The Back Bay West Tour starts at Copley Square and ends at the Boston Women’s Memorial. Focusing on women of the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the sites demonstrate the high energy devoted by women to the arts and education, pointing out educational institutions, clubs, and art associations as well as women’s sculptures.
The Trail
Begins: Boston Public Library, Copley Square
Boston Public Library
Boston Public Library700 Boylston Street
The “BPL,” as it is commonly known, has served as an intellectual and educational center for Boston women, from reformers to newly-arrived immigrants, since it opened in 1854. Housed in the elegant McKim building since 1895 and the addition designed by Philip Johnson opened in 1972, the library was called a “noble treasure house of learning” by Russian immigrant, Mary Antin (1881-1949). She wrote, to be “in the midst of all the books that ever were written was a miracle as great as any on record.” Many Boston women have also worked as library professionals including Louise Imogen Guiney (1861-1920), who later became a respected poet and writer and filled a role as an ambassador between the Irish Catholic community and the Boston Brahmins. Women pioneered children’s services at the library. Alice M. Jordan (1870-1960) was the first Supervisor of Work with Children, serving from 1900 to 1940. In 1906, she founded the New England Round Table of Children’s Librarians to provide a meeting ground for this emerging profession. Since 1960, the Round Table and the Massachusetts Library Association have sponsored the Jordan-Miller Storytelling Program in recognition of Jordan’s commitment to storytelling. Beryl Robinson (1906-89) introduced storytelling to children in BPL branches all over the city in the 1940s and 1950s. Her stories came from many cultures. In 1958-59, she produced and told stories on public television, extending her audience to children throughout eastern Massachusetts. Several women are included in the library’s art collection. The Charlotte Cushman Room on the third floor of the McKim building is named for one of Boston’s favorite nineteenth-century dramatic actresses and art patrons, who was born in the North End. A bust by Anne Whitney of Lucy Stone, Boston suffragist and founder of the Woman’s Journal, is displayed in Bates Hall, along with a bust of her daughter Alice Stone Blackwell by Frances L. Rich. Dioramas created by Louise Stimson (1890-1981) in the 1940s, on the third floor of the McKim Building, depict miniature scenes of famous artists and their paintings.
Boston Marathon, Tortoise and Hare Sculpture
Boston Marathon, Tortoise and Hare SculptureCopley Square
In celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Boston Marathon in 1996, Nancy Schön, a former marathon runner, created the sculpture, The Hare and the Tortoise, near the finish line. Her Make Way for Ducklings statue is located in the Public Garden. A bronze circle recessed in the pavement displays the names of all the Boston marathon winners. Women were not allowed to enter the marathon as official runners until 1972 when Nina Kuscsik became the first female to be crowned with the laurel wreath. The first unofficial woman winner was Roberta Gibb in 1966. Joan Benoit Samuelson, who in 1984 was awarded the gold medal in the first women’s Olympic marathon, won the Boston Marathon in 1979 and 1983. Other women Olympic gold medal winners who also placed first among women in the Boston Marathon were Fatama Robba, Boston winner in 1997 and 1998, and Rosa Mota, Boston winner in 1987, 1988, and 1990.
Hotel and Restaurant Workers’ Union
Hotel and Restaurant Workers’ UnionFairmont Copley Plaza Hotel, Copley Square
Until the mid-1960s, only male waiters could work in local hotels organized by the Greater Boston Hotel and Restaurant Workers’ Union. At that time, fifty-seven women waitresses, who were members of an all-women’s union (Local 277) took their traveling cards to Local 34 of the union and asked for membership. When they were refused, the women sued. Supported by the Massachusetts Council Against Discrimination, the waitresses won their battle in June 1966.
Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association
Massachusetts Woman Suffrage AssociationChauncy Hall, 585 Boylston Street
Chauncy Hall in 1913 was a “busy bee hive full of workers for women,” according to the Boston American. It had housed the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association and the Woman’s Journal since 1909 when they moved from 5 Park Street. In the last years of the suffrage campaign, the MWSA shared the building with the College Equal Suffrage Association, the Massachusetts Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government, and the New England Woman Suffrage Association. The Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women had its office two blocks west, at the corner of Boylston and Exeter Streets. The group worked closely with the men’s Massachusetts Anti-Suffragist Committee. Alice Stone Blackwell (1857-1950), daughter of Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, edited the Woman’s Journal for thirty-five years after her graduation from Boston University in 1881. She served as president of the MWSA from 1910 until women achieved suffrage in 1920. In addition to helping start the League of Women Voters, successor to the MWSA, Blackwell was active in many other causes including relief for Armenian refugees, the Women’s Trade Union League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the American Peace Society. As a young valedictorian, she had predicted her life of dissent, saying, “It’s perhaps the first, but I don’t mean it to be the last, old fence I shall break through.”
Sarah Wyman Whitman and Margaret Redmond Windows
Sarah Wyman Whitman and Margaret Redmond WindowsTrinity Church and Parish House, Clarendon and Boylston Streets
Two women, Sarah Wyman Whitman (1842-1904) and Margaret Redmond (1867-1948), created stained glass windows in the Trinity Church Parish House. Redmond’s work is also represented in Trinity Church itself. Whitman’s window commemorates the life of the Reverend Phillips Brooks, first rector of the church. A devoted member of the church, Whitman taught Sunday Bible classes for women for thirty years. Upon the death of Brooks in 1893, Whitman and her class campaigned for three years before she was allowed to create the window. A stained glass window across from Whitman’s window is dedicated to her memory. In addition to fabricating stained glass, Whitman painted landscapes, flowers, and portraits, and designed more than two hundred book covers for the Boston publisher Houghton Mifflin. In addition to creating the window, Tree of Life, in the Trinity Parish House to memorialize Boston painter Susan Hinckley Bradley (1851-1929), Margaret Redmond’s windows inside Trinity Church include Saul Anointeth David, David Plays before Saul, and Queen of Sheba before King Solomon in the northwest vestibule. In the nave are her Eight Apostles and The Evangelists.
Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA)
Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA)140 Clarendon Street
The Boston Young Women’s Christian Association, the first in the nation, was founded in 1866 by upper middle-class Protestant women. Led by Pauline Durant (1832-1917) until 1905, the YWCA hoped to guide and guard the young rural women coming to the city to work. The YWCA provided them with lodging and employment assistance. By the early twentieth century, the YWCA had added a School of Domestic Science and a popular gymnasium. The young women whom they served began to take an active role in the organization’s management and established a busy club program. Confronting racism in the 1930s and 1940s, the YWCA integrated its branches and named Lucy Miller Mitchell (1899-2002) as the first board member of color in 1941. Mitchell, who became executive director of Associated Day Care Services of Metropolitan Boston, was a local and national pioneer in the development of standards for child care. The building on this site, constructed in 1929, now houses offices for the YWCA.
Rogers Building, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Rogers Building, Massachusetts Institute of Technology501 Boylston Street
Although she was not directly connected with the Rogers Building, known as “Tech on Boylston Street” from 1886 to 1916, Ellen Swallow Richards (1842-1911) holds an important role in the history of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. When she was admitted as a special student in chemistry in 1870, she became the first woman to study at MIT. She was awarded a B. S. degree three years later, but the doctorate for which she was qualified was refused her, it is believed, because the school did not want a woman to receive the first doctorate in chemistry. Richards, who pioneered the field of sanitary engineering and home economics, established a Woman’s Laboratory at MIT in 1875 with funding from the Women’s Education Association. When her students were admitted to regular courses at MIT, Richards closed the laboratory and, aided by Ednah Dow Cheney (1824-1904), Lucretia Crocker (1829-86), and Abby W. May (1829-88), established a parlor and reading room for women students in a new MIT building. It was dedicated to the memory of Cheney’s daughter Margaret, a student at MIT who would have been the second woman graduate had she not died of typhoid fever in 1882. In that year, four women received regular degrees. Richards continued to be connected with MIT as an instructor and laboratory scientist in sanitary chemistry and engineering, and in connection with her pioneering studies of air, water and food, is said to have coined the word “ecology.”
Museum of Natural History
Museum of Natural History234 Berkeley Street at Boylston
At its founding in 1830, women were not allowed to become members of the Boston Society of Natural History whose museum was at this site from 1864 to 1951, although they could use its resources. When the Society sought to expand its membership in 1876, a great debate ensued. An opponent believed that “the presence of charming girls among the young students of science would be a great hindrance to any cold consideration of abstruse scientific thought.” A proponent countered that women “would make as good members…and as interested an audience, as 9/10ths of the male members.” Another supported the admission of women because they were “human beings even if they are of one sex.”Although fifteen women were soon admitted, women did not have a major influence until the Society established a Teachers’ School of Science in 1870. When support for the school lagged, Lucretia Crocker (1829-86) , supervisor of science for the Boston Public Schools, and philanthropist Pauline Agassiz Shaw (1841-1917), raised the necessary funds to continue it. Noting the progress women teachers made in the school, the Woman’s Education Association sponsored summer classes for teachers at Annisquam (Gloucester), Massachusetts, in 1881. This led to the establishment of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole on Cape Cod a few years later. In 1951 the museum, renamed the Museum of Science, moved to Science Park on the Charles River.
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences28 Newbury Street
Although the American Academy of Arts and Sciences has not occupied this building since 1955 and now is located in Cambridge, its roots are in Boston. Founded during the American Revolution to promote the arts and sciences, it was open only to men until 1943. The exception was astronomer Maria Mitchell (1818-89), who was elected to the academy in 1848 and for a century held that exclusive position in history. Soon after women were granted suffrage, the academy reconsidered its policy of electing only men to its membership. Even though a survey showed 147 members in favor and only 72 opposed, the academy did not elect women until 1943 when it admitted four women including another astronomer, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (1900-79) of Harvard. In 1976 Elma Lewis, the founder of the National Center of Afro-American Artists in Roxbury, was elected to membership. Currently about twenty percent of the academy’s new members each year are women. Maria Mitchell was a favorite of nineteenth-century Boston women, and her annual visit to speak at the New England Women’s Club was much celebrated. She grew up on Nantucket, where she learned celestial navigation from her father. In 1847 her discovery of a comet brought her fame and induction into the academy. Mitchell was a strong proponent of women’s rights and helped found the Association for the Advancement of Women. She said, “The eye that directs a needle in the delicate meshes of embroidery will equally well bisect a star with the spider web of the micrometer.” She also observed that, “Until women throw off reverence for authority, they will not develop. When they do this…the truth which they get will be theirs and their minds will go on and on, unfettered.” Mitchell became Vassar College’s first woman science professor and director of their observatory. Her observatory and birthplace are maintained by the Maria Mitchell Science Center on Nantucket Island.
Church of the Covenant, The Women’s Lunch Place
Church of the Covenant, The Women’s Lunch Place67 Newbury Street
The Church of the Covenant has supported women since they were given the right to vote in all church matters in 1885. Member Abbie Child was the head of the Women’s Board of Missions of the Congregational Church in the late nineteenth century. Member Dr. Elsa Meder was one of the first women ordained to the office of elder in the Presbyterian Church in New England. Elizabeth Rice and Alice Hageman, who were ordained in 1974 and 1975, were the first women to serve as pastors at a Back Bay church. When they were joined by Donna Day Lower, the church became the only one in the United States with three women clergy. The church sanctuary is noted for its Tiffany stained glass windows, including Four Women of the Bible, portraying Miriam, Deborah, Mary of Bethany, and Dorcas. In 1982, Jane Alexander and Eileen Riley opened the Women’s Lunch Place, a shelter which provides food and other resources to homeless women in a special space set aside in the church.
Junior League of Boston
Junior League of Boston117 Newbury Street
Boston’s Junior League, established in 1907, is the second oldest Junior League in the country. Growing out of the nineteenth century sewing circle tradition, the league was first known as “The Sewing Circle League.” Originally membership was by invitation only among the debutantes of the season. The league soon became interested in the social and industrial problems of the city and changed its name to the Junior League of Boston in 1916. The current Boston League welcomes as members all women who are committed to volunteerism. The League focuses a significant part of its programming on the positive development of adolescent girls and works in collaboration with several organizations with similar goals.
Gibbs College
Gibbs College126 Newbury Street
Katharine Gibbs (1863-1934) founded her first business school for women in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1911 and opened a Boston branch on Huntington Avenue six years later. Men were eagerly sought as students, but when they were all drafted for World War I, Mrs. Gibbs, a marketing genius, simply changed the focus of her advertising to women. The school moved around Back Bay with addresses on Huntington Avenue, Berkeley Street, Marlborough Street, Commonwealth Avenue, Dartmouth Street, Arlington Street and Beacon Street before it ceased to be a residential school and moved to Newbury Street where it became Gibbs College. Gibbs College closed in 2011.
School of Fashion Design
School of Fashion Design136 Newbury Street
The School of Fashion Design was founded in 1934 by Carolyn L. Dewing and Donald Smith-Fedey as the Modern School of Applied Art. In 1936, Dorchester native Isobel Sinesi joined the faculty and was instrumental in adding fashion design to the curriculum. Serving as co-director from 1952 until her death in 1997, Sinesi led the school in developing its curriculum to focus entirely on fashion design.
Kip Tiernan Memorial
Kip Tiernan MemorialBetween Boylston and Newbury Streets on Dartmouth Street
Kip Tiernan (1926-2011), an indefatigable activist for social and economic justice, settled in Boston in her 20s. In 1974 she founded Rosie’s Place, America’s first shelter for homeless women, in an abandoned supermarket. With her advocacy partner, Fran Froehlich, Tiernan founded or helped found a wide range of community organizations to address the needs of people, especially the homeless and the hungry. The list includes The Boston Food Bank, the Poor People’s United Fund, Finex House, the Boston Women’s Fund and Transition House. Grounded in the principles of the Catholic left,Tiernan devoted her life to speaking, lobbying and protesting.
Muriel Snowden International High School
Muriel Snowden International High School150 Newbury Street
In 1988, the Boston School Committee renamed Copley Square High School to honor long-time African American community activist Muriel S. Snowden (1916-88). With her husband, Otto, Muriel Snowden founded Freedom House, Inc., in Roxbury as a nonprofit community-based organization dedicated to human rights and advocacy for African Americans in Boston. Her leadership moved Freedom House into areas of urban renewal, minority employment, and educational equality for children as well as being a positive force for interracial cooperation in Boston. The high school encourages the study of international cultures and foreign languages, fields Snowden also fostered.The building once housed the Boston Art Club, founded in 1855. Although women could not be members until the 1930s, they did exhibit there. Among the new members was Meta Vaux Warrick Fuller, whose sculpture Emancipation stands in Harriet Tubman Square.
The Copley Society of Art
The Copley Society of Art158 Newbury Street
The oldest art association in America, the Copley Society was founded as the Boston Art Students Association in 1879 by the first graduating class from the Museum School of Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The founders wanted a place to exhibit the work of young artists and to continue their Museum School associations. The organization changed its name to the Copley Society of Boston in 1901 and membership was no longer restricted to those persons with an affiliation. Sarah Choate Sears and Sarah Wyman Whitman served on the Copley Society’s committees. Among other distinguished members were painter Margaret Fitzhugh Brown (1884-1972); Lillian Westcott Hale (1881-1963), known for her carefully drafted charcoal drawings; and Marie Danforth Page (1869-1940), whose portraits often depicted women and children. In addition to showing works by Boston women artists, the Society exhibited paintings by internationally known artists Mary Cassatt and Cecelia Beaux (1855-1942).
Guild of Boston Artists
Guild of Boston Artists162 Newbury Street
In addition to the art galleries along Newbury Street, many displaying the work of women artists and some owned or managed by women, is the Guild of Boston Artists. It is an association of painters, sculptors, and printmakers founded in 1914. Women have always been active in the guild and were among the charter members. One of its goals is to bring to public attention the work of young greater Boston artists. In addition to its public gallery, the guild sponsors art classes in its building.Among women members was Bostonian Lilla Cabot Perry (1847-1933), whose paintings are included in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts and the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C. She studied in Paris and was influenced by Claude Monet. She was his neighbor in Giverny for ten summers, beginning in 1889. Perry also taught and painted in Tokyo for three years. Other Boston women painters include Adelaide Cole Chase (1868-1944), who also studied in Paris and painted still life and portraits, especially of women and children; and painter Gertrude Fiske (1878-1961), who was a founder of the guild and was the first woman named to the Massachusetts Art Commission.In 1930, Boston sculptor Amelia Peabody (1890-1984) held a major exhibition at the Guild. Her sculpture End of an Era, depicting the last of the Boston one-horse cabs, was very popular and was acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts. Although she continued to create and exhibit her sculpture, Peabody was also a philanthropist. An ardent sportswoman and lover of animals, especially horses, she provided support to the new Tufts Veterinary School. She divided her time between her home at 120 Commonwealth Avenue and her farm in Dover. Peabody continued creating sculpture late in life, turning to the medium of ceramics. She served on the boards of many Boston hospitals, donating funds—and sculptures—to them.
Society of Arts and Crafts
Society of Arts and Crafts175 Newbury Street
This is the former site of the Society of Arts and Crafts, now located in the Seaport District. Women were active in the Society from its beginning. It was founded in 1897 as an expression of the Arts and Crafts Movement and is the oldest nonprofit crafts organization in America. It encourages the creation and collection of the work of craft artists and awards an annual Medal of Excellence in Craft. Painter and art patron Sarah Choate Sears was a member of the original incorporating committee and, along with Sarah Wyman Whitman, was an early officer. Women who were awarded the Medal of Excellence in the early years included: Mary Crease Sears, bookbinder; Josephine H. Shaw and Margaret Rogers, jewelers; Sister Magdalen, Winifred Crawford, and Beatrix Holmes, illuminators; Lydia Bush-Brown, batik dyer; and Louise Chrimes, needleworker.
Massachusetts Normal Art School Site
Massachusetts Normal Art School SiteNorthwest corner of Exeter and Newbury Streets
The Massachusetts Normal Art School, the predecessor of the Massachusetts College of Art, operated on this site from 1873 until 1886 when it moved to its present location at 621 Huntington Avenue. Because the school was a response to the Drawing Act of 1870 requiring free drawing classes for municipalities with a population of 10,000 or more, students training to be teachers had free tuition. In the first thirty years, eighty percent of the students were women.
Spiritualist Temple and Exeter Street Theater
Spiritualist Temple and Exeter Street Theater26 Exeter Street
Though known as the Exeter Street Theater after 1913, this building was built as the First Spiritualist Temple in 1885. Young women played an important role in spiritualist meetings. They sometimes served on stage as mediums through whom it was believed a departed spirit was speaking. Two sisters, Viola Berlin and Florence Berlin, ran the Exeter Street Theater for many years, turning it into a popular place to see foreign films. The theater closed in 1984.
Women Sculptors on Commonwealth Avenue Mall
Women Sculptors on Commonwealth Avenue MallCommonwealth Avenue Mall
The statue of Samuel Eliot Morison near Exeter Street by Penelope Jencks is one of four statues created by women on the Commonwealth Avenue Mall before the installation of the Boston Women’s Memorial. Jencks is well known as the sculptor of the Eleanor Roosevelt Memorial in New York’s Riverside Park. Boston sculptor Anne Whitney created the statue of Norwegian explorer Leif Eriksson at the end of the mall near Charlesgate. Yvette Compagnion won the competition sponsored by the Argentine government to make the sculpture of Argentine president Domingo Sarmiento near Gloucester Street. Theo Ruggles Kitson worked with her husband, Henry Hudson Kitson, to create the group statue honoring Mayor Patrick Collins near Clarendon Street.
Fanny Mason and Peabody Mason Music Foundation
Fanny Mason and Peabody Mason Music Foundation211 Commonwealth Avenue
The Peabody Mason Foundation, established in the memory of Fanny Mason (1864-1948), a patron of musicians during her lifetime, gives grants to orchestras and performers and offers free concerts. The organization founded the Fanny D. Mason Professorship of Music at Harvard University. At her home on Commonwealth Avenue and in other venues, Fanny Mason sponsored public concerts by such well-known performers as Jan Paderwski, Pablo Casals, and Nadia Boulanger.
The Boston Women’s Memorial
The Boston Women’s MemorialCommonwealth Avenue at Fairfield Street
Installed in 2003, the Boston Women’s Memorial represents three literary women: presidential advisor and correspondent Abigail Adams, suffragist and editor Lucy Stone, and the first African American published poet Phillis Wheatley. The bronze sculpture by New York artist Meredith Bergmann takes the women down off their pedestals so that they can use the pedestals for their work. The Memorial is the result of a twelve-year public process led by the Boston Women’s Commission. Abigail Adams (1744-1817) was a critical thinker and valued correspondent with her husband, John, the second president of the United States. She took responsibility for managing their farm in Quincy, raising their children and looking after their finances while John was gone on the affairs of the new republic. Phillis Wheatley (ca1753-84) was the first published African American woman poet in America. She was brought to this country as an enslaved child and her poetry reflects her love of freedom. Lucy Stone (1818-93), a leader of the woman suffrage movement, founded and edited The Woman’s Journal and toured the country lecturing on abolitionism and women’s rights.
