Heidi Gengenbach – Page 13 – Public History at UMass Boston

March 27, 2017Heidi Gengenbach No Comments

Women of the Past & Present Shaping the Future

by Monica Haberny

In January 2017, half a million people showed up for the Women’s March in Washington DC and over four million people participated in their own marches throughout the country to raise awareness for women’s rights. During my internship at the Boston City Archives in Fall 2016, I came across many female activists who worked tirelessly for change in the past two centuries. The following three women represent just a fraction of the inspiring women whose successes and failures can motivate activists fighting for similar issues today.

Florida Ruffin. ca.1890. Wikimedia Commons.

Suffragist, journalist, and anti-lynching activist, Florida Ruffin Ridley (1861-1943) became one of the first black teachers in Boston. She came from an educated background. Her father, George Lewis Ruffin, was the first African American to graduate from Harvard Law School and the first African American to be a judge in the country. Her mother, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, a suffragist and civil rights activist, published the first newspaper for African American women. Ruffin, following in her mother’s footsteps, also worked as a pioneering journalist and activist.

Florida Ruffin's Teacher Qualification Record, 1888, Teacher Qualification registers and index. Courtesy of Boston City Archives. — Florida Ruffin’s Teacher Qualification Record, 1888, Teacher Qualification registers and index. Courtesy of Boston City Archives.

Journalists provide an invaluable service, especially in a digital age where news comes from various sources and is often contested or falsely reported. Florida edited the Women’s Era, her mother’s newspaper. She wrote articles about black history and issues affecting blacks for multiple publications, including the Journal of Negro History and The Boston Globe. She, Pauline Hopkins and Dorothy West all belonged to the Saturday Evening Quill Club, an African American literary group founded in 1925. In addition to her writing career, Florida was involved in co-founding several nonprofits for African American women and was a lifelong political activist.

Application from the Housekeeper's League, January 1913. Courtesy of Boston City Archives. — Application from the Housekeeper’s League, January 1913. Courtesy of Boston City Archives.

Ridley raised awareness about race relations; her contemporary Ida Hebbard pioneered the issue of food safety in Boston. Recent documentaries like Food, Inc. and Cowspiracy have challenged people to think about where their food comes from. Hebbard became a food safety activist over a hundred years ago.

She served as president of the Housekeepers League, an all-female group. During the 1910s, the League lobbied for consumer rights, protesting the increasing prices of household foods. Hebbard led the group in protesting the price of eggs in 1912, as well as the price of potatoes and coal in 1917. Potato prices for consumers dropped from 70 cents to 35 cents a peck because of their efforts. More importantly, she advocated for the Bob Veal Bill. This bill banned the sale of calves weighing less than sixty pounds, preventing them from being slaughtered and shipped to Boston the day they were born.

In November 2016, activists like Ida Hebbard succeeded in passing Question 3 on the ballot, which banned the confinement of farm animals in small cages in Massachusetts. Like the Bob Veal Bill, Question 3 will go on to improve the health of people because it improves the lives farm animals.

Grace Lonergan with fiancee Lee Lorch in 1943.

Grace Lonergan Lorch, the third Boston woman featured today, championed civil rights and women’s rights in education. Before 1953, Boston Public School teachers were forced to resign before they married. Thus, in the 1880s, Florida Ruffin left her job to marry. Grace Lonergan Lorch changed that for future female teachers. In 1943, she brought a case against the Boston School Committee (BSC) in an attempt to keep her job after she married Lee Lorch. Although the BSC upheld the rule and Lorch was forced to resign when she married, the publicity surrounding the case forced the BSC to end the ban of married women public school teachers ten years later.

During his service in the military during World War II, Lee became aware of racism. During troop transports, he noted, often the black company had to clean the ship. Discrimination made Lee Lorch, a professor and mathematician, very uncomfortable and his wife shared his views. When the couple moved to New York City following the war, they worked to desegregate their home community, Stuyvesant Town apartments, which had banned black families from living in their complex.

The Lorch family being interviewed in 1949 by New York Times reporters about their work in Stuyvestant Town. New York Times, 2010.

Lee led the Town and Village Committee to End Discrimination in Stuyvesant Town to try to end the ban. In 1949, the Lorch family attempted to find a loophole in the ban and invited a black family to live in their apartment as their “guests.” When their plan backfired, the couple and their daughter, Alice, moved to Pennsylvania, then Tennessee before they moved to Little Rock, Arkansas in 1955.

The couple became very active in civil rights in their new community. Their neighbors were Daisy and L.C. Bates, founders of the Arkansas State Press and active members of the NAACP during the Little Rock Crisis. Alice Lorch became friends with many of the children in their new neighborhood. So, in September 1955, Grace wrote to the local superintendent requesting that her daughter be able to attend the local school. She hoped that Alice would not only be able to attend school with friends, but also promote integration as their neighborhood was predominately black. Although the school board denied her request, Grace continued to be involved in Little Rock’s branch of the NAACP.

The now famous image of Grace Lorch (left) comforting Elizabeth Eckford (right).

On September 4, 1957, Elizabeth Eckford, one of the Little Rock Nine, found herself alone and surrounded by a mob when she attempted to enter Little Rock Central High School.

All nine teenagers had planned to arrive at the school together with their parents, but the meeting place changed. The Eckford’s lack of a phone left Elizabeth uninformed and alone. Grace Lorch, after dropping Alice off at school, passed the high school and saw Elizabeth’s predicament. The civil rights activist fought her way through the angry crowd and helped escort the girl home. The rescue of Elizabeth placed a target on the Lorch family. Alice Lorch found herself bullied at school. Someone placed dynamite in their garage, and they were harassed by both press and the people around them. In 1959, Lee accepted a job from the University of Alberta and moved his family to Canada.

By fighting for causes that were important to them, Florida Ruffin, Ida Hebbard, and Grace Lorch shaped the future and women now continue to do so. Originally from Little Rock, journalist, activist, and speaker Liz Walker became the first African American woman to co-anchor a newscast in Boston in the 1980s. Lauren Singer challenges us to think about where our household goods come from and the environmental impact they may have. In India, Rashmi Misra fights for education in rural communities and giving young women entrepreneurial skills, and Maya Wiley works for civil rights in New York. Like Ruffin, Hebbard, and Lorch before them, these women will go on to influence the next generation of women.

Monica Haberny is currently working on her Master’s degree, specializing in Archives. She received her Bachelor’s in History from Montclair State University (2013). Currently, she is working on a digital exhibit on Kathleen Sullivan, the only woman on the Boston School Committee during the start of Boston’s public school integration, for Stark & Subtle Divisions. She has a strong interest in the history of nutrition, activism, and animal rights, and hopes to use these interests in her final capstone project.

March 24, 2017Heidi Gengenbach No Comments

The Peaceful Gardener: Rose Standish Nichols & the Peace Movement Part I

By Corinne Zaczek Bermon

Just outside of Rome in the 1920s, fifty year old Rose Standish Nichols walked through the gardens of Villa Torlonia perhaps thinking about her two favorite topics: landscape architecture and world peace.

Once belonging to Cardinal Albani, the gardens were rented by future dictator Benito Mussolini, who had not launched his campaign to make Italy a world empire yet.

Nichols strolled through the gardens as she researched her third book, Italian Pleasure Gardens.((Rose Standish Nichols. 1931. Italian Pleasure Gardens. New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 191. )) Although she did not document if she had a conversation with “Il Duce,” Nichols had a history of visiting dignitaries and enchanting them with conversations about their gardens before moving on to politics. An extraordinary woman, Nichols used her place in society, her profession, and her countless connections, to work for the women’s peace movement that began before World War I. Her story and her role in the international pacifist movement remains mostly untold.

Rose Standish Nichols was born on January 11, 1872, into an Boston Brahmin family. She lived at 55 Mount Vernon Street in the

Portrait of Rose Standish Nichols by Taylor Greer, 1912. Wikimedia Commons.

prestigious Beacon Hill neighborhood Boston, for most of her life. The eldest of three daughters born to Arthur Howard Nichols, a prominent holistic doctor, and Elizabeth Homer Nichols, a social activist who worked with the Boston Children’s Aid Association and the Boston Female Asylum, Rose enjoyed an extensive education. She showed a lifelong appreciation for beauty and peace, influenced by her uncle, noted American sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and her activist parents who taught her the importance of peace and social reform. Her father taught her how to question and challenge what she thought was amiss in the world.(( George Taloumis, “Rose Standish Nichols, Sixty Years Ago She Organized the Beacon Hill Reading Club (1896)” Boston Sunday Globe, September 16, 1956. The Nichols House Museum and Archive.))

Rose Nichols spent most of her summers traveling, and in Europe she met many new people she counted as friends. Among her acquaintances she included royalty, such as Maria Feodorovna, Grand Duchess of Russia, the Marquess da Frontieira Maria Mascarenhas Barreto, of Portugal and numerous queens, countesses, lords, cardinals and archbishops.((Margery P. Trumball, “Selections from the Published Writings of Rose Standish Nichols.” (PhD diss., Dartmouth College, 1989).))

Surrounding herself with prominent people gave Nichols a global social circle consistent with her upper class status, and through staying within this network of family friends, she could travel safely to Europe for gardening, social visits, and peace work. This was a time period in which a woman who traveled alone would have her respectability questioned and Nichols rarely traveled alone.((Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space and Power in Boston, 1870-1940. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).)) Despite being raised in an era when Victorian notions governed women’s place in society, Nichols attended a pilot program at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in landscape architecture in the late

Picture taken of the MIT landscape architecture cohort in 1900. — Students in the MIT landscape architecture cohort. Unfortunately, Rose is not pictured here.

1890s and was given the status of a “special student.” Women students were attracted to the MIT program because it provided excellent opportunities, which they were denied elsewhere. This pilot program coincided with the 19th century idea that gardening was a hobby suitable for women in their socially constricted environments. Still, women in Nichols’ cohort were not given the status of full-time students because MIT had not fully developed their landscape architecture program and would not do so for a few more years.((Eran Ben-Joseph et al. “Against All Odds: MIT’s Pioneering Women of Landscape Architecture” http://web.mit.edu/ebj/www/LAatMIT/LandArch@MITlow.pdf.))

Rose Nichols had two important influences that led her to work in social reform: her family and her landscape design tutors. The Nichols family was active in social reform and political movements, such as women’s suffrage, relief efforts and anti-imperialism. Rose Nichols’ landscape design tutors also shaped her thinking that the local would impact the global. From them, she learned a specific method of using landscape design as an introduction to talking to world dignitaries, which also included viewing design itself as a method of peace. However, Nichols was unable to accept egalitarian ideals embraced by many of her fellow reformers. Being raised in the mid-Victorian Era meant that Nichols believed social classes should live in separate parts of town and differed significantly in their attitudes toward politics and religion. Consequently, the upper class was most likely to associate with others who shared their social status, opinions and values. As part of the elite class, Nichols had her own code of conduct and value system, which one belonging to this particular social class had to conform to.

While in general women had few options outside of marriage and childrearing, Rose Nichols chose to do neither. She, instead, supported herself as a garden designer, traveling across the United States and Europe as she learned and perfected her craft. She believed in the universalizing power of gardening and was introduced to gardening by her maternal grandfather, Thomas Johnston Homer, who allowed her to cultivate a small corner of his

garden in Roxbury Highlands, a streetcar suburb of the city of Boston at that time. Nichols was not yet ten years old but according to her youngest sister Margaret’s memoirs, Rose Nichols industriously planned and worked in her small plot with their grandfather.((Margaret Homer Shurcliff, Lively Days: Some Memoirs (Boston: Private Publication by Shurcliff Family, 1965).)) Her education further prepared her for entry into the rather exclusively male field of landscape architecture. Nichols attended private schools in Boston, among them the progressive Mrs. Shaw’s School, which did not differentiate its courses on the basis of gender. Girls learned woodworking alongside needlepoint and were encouraged to read widely, especially in history and the classics, and to acquire a working knowledge of several languages. Nichols entered adulthood with the ability to speak Greek, Latin, French, German and Italian, which helped her move into international circles as an organizer for Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and to undertake research for her gardening books.((Taloumis, 22.))

In the next post of this series on Rose Standish Nichols, we will explore her groundbreaking profession as a noted landscape architect.

To learn more about Rose Nichols, please visit the Nichols House Museum for a tour.

Corinne Zaczek Bermon is earning her M.A. in History with a specialization in Archives. She earned a B.A. in American Studies in 2009 and a M.A. in American Studies in 2015 from University of Massachusetts Boston. This series of articles on Rose Standish Nichols represents her award winning research in American Studies. Currently, her work explores the social history of the Otis Everett family living in the South End of Boston in the 1850s. She is designing a digital exhibit that explores Victorian life for the merchant class conducting business in Boston and abroad through the Everett letters.

March 22, 2017Heidi Gengenbach No Comments

Drowning in Culture: Women & Swimming in the 20th Century US

In the contemporary US, both boys and girls learn to swim as part of physical education. In the early 1900s, however, many men learned to swim but few women received instruction. Often, women actively shunned the water. When a fire broke out on the steamboat General Slocum in 1904, eyewitnesses reported that women, certain they would drown if they jumped overboard, “waited until the flames were upon them, until they felt their flesh blister, before they took the alternative of the river.”((“1,000 Lives May Be Lost In Burning of the Excursion Boat Gen. Slocum,” New York Times (June 16, 1904), 1.))

GeneralSlocum_05 — Bodies washed ashore after the steamship, *General Slocum*, caught fire, 1904. Wikimeida Commons.

Of the estimated 978 women and children aboard the cruise, nearly all died. Most drowned just a few feet from shore in relatively shallow waters.

The New York Times opined, “one of the lessons which the General Slocum horror should bring home to every woman and girl in New York City is the desirability of knowing how to swim.”((“1,000 Lives May Be Lost In Burning of the Excursion Boat Gen. Slocum,” New York Times (June 16, 1904), 1.)) While catastrophes like this commanded national attention, thousands of accidental drowning deaths occurred in the US annually. Most fatalities involved women and children.

Why did so few women know how to swim in the early 20th century?

Some physicians and conservatives concluded that women were biologically inferior or incapable of swimming. One common cultural stereotype held that men were innately predisposed to athleticism. Many saw swimming–especially open water swimming–as a masculine sport, far too challenging for women.

Frederick J. Garbit, M.D., “The Woman’s Medical Companion and Guide To Health.” The Josephine Long Wishart Collection: Mother, Home, and Heaven, Courtesy the College of Wooster Special Collections.

Others realized that women’s aversion to water and unfortunate tendency to drown had less to do with biological deficiency than it did with cultural customs.

Louisa Dresel and two women in bathing suits at Mingo's Beach, Beverly, Mass., 1900. Image courtesy of Schlesinger Library. — Louisa Dresel and two women in bathing suits at Mingo’s Beach, Beverly, Mass., 1900. Image courtesy of Schlesinger Library.

In the early 1900s, cultural beliefs required modesty of women. As a result, women’s swimsuits consisted of multiple layers: dark wool tights, knee-length bloomers, a sailor-style blouse with balloon sleeves, a belt, and full skirt. The average woman’s swimsuit used seven to ten yards of woolen fabric depending on the style.

Margaret Wessell Piersol learning to swim, 1896, Courtesy Radcliffe College Archives, Schlesinger Library.

Women ventured to bath houses located along river banks and ocean beaches to cool themselves and allow their children to play in the water. Their long, heavy bathing suits permitted frolicking in the surf. But the full, water-logged skirt often tangled around a woman’s legs and immobilized her. Ironically, the fear of drowning in the swimsuit that cultural etiquette demanded women wear deterred many women from learning to swim.

Even if a woman knew how to swim, the weighted fabric could drag her down. In the summer, each week, newspaper headlines recounted numerous deaths–mostly of women–from drowning at beaches and lakes. Often women drowned while trying to save a child.

The deaths of nearly 1000 women in the General Slocum incident called attention to drowning as a public health and safety issue. Confronted with this threat to safety, municipalities initiated “Learn to Swim” campaigns targeting women. Postcards, posters, and newspaper articles encouraged and warned women to learn to swim as a life-saving measure for themselves and–more importantly–for the nation’s children.

Postcard promoting swimming for girls and women, circa 1905. Personal collection.

As cities began offering swimming instruction to women, individuals advocating swimsuit reform–like Lucille Eaton Hill, Edwyn Sandys and Annette Kellerman–began finding audiences receptive.

Campaigns about public safety worked together with advertisements glamorizing swimming for women. They began to dismantle the stereotype that open water swimming was a masculine sport unsuitable for women.

Public safety advertisements successfully persuaded the general public that men and women could (and should) swim together on beaches because men could both safeguard women and teach them basic elements of swimming.

This interaction of the sexes in a sport designated as masculine, like swimming, contradicted custom. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries middle-class propriety delineated appropriate interactions between the sexes in most social settings–especially sports. Swimming pools were often segregated by gender and race but the dangers posed by the surf allowed conservatives to condone mixed-gender swimming, despite the fact that swimming exposed more of the body than other sports.

in the swim — Mixed-gender swim group in New York, August, 1906. By G. C. Hovey, Mid Manhattan Picture Collection, Library of Congress.

The early 20th century “Learn to Swim” campaign succeeded. Mixed-gender amateur swim groups formed in most major US cities. Soon women began competing against men in open water marathons. Women’s success contradicted cultural beliefs about women’s physical frailty.

Open water swimming race from the Battery to Coney Island, New York, 1908. (George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)

But the campaign may have had unintentional effects. Early “Learn to Swim” campaigns that targeted women may have inadvertently (or purposefully) reinforced another cultural stereotype: that swimming was a “white” activity.

Today, death by drowning is capturing headlines again. This time, however, the victims are predominantly nonwhites: 70 percent of African-American children don’t know how to swim. They are three times more likely to drown than other children. This begs the question: are our cultural stereotypes killing us?

Marilyn Morgan, Director of the Archives Program and Lecturer of History and UMass Boston.

Marilyn Morgan is the Director of the Archives Program & Lecturer of History at UMass Boston. Her first book, a cultural history of open water swimming and swimwear in America is unexpected to be released in 2018. She is at work on a new project on the history of gender, food, and advertising. Check out her blog or follow her on Twitter @Mare_Morgan

March 18, 2017Heidi Gengenbach 1 Comment

Roaring for Rights: Women & Boston’s Anti-Busing Movement

Clipping of a newspaper article about ROAR's "March on Washington" in March 1975. The article states that ROAR marched to demand a constitutional amendment to block school busing. Clipping part of the Louise Day Hicks Papers, Boston City Archives. — Clipping of a newspaper article about ROAR’s “March on Washington,” March 19, 1975. Louise Day Hicks stands in the front of the crowd, wearing sunglasses. Clipping from the Louise Day Hicks Papers, Boston City Archives.

On March 19, 1975, roughly 1200 Bostonians trudged through torrential rains and howling winds from the Washington Monument to the Capitol building. The group, members of “Restore Our Alienated Rights”–ROAR for short–marched to generate national support for a constitutional amendment. The determined marchers–mainly mothers–alternated singsong shouts of “No! No! No! We won’t go!” with the chorus of “God Bless America” as they slogged through the deluge with the movement’s founding leader, Louise Day Hicks.

At the time, many women across the nation gathered in public demonstrations to support the ERA, a proposed constitutional amendment that would guarantee equal rights for women. But the demonstrators of ROAR had a different goal that blustery March day. They intended to galvanize support for a different constitutional amendment–one that would end court-ordered busing as a means of integrating public schools in Boston.

Logo of Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR), depicting a lion grasping a school bus in its claws. Image from the Louise Day Hicks papers, courtesy of Boston City Archives.

On the steps of the Capitol, Louise Day Hicks, dubbed “the Joan of Arc of Boston,” rallied the sodden crowd. The day before, leaders from fourteen states formed a national anti-busing coalition and appointed Hicks as chairperson. Like its Boston counterpart, the national ROAR coalition’s logo featured a fierce lion menacingly clutching a school bus in its paws. ((Robinson, Walter. “National Antibusing Coalition Formed with Hicks as Leader.” Boston Globe (1960-1985): 1. Mar 19 1975. ProQuest. Web. 16 Mar. 2017)) As Hicks announced the national coalition, its goal, and her role as leader, she dramatically compared the heavy rain to the tears “of Boston’s oppressed parents.”((Robinson, Walter. “Hub Busing Foes Get Drenching, some Support.” Boston Globe (1960-1985): 1. Mar 20 1975. ProQuest. Web. 16 Mar. 2017.)) Gatherers roared their approval.

Louise Day Hicks, ca.1969. — Louise Day Hicks, ca.1969, prior to her leadership of ROAR. Wikimedia Commons.

Perhaps the most widely recognized leader of Boston’s anti-busing movement, the controversial Hicks provoked mixed reactions. To some, especially those from predominantly white neighborhoods like South Boston, Hicks became a paragon of virtue who championed the rights of working-class whites. To others, she epitomized a conservative racist on par with white supremacist “Bull” Connor, who ordered attacks on civil rights demonstrators in Birmingham, Alabama.

Hicks was raised in the predominantly Irish working-class neighborhood of South Boston. Known for her political and social conservatism, she embodied virtues associated with traditional femininity. Observers noted that she always styled her hair precisely, wore blue, pink, or green dresses, and frequently wore dainty white gloves. Although she conceived of the acronym ROAR, she spoke in a cultured, genteel voice and emphasized her role as a mother in her political campaigns.((Feeney, Mark. “LOUISE DAY HICKS, ICON OF TUMULT, DIES.” Boston Globe. Oct 22 2003. ProQuest. Web. 15 Mar. 2017.))

Before she became a champion of the anti-busing movement, as a young wife and mother, Hicks earned a law degree from Boston University Law School. In 1955, she was one of only nine women graduated from a class of 232. She built a successful, if short, career in politics after winning election to the Boston School Committee with the slogan “the only mother on the ballot.” ((Lukas, J. Anthony. Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families (New York: Vintage Books), 1986, 123.)) Despite her hearty endorsement of social conservatism, Hicks held a membership in the the National Organization for Women. Reportedly, her father had taught her that gender should not limit options or curtail opportunities; thus Hicks had lobbied for passage of the ERA while she served as a Massachusetts Representative in Congress (1971-1973).((Feeney, Mark. “LOUISE DAY HICKS, ICON OF TUMULT, DIES.” Boston Globe. Oct 22 2003. ProQuest. Web. 15 Mar. 2017.))

Hicks’ advocacy of equal rights did not extend to all. While serving on the School Committee in the 1960s, Hicks faced accusations that Boston Public Schools (BPS) suffered from racial imbalance. Like others on the Committee, she adamantly denied the accusation and clashed repeatedly with the NAACP on the issue.

Button of Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR), depicting a lion sitting on a school bus with the words, "STOP FORCED BUSING." — Button of Restore Our Alienated Rights (ROAR) with logo and words, “STOP FORCED BUSING.” Courtesy of John Joseph Moakley Archive & Institute, Suffolk University.

In 1974, when a federal judge ruled that BPS were segregated and mandated public school integration by busing students away from neighborhoods, many protested vehemently. Hicks became a spokesperson for the outrage many Bostonians felt towards “forced busing.” To some working-class Bostonians, Hicks and ROAR, the group she founded, symbolized key tenets of inalienable rights: individual liberty, the right of parents to make the best life choices for their children’s well-being and happiness.

Flyer of the Jamaica Plain Concerned Citizen's League. Image courtesy of Northeastern University Archives & Special Collections. — Flyer of the Jamaica Plain Concerned Citizen’s League. Image courtesy of Northeastern University Archives & Special Collections.

Under the guidance of Hicks, who had built a solid reputation as a conservative mother, ROAR began as an informal group of local women–white mothers with young children–expressing concern about busing. Excepting Hicks, most lacked any background in political organizing. But within a short time, ROAR members orchestrated numerous demonstrations, coordinated widespread boycotts, and initiated letter-writing campaigns, publicity stunts, and political appeals. Often, Hicks and other women justified even the group’s most violent activities in gendered terms, claiming a responsibility as mothers protecting neighborhood children.

Researching the topic of Boston Public School desegregation, graduate student Rachel Sherman became intrigued by ROAR, its controversial but little-researched leader, Louise Day Hicks, and the other women active in the anti-busing movement. Want to learn more about Hicks and ROAR? Sherman designed an online exhibit, “ROAR: THE ANTI-BUSING GROUP WITH THE LOUDEST VOICE,” that explores the group’s main characters, their motivations, local activity and national support. Peruse documents, ROAR’s publications, and photographs that Sherman unearthed at the Boston City Archives and Northeastern University Archives and Special Collections and learn about the women of ROAR and their legacy by visiting her full exhibit here.

March 15, 2017Heidi Gengenbach 1 Comment

Their Battle for the Ballot: Preserving Hyde Park’s History of Women’s Activism

by Patrice Gattozzi

In March 1870, fifty years before the 19th amendment granted women citizens in the US the right to vote, a bold group of women from Hyde Park, Massachusetts, voted in a local election.

Flyer announcing Caucus for Women’s Suffrage in Hyde Park, 1870.

Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah Grimké, sisters who actively fought for abolitionism, had moved to Hyde Park after the Civil War. After the 13th Amendment outlawed slavery, the sisters focused their activism on securing rights, both political and social, for women. They may have led the women in Hyde Park not only to organize and speak out for women’s suffrage, but to vote in 1870.

That March, a group of roughly fifty women, including the Grimké sisters and Sarah M. Stuart, turned out on election day and cast their votes in a separate box. Local officials did not count the women’s ballots. But women’s collective action–showing up and voting–brought widespread attention to their demands for political rights. It also helped inspire another generation of women to continue the fight. The women’s ballots were saved and belong to the Hyde Park Historical Society (HPHS). They represent a valuable piece of local women’s history.

The HPHS contains a treasure trove of records, letters and photographs documenting the history of local women and men. Like many small historical societies, the collections of the HPHS live in a section of the the town’s library, in this case, Hyde Park Branch Library of the Boston Public Library. For a variety of reasons, including lack of funds and professional staff, over the past decade this private historical collection has received little preservation, organization, or research attention. Today, the HPHS society materials have reached a critical juncture. As graduate student studying History at UMass Boston, I hope to find a way to help protect and preserve the physical documents.

Records of the Current Events Club, a grassroots women's organization in Hyde Park. — Records of the Current Events Club, a grassroots women’s organization in Hyde Park.

Recently, I’ve begun preparing my thesis; it focuses on the women’s clubs of Hyde Park in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Two of the clubs, the Thought Club and the Current Events Club, formed in 1881 and existed for 127 and 114 years respectively.

The HPHS holds the clubs’ records, from their establishment until their disbandment. These include handwritten minutes from every meeting, financial reports, and membership records of every woman.

Hyde Park is my hometown neighborhood, and what interests me is that the records include their home address and most of their houses still stand today. In addition to membership records, the collection includes pamphlets, photos, directories, and maps. It’s exciting material, virtually untapped!

Letter from Julia Ward Howe to the Thought Club, 1896. — Letter from Julia Ward Howe to the Current Events Club, 1896.

Hyde Park became home to some outspoken activist women, like Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah Grimké. The records of the HPHS reveal relationships to other women’s rights activists who lived in nearby Boston.((Hyde Park was incorporated in 1868 and annexed to Boston in 1912.))

Browsing through the Thought Club’s records, I found a handwritten note written by poet, author, and suffragist Julia Ward Howe. Best know for her song, Battle Hymn of the Republic, Howe lived in South Boston and had planned to address the Current Events Club in fall 1869, just months before a number of Hyde Park women voted in the local election. Her note sent regrets that she could not attend the meeting due to her health that day, but she hoped to soon reschedule.

Other samples from the collection include Clover Blossoms written by Elizabeth Hedge Webster, a poet, author, suffragist, and member of the Thought Club.

Pages of Clover Blossoms by Elizabeth Hedge Webster, who lived in Hyde Park. The collection of poems and prose discusses suffrage and women's rights at length. — Pages of Clover Blossoms by Elizabeth Hedge Webster (who lived in Hyde Park), 1880. The collection of poems and prose discusses suffrage and women’s rights at length.

The book tells an important piece of local history. The volume is filled with Webster’s reflections of people, events, poems, her thoughts and relationships with many important local people of the day. It also discusses suffrage and women’s rights at length. Though a copy of the book was digitized and made available for viewing online by the Internet Archive, the volume at HPHS is a rare and precious find for those studying the history of Hyde Park’s activist women.

These and other examples of women’s history in the HPHS collection can be found on the open shelves. But the Nancy Hannon Room, which was named after the last active historical society president, contains even more archival materials. The HPHS should be commended for collecting and saving these important documents. Unfortunately, reflecting the circumstances of many local historical societies, an inventory of materials doesn’t yet exist. Most of the materials have not been cataloged or received any preservation treatment. Two dedicated volunteers have begun to sort the materials, but they face a monumental task. And currently, the HPHS lacks funds to properly preserve and catalog the documents.

Luckily, I can begin my research. But ideally, I’d like to help design a plan for the cataloging and preserving of the materials so that future historians, especially those of women’s history, will be able to benefit from the collection. If you’re interested in women’s history and archives and would like to help with this archival project in some capacity–whether it be advice or hands-on work–please respond to this blog post!