e need to talk over not only those things which are of vital importance to us as women, but also the things that are of especial interest to us as colored women," she famously said. George Lewis Ruffin’s accomplishments were equal to those of his iconic wife’s. The first African American to graduate from Harvard, Ruffin was also the first Black man to serve on the Boston City Council, and the first Black judge in the U.S.
Photo credit: Meredith Nierman
Salem
Driving north from Boston, we head to the edge of Salem, one of our cities with a more infamous relationship with its female population. While the town has long been known for the vicious witch hunt that took it over in the 1600s, it has been oft overlooked that a mere 134 years later, Sarah Parker Redmond, a free woman, abolitionist and suffragette was born in the town. Her parents, John and Nancy Redmond, were businesspeople and abolitionists in their own right, hosting leaders of the movements and fugitive slaves in their home. Their drive and entrepreneurial spirit was shared with their children: Charles Lenox, Sarah’s older brother, was the first Black lecturer of the American Anti-Slavery Society; and three of her sisters, Cecilia, Maritchie Juan, and Caroline, owned the largest wig factory in Massachusetts. Sarah herself gave her first anti-slavery speech at the age of 16, and is believed to be the only Black woman to have signed the 1866 petition for women’s voting rights. Redmond travelled between Europe, the UK and the US to deliver speeches on slavery and suffrage. She eventually settled in Italy, where she became a physician. But here in Massachusetts, just north of her hometown along the Danvers River, sits a quiet little park dedicated to Sarah and her brother Charles, and all the work they did for our country.
Photo credit: Meredith Nierman
Within the heart of downtown Salem sits another building with a significant history among suffragettes. One Broad Street might now serve as condominiums, but it was once the original location for Salem Normal School, now known as Salem State University. The fourth school in Massachusetts to open with the intent of training women to become teachers, it was also the Alma Mater of Charlotte Forten Grimké. Born into a significant abolitionist family, the Forten-Purvis’ of Philadelphia, Grimké joined the household of Charles Lenox Redmond in 1854 as a boarder, attending the Higginson Grammar School before joining the Salem Normal School to study literature. During her time in Salem, Grimké became even more involved in abolitionism and women’s rights, penning anti-slavery poems and calling for Black women to join the abolitionists. After her graduation from the Salem Normal School, Grimké moved about the East Coast: to South Carolina to teach newly freed slaves; to Philadelphia where she met and married husband Francis James Grimké; and to Washington D.C., where she helped found the National Association of Colored Women.
Photo credit: Meredith Nierman
Western Massachusetts
Heading just west of Central Massachusetts, we’ll land first at the Lucy Stone Homesite in West Brookfield. The first woman on record to have kept her birth name after marriage, and the first woman from Massachusetts to gain a college degree, Lucy Stone was considered the heart and soul of the suffrage movement. Stone was persuasive and self-possessed, with a voice that many compared to a silver bell. It was through her work on anti-slavery that she began to meet activists who were also turning their eyes toward women’s rights. In the fall of 1848, she was invited to lecture for the women of the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention, and it was there that she first met and began her work with famed suffragettes Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. In 1849, she joined forces with Lucretia Mott to hold Pennsylvania’s first suffragette meeting, while also serving as a lecturer for the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. Stone also spread the word of suffrage to Kansas and New Jersey, as well as serving on the executive committee of the American Equal Rights Association.
Photo credit: Andrea Wolanin
Farther west, in the village of Florence, sits a small park featuring a larger-than-life statue. Sojourner Truth was born enslaved in 1797, separated from her family at the age of nine, and sold multiple times before ending up on a farm in New York. Abused and kept from learning to read or write, Truth “took her freedom” in 1826, when she walked off the farm with her infant, Sophia, finding refuge with abolitionists. Three years later, Truth moved with two of her children to New York City, where she established her reputation as a speaker. In 1843, at the age of 46, she became a traveling preacher, moving up along the Connecticut River Valley until she settled in Florence. It was here where she truly became involved in the abolitionist movement, working alongside men like Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, who later published Truth’s autobiography. During this time, Truth also became increasingly involved with women’s rights, delivering her groundbreaking “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech in Akron, Ohio in 1851. The Sojourner Truth Memorial in Florence memorializes Truth’s time in Northampton, the town where she first became part of the anti-slavery and suffrage movements.
Photo credit: Andrea Wolanin