Susan B. Anthony, one of the most important figures of the 19th century, was born in this house in 1820. Born into a Quaker family, Anthony was a staunch abolitionist, a supporter of temperance, and an advocate for women's rights. Over time, she became best known as one of the most significant leaders in the movement to pass laws that would recognize and guarantee women's right to vote. The house now serves as a small museum and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The house was built by Anthony's father in 1817. The museum features period items, literature, and memorabilia related to Susan's early life and legacy as a suffragist. Her Quaker upbringing is central to her life and work and is a central theme in the museum. Perhaps the most striking part of the museum is a visit to the room in which Susan was born.
The Mount was designed by Edith Wharton in 1902. The building is an example of the wide ranging talents of one of the finest American novelists of the 20th century. During an era of flamboyant house decoration, Wharton designed an airy, informal mansion with many design elements drawn from the houses of continental Europe. Wharton teamed up with her niece, an acclaimed landscape architect, to design the gardens of The Mount. Wharton wrote her 1911 novel Ethan Frome while living at The Mount. The Mount survived as the Foxhollow School for Girls until the 1970. It was later purchased and saved from neglect by Edith Wharton Restoration, Inc.
In 1956 the Thayer Building was created as an isolation lab for the study of diseases of large animals. On June 1, 1957 the building was dedicated to Eleanor A. Thayer as a gift of Red Acre Farm, Inc. of Stow, MA. The building came to be as part of the efforts of Red Acre Farm founder, Miss Harriet G. Bird, who "started her Red Acre Farm with one Black horse, $8, and vision." One of these visions was a place to formally study animal health. According to Red Acre Farm's history: "In 1955, another of Miss Bird's dreams touched reality. At its May 10 meeting, the Board of Directors voted to give the University of Massachusetts $50,000 for the construction of a veterinary hospital for research work connected with ailments of large animals. According to the minutes of that meeting, 'Two years ago Miss Bird reported to the Annual Meeting regarding her interest and effort to have legislation enacted favoring a college in Massachusetts for the education and training of veterinary students. It was later learned that it was advisable to suspend any effort in connection with such a project at that time. The matter of training students and research work with respect to disease in animals, has however, still held a place in our Treasurer's plans, and has found an outlet in the proposed building to be erected on the grounds of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, to be used for the investigation of disease of large animals. The building will be known as the 'Thayer Building'./The building was named in memory of Miss Eleanor Thayer, daughter of longtime Red Acre Farm, Inc. officer Ethel Thayer. The project was funded through the sale of shares of stock." In 2014 Thayer Laboratory was razed and assumingly the dedication memorial plaque was acquired by UMass Special Collections at the time.
Helen Curtis Cole Garden, dedicated in 1999 to Helen Curtis Cole (1909-2007) as first Dean of Women (1945-1973). The inscription read: "Helen Curtis Cole Garden Site, Dean of Women 1945-1973. Energetic advocate of women's education." Cole lead coeducation on the campus during the tumultuous post World War II era and was a vocal advocate for women's education and career advancement. The garden is located between Goodell and the W.E.B. Du Bois Library.
The Dickinson Homestead was the birthplace and home of 19th-century American poet Emily Dickinson, whose poems were discovered in her bedroom there after her death in 1886. The house next door, called the Evergreens, was built by the poet's father, Edward Dickinson, in 1856, as a wedding present for her brother Austin. Located in Amherst, Massachusetts, the houses are preserved as a single museum and are open to the public for guided tours. The Museum is dedicated to educating diverse audiences about Emily Dickinson’s life, family, creative work, times, and enduring relevance, and to preserving and interpreting the Homestead and The Evergreens.
Mount Holyoke, created as Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, was the first women’s college created in a time where women were most unlikely to get accepted into college, much less Ivy League schools. Educator Mary Lyon founded Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1837. Her actions led to her dream of an institution of high academic standards for women coming true. Mary Lyons challenge to women, “Go forward, attempt great things, accomplish great things.”, has inspired many. The creation led to a change in higher education forever.
Clara Barton (1812-1921) led a life of service to others and is best-known for her role in founding the American Red Cross. Barton was also a teacher, an activist for gender and racial equality, an advocate for using public resources to relieve suffering, and a leader who worked for laws that improved the lives of children and the poor. Two centuries later, many still draw inspiration for Barton's humanitarian work. Her birthplace in North Oxford, Massachusetts is now a museum that honors her legacy of leadership and service. It was
Deborah Sampson famously disguised herself as a man to fight in the Continental Army during the American Revolution. Calling herself Robert Shurtleff, she enlisted in the 4th Massachusetts Regiment and soon went to fight in the Hudson Valley. After surviving two gunshot wounds, Sampson developed a fever in 1783. Dr. Barnabas Binney discovered her secret during her hospitalization, and after recovering, she was honorably discharged. A 1797 work by Herman Mann, entitled "The Female Review: or, Memoirs of an American Young Lady" chronicles her experiences; you can find it at the links below. Deborah Sampson is today remembered as a "Daughter of Liberty" and honored with several statues such as this one, in Sharon, Massachusetts.
At the corner of Tyler Street and Beach Street, a historical marker notes the spot where, in 1761, a slave ship carrying seven or eight year old Phillis Wheatley docked at Beach Street Wharf. The young girl was sold into slavery. She was ill and did not speak a word of English. Just twelve years later, she would go on to become America's first published African-American woman.
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was a transcendentalist, activist, and educator. Peabody spent time as teacher and operated a bookstore until she discovered the kindergarten movement. She opened the first English-speaking public kindergarten in America in 1860 inspired by Friedrich Fröbel’s teachings and schools. Much of the rest of her life was dedicated to early childhood education.
Founded in 1992 by Dr. Mary C. Nash, the Lyon K-8 School has been acknowledged as one of Boston Public Schools most inclusive elementary schools and expanded into the middle school grades in 1999. Their mission has been to integrate both special needs students and general education students in the same classroom with a high teacher/student ratio. This barrier free school includes severely emotionally disturbed students in regular education classrooms to ensure equal achievable academic success. At the present stage of their development, the Mary Lyon School now seeks to create new teaching strategies to enable all sorts of students, especially those with complicated styles of learning, to be proficient in their respective grade levels.
Dorothea Lynde Dix was an American activist who established the first generation of American mental asylums. She provided treatment for the mentally ill and promoted the conditions of the hospitals for them. In 40 years, she submitted reports and changed the poor conditions of the state hospitals for mentally ill in 15 U.S. states and even in Canada. Throughout her whole life, she dedicated herself to the improvement of the living conditions and treatments of the mentally ill.
This 19th-century Cambridge duplex was home to Maria Baldwin when she served as the first female African African-American female principal in a Massachusetts school. The home was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1976 and remains a private family home. Baldwin lived here from 1892 to 1922. From 1916 to her death in 1922, she supervised an all-white teaching staff and a student population that was 98% white when she served as the headmaster of the Agassiz Grammar School. Her contributions were so significant that she is commonly referred to as the most distinguished educator of African descent in the early 20th century.
Established in 1888 as a training school for kindergarten teachers by Lucy Wheelock, this school was known as Wheelock College between 1939 and 2018 when it merged with Boston University. Wheelock was a key figure in the kindergarten movement in America. Wheelock taught in kindergartens, toured internationally to lecture on the topic of early childhood education, and established a school that trained tens of thousands of teachers well after her death in 1946. Wheelock served on many committees including in the League of Nations through the years as well. Her legacy lives on as the namesake of Wheelock College of Education & Human Development, Boston University's school of education.
The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum houses an impressive collection of fine and decorative art with over 2,500 paintings, sculptures, tapestries, manuscripts, and much more. The building itself is three stories tall and modeled after a 15th-century Venetian-style palace with a central courtyard. The museum features many works by famous artists such as Michelangelo, Raphael, Degas, and Sargent on display and also houses works by contemporary artists, musicians, and scholars. The museum’s art is the personal collection of Isabella Gardner, a prominent past Pennsylvania resident, art collector, and supporter of fine arts, music, literature, and dance. Gardner was a friend to many leading artists of the day including John Singer Steward and Henry James. The Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum was the site of the largest, still unsolved, art heist in history. Taking place in 1990, the theft has been viewed as a wide-spread tragedy for the loss of cultural heritage, as well as the potential damage done to the still-missing paintings done over the course of the robbery. The robbery caused security overhauls both in the Gardener Museum, but also nation-wide. The paintings, which weren’t insured at the time of the robbery, are estimated to be worth $500 Million, and a $10 Million reward has been issued for the paintings’ safe return.
Boston University School of Medicine was the first accredited coeducational medical school in the United States in 1848. At the time it was called “Boston Female Medical Collage, changing to “New England Medical Education Society” in 1851. It started with just 12 students and two professors. It went on to not only graduate women, but also women of minority races such as Rebecca Lee Crumpler. In 1873, after a fire destroying the school, the New England Medical Education Society merged with Boston University creating “Boston University School of Medicine”, an institution that taught men, women, and minorities alike.
Harriet Tubman was a runaway slave, born in 1820. During the Civil War, she was one of the leading abolitionists in the Underground Railroad, saving more than 300 slaves. Originally from Maryland, she moved to Auburn, New York after the war where she published her biography and aided newly freed slaves in beginning their lives. The statue depicts Tubman with a bible in her left hand leading freed slaves. It is located in the South End of Boston and was created in 1999 by Fern Cunningham, a graduate from Boston University. Boston proudly commemorates both the Union and women with this statue. On the reverse side of the monument is a vertical slab that tracks the route that Tubman took when accompanying passengers on the Underground Railroad.
Dedicated in 2003, this memorial celebrates the lives of three of the most historically significant women in American history: Abigail Adams, Lucy Stone, and Phillis Wheatley. Each of the tree women honored by the memorial faced threats and opposition but were committed to social change. The authors of poetry, essays and books, each of these three women offered contributions that demonstrate the intellectual roots of the movements against slavery and for the civil and political rights of women. Each of the three women honored are shown in poses that reflect the use of their language as writers, essayists, and poets.
The Mary Baker Eddy Library gives visitors the opportunity to “explore the life, ideas, and achievements of Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), a remarkable nineteenth-century New England woman who overcame adversity to write a groundbreaking book on religion, health, and spirituality: Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures” (“About”). Eddy was a pioneer in several different fields, including “business, education, publishing, and founded The First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, Massachusetts” (“About”); she was an author, teacher, and religious leader. The library offers several educational programs and exhibits; current feature exhibitions include Mapparium, Hall of Ideas, Quest Gallery, and Portraits of Global Caring. The library’s Research and Reference Services is one of the largest collections that is both by and about an American woman.
Phillis Wheatley was born in an unknown location around Senegal or Gambia around 1753. After being kidnapped at age 6 and sold to slavery in America, she fought against slavery and managed to become America's first published African-American woman. She is one of the most important women throughout American history to impact civil rights and education through inspirational historic achievements and poems. Wheatley's spirit continues to be a symbol for the abolitionist movement long after her death. Her poems have been constantly used to demonstrate a shared humanity between her white readers and herself. Moreover, the poems helped refute various racist arguments and exhibits the astonishing literary talents of people of African descent.
From 1821 until his death in 1861, the influential textile manufacturer and politician Nathan Appleton lived at this residence-a pair of nearly identical three-story brick townhouses. For most of the 20th century, these townhouses served as the headquarters for the Women's City Club, a social and civic organization that promoted charitable causes, mutual aid, and education.
On April 1, 1979, a crowd of between 500 and 1500 met at the Boston Common to protest a recent string of murders that left seven Black women dead in the Roxbury-Dorchester area. As the crowd memorialized the seven victims, news arrived that there was an eighth victim. The protesters updated their signs and marched from the Common to the state house. Within two months, the total number of women who had been murdered in a two-block radius had risen to thirteen, with all but one of the victims being African American. The Combahee River Collective, a pioneering Black feminist group formed in 1974, later circulated pamphlets that challenged readers to think about the ways that perceptions of race and gender made Black women more vulnerable to violence. The pamphlet, along with letters from Audre Lorde and other radical feminists, asked whether the police would respond to the murder of white women or men in the same manner. The protests challenged many of the assumptions about the protection of women. For example, the Combahee River Collective suggested that many of society's ideas about the protection of women were not only misogynistic, but self-defeating. For example, the idea that men were the protectors of women failed to account for the fact that the men who stopped physical and verbal assaults against women were nearly always stopping an act perpetrated by another man. If men stopped devaluing women, especially Black women, the assumptions and conditions that led to assaults would no longer exist.
This stone sculpture depicts the Quaker martyr Mary Dyer who was hung for her religious beliefs in June, 1660. The sculpture was ordered by a bill of the General Court of Massachusetts and was created by the well-known Quaker artist Sylvia Shaw Judson. It was dedicated in 1959 and stands at the corner of Beacon Street and Bowdoin Street in front of the Massachusetts State House.
On February 12th 1914, the Civil War Army Nurses Memorial was unveiled in the Massachusetts State House in what is now known as Nurses’ Hall. The bronze statue, which depicts an army nurse supporting a fallen solider on the battlefield while she nurses his wounds, was created by Bela Lyon Pratt. This memorial was commissioned by the Army Nurses Memorial Association and sponsored by the Daughters of Veterans of the Civil War. To this day, the Nurses Memorial receives many visitors who come to learn about or pay their respects to the men and women who fought in the Civil War.
This building was home to Julia Harrington Duff and her husband, Dr. John Duff's and is part of the Boston Women's Heritage Trail in Charlestown, Massachusetts in recognition of Julia Duff's accomplishments in education. Duff advocated for immigrants, especially Irish-Americans women who wanted to be given the opportunity to teach at the Public Schools in Boston. Duff also became the first Irish-American Catholic woman to serve as a community leader on the Boston School Committee. She served in this role from 1901 to 1905 and pushed for equal rights for women and equal opportunity for children of diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds.
Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, was born in New Hampshire but spent much of her adult life in Massachusetts. Eddy lived in her home in Lynn from 1875 until 1881, when she moved to Boston. It was in the home in Lynn that she wrote "Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures."
A national historic landmark, the Lydia Pinkham House is used today as a collection of studio and business spaces under the collective name of Lydia Pinkham Labs, and is only open to the public for special events (see official website, linked below). Historically, it was the home and laboratory of one of the 19th century's most successful businesswomen, who began selling the famous patent medicine, Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound, in the 1870s (4; 5).
The Salem Village Historic in Danvers is home to several buildings and sites associated with the infamous Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692-1693. During these trials, several young girls accused hundreds of older women of "bewitching" them. The Rebecca Nurse Homestead sits on over 25 acres of an original 300 acres occupies by Rebecca Nurse and her family. This is the only home of a person executed during the trials open to the public. The Homestead is a private non-profit museum owned by Dancers Alarm List Coy. Volunteers reenact 18th century living history and portray militia, minute and alarm companies.
This early 18th-century house was the longtime home of Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott (1799- 1888). New England Transcendentalism was a literary and ideological movement that originated in Concord, Massachusetts. Transcendentalists embraced nature and idealism, and rejected materialism. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, Transcendentalists "were loosely bound together by adherence to an idealistic system of thought based on a belief in the essential unity of all creation, the innate goodness of humanity, and the supremacy of insight over logic and experience for the revelation of the deepest truths." Transcendentalists included writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Bronson Alcott. Alcott was an educator and, included on the property, is his School of Philosophy - an adult education center.Alcott's daughter, writer Louisa May Alcott, wrote the novel Little Women at Orchard House after her family sold the nearby house known today as the Wayside to author Nathaniel Hawthorne. The historic home is now a house museum dedicated to the Alcotts' life and work.
The American Textile History Museum, originally named the Merrimack Valley Textile Museum, was founded by Caroline Stevens Rogers in 1960 after she inherited a collection of textile manufacturing equipment from her father. The museum's early collections also included the records of the Stevens family's woolen business. The museum grew for several decades, relocating to a larger space and coming to hold the largest collection of documents and artifacts related to textile manufacturing in the world. However, financial troubles loomed, and in June 2016, after unsuccessful attempts to raise enough money to continue operations, the museum closed its doors for good. The museum's collections were acquired by Cornell University Library in Ithaca, New York, and remain open to researchers there.
This sculpture by Mico Kaufman was dedicated in 1984 as a tribute to Lowell's nineteenth century "mill girls" whose labor fueled the Industrial Revolution in this part of New England. At the height of technological innovation, Lowell was responsible for 40% of the United States' cloth production. The factories employed over 8000 girls and women, but paid them only a fraction of male wages. The sculpture reflects the aspirations, dignity, and solidarity of these workers who led a series of protests and strikes during the 1830s and 1840s. These workers not only created the fabrics worn by diverse Americans, they sparked the creation of the first women's labor unions.
This Tour is a Thematic Tour or Heritage Trail.
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This statewide heritage trail includes nearly three dozen monuments, museums, and historic sites that are dedicated to the history of women who shaped the Commonwealth of Massachusetts and the United States.
