This is site 1 - 3 of 14 Next "C" Site Return to beginning of South Cove/ Chinatown
		C1: Elizabeth Peabody Book Shop 13-15 West Street The Book Shop of Elizabeth Peabody (1804-1894) is best known as the location of the 1839-44 Conversations led by Margaret Fuller (1810-1850) which helped crystallize New England Transcendentalism, a movement encouraging the perfection of each individual. A regular participant in these Conversations was philosopher and activist Edna Dow Littlehale Cheney (1824-1904) who, at age 16, was the youngest participant (see also BB3). Fuller received an intense classical education from her father and became known as an intellectual prodigy. Working with Ralph Waldo Emerson and others, she edited the transcendentalist journal The Dial and was the first woman journalist for the New York Tribune. Her essay Woman in the Nineteenth Century is an American feminist classic. Elizabeth Peabody, also a Transcendentalist, founded American kindergartens (see B5) and here at the Book Shop became the first woman publisher in Boston. Her younger sisters were each married in the family parlor behind the Book Shop. Sophia (1809-1871), an artist, married author Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Mary (1806-1887), an educator, married Horace Mann, considered to be the father of American public education. "...men are called on from an early period to reproduce all that they learn. Their college exercises, their political duties, their professional studies...call on them to put to use what they have learned. But women learn without any attempt to reproduce. Their only reproduction is for purposes of display. It is to supply this defect that these conversations have been planned." -- Margaret Fuller
		C2: Massachusetts Bar Association 20 West Street The first woman member of the Massachusetts Bar Association was Mary A. Mahan of West Roxbury, who was admitted in 1913. Many women lawyers in Boston attended Portia School of Law, established in 1908 (see B4). After Mahan was admitted along with with 34 men, a member spoke up saying he hoped her admission would "not interfere with our banquets and prevent smoking", but, he added, showing his pride in their action, "the question of women members has been brought before the American Bar Association and the members have dodged it."
		C3: Telephone Exchange 2-8 Harrison Avenue and Oxford Place A successful and nonviolent strike of 8,000 women telephone operators in April 1919, led by Julia O'Connor [Parker] (1890-1972), paralyzed telephone service in five New England states for six days. This building is an expansion of the Oxford Street exchange where O'Connor worked. Switchboard operators, who were mostly young single Irish-American women, were expected to work at breakneck speed often on split shifts. They were punished with detention as if they were still in high school. Supported by the Women's Trade Union League, O'Connor and her team negotiated a settlement that included a $3 to $4 weekly raise (see C12). Starting in 1939, O'Connor worked for 18 years as an organizer for the AFL.