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| D10:
Mary Baker Eddy and Tremont Temple 88 Tremont Street  In
an earlier building on this site, 19th century women held many meetings urging
the abolition of slavery, adoption of woman suffrage, and temperance reform.
Here, in March 1885, Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), founder of the Church of Christ,
Scientist, was given ten minutes to respond to a barrage of criticism from members
of the Boston clergy. Her ideas about God as father-mother and of man and woman
as co-equals - both created in God's image - angered the ministers of the time.
Her book, Science and Health, was a best seller. In the years following her
talk, Eddy emerged as one of the most important women reformers of her day,
pioneering in the field of mind-body medicine. Soon after she spoke in Tremont
Temple, she wrote, "Let it not be heard in Boston that woman ... has no rights
which man is bound to respect .... This is woman's hour, with all its sweet
amenities and its moral and religious reforms." |
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D11: Boston School Committeewomen Old City Hall, 45 School Street  Women
were elected to the Boston School Committee before they could vote. In 1875,
after a drive by the New England Women's Club, six women took their seats on
the Boston School Committee elected by Boston men. Although the Committee was
reduced from 116 to 24 members the following year, four women were reelected
including Lucretia Crocker (1829-1886), who later became the first woman supervisor
in the Boston Public Schools, and Abby May (1829-1888). May succeeded in starting
a separate Latin School for girls, but it was not until 1972 that the two Latin
schools became co-educational. When May was defeated for reelection, women all
over Massachusetts petitioned the legislature and won the right to vote for
school board members, starting in 1879.Julia Harrington Duff (1859-1932) of Charlestown, a former Boston School teacher, was the first Irish-American woman to be elected to the Boston School Committee in 1900. Her rallying cry, "Boston schools for Boston girls," expressed her belief that Yankee teachers from outside the city were being hired in preference to the young Catholic women graduates of Boston's Normal School. Boston women teachers pressed for their rights. Among the women challenging the 1880s School Committee regulation that women resign upon marriage were Grace Lonergan Lorch (1903-1974) and Suzanne Revaleon Green. Green's husband, a lawyer, succeeded in having his wife and two other married teachers reinstated to their teaching positions. The regulation remained on the books, however, until 1953 when a state law required its removal. |
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D12: Women Judges Municiple Court House, Pemberton Square  Jennie
Loitman Barron (1891-1969) became the state's first full-time woman judge in
1934. She served for thirty years, twenty in the Boston Municipal Court and
ten in the Superior Court. As a lawyer representing the League of Women Voters,
she successfully argued for women's service on juries. Before she became a judge,
Barron served on the Boston School Committee in the late 1920s, where she focused
attention on substandard school conditions. In the late 1990s, four of the eleven
Boston Municipal Court justices were women. |
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