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Susanna Rowson and Federal Street Theatre Federal Street  Susanna
Haswell Rowson (1760-1824), a playwright and an actress at the Federal Street
Theater, was the author of the first American best-selling novel, Charlotte
Temple, A Tale of Truth. Rowson arrived in America when she was six, but
her father was a Loyalist and during the Revolution they were returned to England.
Not long after her marriage to William Rowson, Susanna returned to America and
settled in Boston where they both acted at the Federal Street Theatre. For the
five years following 1796, she performed 129 different parts in 126 productions,
many of which she wrote herself. Her next venture was to set up a Young Ladies
Academy in 1797 near the theater. Rowson moved the school out of Boston but
later returned. Her academy was one of the first to offer girls education above
the elementary level and included instruction in music and public speaking.Another woman playwright whose plays were performed at the Federal Street Theatre in 1795 and 1796 was Judith Sargent Murray (see D24). Her satirical plays, The Medium or Happy Tea-Party (later renamed The Medium, or Virtue Triumphant) and The Traveller Returned, addressed class structure and gender roles in the new republic. |
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D23: Federal Street Church 100 Federal Street Among the more well-known Boston women who attended William Ellery Channing's Federal Street Church were abolitionists Maria Weston Chapman (1806-1885) and Eliza Lee Cabot Follen. Chapman, a founder of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, was a supporter of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the famed abolitionist newspaper The Liberator. An inspired organizer and fundraiser, Chapman ran 22 yearly anti-slavery fairs in Boston beginning in 1834. One of her colleagues in this venture was Lydia Maria Child whose 1833 publication, An Appeal in Behalf of that Class of Americans called Africans, was the first book to advocate an immediate end to slavery. Chapman's fairs became a model for women in other parts of the country to raise money for the abolitionist cause. Chapman also published several important anti-slavery tracts including How Can I Help Abolish Slavery? and Right and Wrong in Massachusetts. With Garrison, Maria Chapman supported women's full participation in abolitionist work - including public speaking, which had been condemned in a pastoral letter from the Congregational ministers of Massachusetts as being outside women's God-ordained sphere. In 1840, Chapman was elected to the executive committee of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Eliza Lee Cabot Follen (1787-1860) was best known for her anti-slavery writings including Anti-Slavery Hymns and Songs and A Letter to Mothers in Free States. In A Letter, Follen wrote, " ... what can women, - what can we mothers do? ... you can do everything; I repeat, you can abolish slavery. Let every mother take the subject to heart, as one in which she has a personal concern. In the silence of the night, let her listen to the slave-mothers crying to her for help ...." Much of Follen's writing was designed for children, including songs, poems, and stories that carried a moral lesson.
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D24: Franklin Place and Home of Judith Sargent Murray Franklin and Arch Streets  The
Tontine Crescent was a fashionable place to live in the late 18th and
early 19th-century Boston. The long row of elegant townhouses, designed
by Boston architect Charles Bulfinch, was built in 1793 and named Franklin
Place after Benjamin Franklin. With the opening of the Back Bay for settlement,
they declined in fashion and were demolished in 1872 after the Great Fire.
Franklin Street still retains the curve of the buildings.Among the notable women who lived there was Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820), a native of Gloucester, who moved with her husband, John Murray, to No. 5 Franklin Place in 1794 (see N11). Judith Sargent Murray was already a successful writer, publishing a regular column in the Massachusetts Magazine, a new literary monthly, titled "The Gleaner." Using a male persona, she expressed her opinions on female equality, education, federalism, and republicanism. She wrote that not only should a woman be educated to be "the sensible and informed" companion of men, but she should also be equipped to earn her own living. Murray saw the many new female academies as inaugurating "a new era in female history." In 1798, she published her "Gleaner" essays in a book she also called The Gleaner, selling it to a list of subscribers headed by George Washington. The Gleaner became a minor classic, and Murray became the first woman in America to self-publish. She was also a poet and published in various Boston periodicals under the pen names "Honora Martesia" and "Constantia." An avid letter writer, the copies of letters Murray wrote from 1765-1818 (ages 14-67) were discovered in 1984, and offer a new eyewitness account of early American history. Abby May (1829-1888), also an advocate for women's rights, lived at 5 Franklin Place with her family as a young woman. Among her many achievements, May succeeded in starting a separate Latin Schoool for girls and served as one of the first women on the Boston School Committee (see D7 and D11).
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