Angelina and Sarah Grimké; Dorothea Dix – State House, Third Floor, Senate Chambers
Women were considered citizens with the right to petition long before they gained the right to vote in 1920. Abolitionists Angelina Grimké (1805-79) and her sister Sarah Grimke (1792-1873), who were raised by a slave-holding family in the South, spoke out against slavery on a tour of New England in 1837. In 1838, Angelina Grimke presented a women’s anti-slavery petition with 20,000 signatures to a committee of the state legislature and became the first woman to publicly address a state legislature. That same year Sarah Grimke published Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Women, a book that influenced Lucy Stone. After settling in the Hyde Park section of Boston, both sisters were active in the suffrage movement. They were part of a group of some fifty women who cast ballots in the 1867 Hyde Park town election. Their votes were accepted, but not counted. In 2019 a bridge in Hyde Park was named after the sisters.
In 1843, after an eighteen-month survey of jails and poorhouses in Massachusetts, Dorothea Dix (1802-87) prepared a Memorial for the state legislature. “I come to place before the legislature of Massachusetts the condition of the miserable, the desolate, the outcast,” Dix began, as she charged extreme cruelty in the treatment of the mentally ill. The state appropriated funds to improve one facility and she continued her investigations in many other states. During the Civil War, Dix was the superintendent of army nurses for the Union.
Notable Women of Boston – State House, Fourth Floor, outside House Chambers Gallery
The mural, Notable Women of Boston, was originally created by Ellen Lanyon for the Workingmen’s Cooperative Bank centennial in 1980. It became part of the Simmons University art collection in 1985. In 2022, Simmons loaned the mural to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, State House Art Commission, on a long-term basis. Cameo sketches of each woman accompanied by written descriptions of them are on the wall beside the mural. The notable women are: Anne Hutchinson (1591-1643), religious dissenter; Phillis Wheatley (c1753-1784), first published African American poet; Sister Ann Alexis (1805-1875), hospital founder and administrator for the Daughters of Charity; Lucy Stone (1818-1893), suffrage leader and editor; Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist; Ellen Swallow Richards (1842-1911), pioneer in ecology; Mary Morton Kehew (1859-1918), social reform leader; Annie Sullivan (1866-1936), teacher of Helen Keller (1880-1968); and Melnea Cass (1896-1978), activist and civil rights leader.
