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Home of Susan Paul 36 West Cedar Street In the 1830s, Susan Paul (1809-1841) taught at the Smith School on Joy Street, a segregated school for African American children funded jointly by the city and private donations (see B7). Paul was also an officer in the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society founded by Maria Weston Chapman in 1832 (see D22). She was the daughter of Thomas Paul, the founder of the African Baptist Church, and supported her mother after his death. Some of her letters were printed in William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator. In 1834 she wrote to condemn the "spirit which persecutes us on account of our color - that cruel prejudice which deprives us of every privilege whereby we might elevate ourselves - and then condemns us because we are not more refined and intelligent." |
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B15: St. Margaret's Convent 19 Louisburg Square  Originally
founded in Sussex, England, in 1855 to care for the poor and ill in the surrounding
countryside, this Episcopalian religious community came to Boston in 1873 to
act as superintendents of a children's hospital. The sisters moved to three
townhouses on Louisburg Square in 1883 which they used as a convent, chapel,
and small hospital. Here, they expanded their nursing and evangelical teachings
to reach the sick and poor on Beacon Hill and its environs. They ran St. Monica's
Home, a nursing home for Black women and children, on Joy Street and later in
Roxbury until 1988. In 1992, the St. Margaret's community moved the Motherhouse
to Roxbury. |
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B16: Anne Whitney Studio 92 Mount Vernon Street  The
window on the top of this building marked the studio for two decades of sculptor
Anne Whitney (1821-1915), who was part of a group of American women sculptors
gathering around actress Charlotte Cushman in Rome in the mid-19th century (see
N7). In 1873, soon after Whitney returned to Boston, she received a commission
for the statue of Sam Adams now standing outside Faneuil Hall. Her statue of
Leif Ericsson is on the Commonwealth Avenue mall (see BB25). Her bust of Lucy
Stone is in the Boston Public Library (see BB9), and her sculpture of abolitionist
William Lloyd Garrison is in the Massachusetts Historical Society. Whitney had
a "Boston marriage" with her longtime companion Adeline Manning. During the
late Victorian era, such marriages between women, generally professional and
upper class, were both common and accepted by society at large. |
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B17: Women's International League for Peace and Freedom: Florence Hope Luscomb and Emily Greene Balch 6 Byron Street  Between
World Wars I and II, 6 Byron Street was the office of the Massachusetts Women's
International League for Peace and Freedom. Florence Luscomb (1887-1985) was
executive secretary of the office from 1929-1933. An early graduate of MIT,
Luscomb gave up her career in architecture to work full time for the women's
movement. After suffrage was passed, she was the executive secretary for the
newly formed Massachusetts League of Women Voters and narrowly missed being
elected to the Boston City Council. She became involved in the labor movement
and ran for governor in 1952, continuing her antiwar and civil rights activities
until her death. During the time the WILPF office was here, Emily Greene Balch
(1867-1961), the second American woman to earn the Nobel Peace Prize, served
as national president. Balch was a native of Boston and a former Wellesley College
professor. From 1919 to 1922, as first international secretary-treasurer of
WILPF in Geneva, Balch launched the new organization and set up its guidelines.
In 1946, Balch followed Jane Addams (1860-1935) when she earned the Nobel Peace
Prize in recognition of her efforts and the work of WILPF.
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