Take a walk through herstory with BWHT’s colorful new map!

BWHT is pleased to introduce its spectacular new map featuring 30 highlights of Boston women’s herstory. We handed out hundreds on Women’s Equality Day, August 26, 2011 at a special event in the Boston Public Garden. (See the photos here.) More information on how and where to get the map will be available soon.

Sometime in the late 1980s, a young girl was on a class trip walking Boston’s famed Freedom Trail. The girl, perhaps influenced by her mother’s feminist persuasion and observant of the personalities described on the Trail, asked, “Where are the women?”

Indeed, where were the women? They were right there in front of our faces. Inspired by the child’s question, a group of Boston Public School teachers, librarians, and other educators constructed a list of hundreds of women with Boston roots or connections who had made contributions to society by virtue of their careers or volunteer work but had never been recognized. Thus was the genesis of the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail.

Women’s lives and achievements have enriched the history of Boston for almost four centuries, yet the significance of their stories is often overlooked. Patriots, intellectuals, abolitionists, suffragists, artists, and writers – Boston women have always played an integral role in shaping history.

The Boston Women’s Heritage Trail tells some of these diverse and remarkable stories, and forever weaves Boston women back into the fabric of the “city upon a hill.”