Chauncy Hall in 1913 was a “busy bee hive full of workers for women,” according to the Boston American. It had housed the Massachusetts Woman Suffrage Association and the Woman’s Journal since 1909 when they moved from 5 Park Street. In the last years of the suffrage campaign, the MWSA shared the building with the College Equal Suffrage Association, the Massachusetts Men’s League for Woman Suffrage, the Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government, and the New England Woman Suffrage Association.
The Massachusetts Association Opposed to the Further Extension of Suffrage to Women had its office two blocks west, at the corner of Boylston and Exeter Streets. The group worked closely with the men’s Massachusetts Anti-Suffragist Committee. Alice Stone Blackwell (1857-1950), daughter of Lucy Stone and Henry Blackwell, edited the Woman’s Journal for thirty-five years after her graduation from Boston University in 1881. She served as president of the MWSA from 1910 until women achieved suffrage in 1920. In addition to helping start the League of Women Voters, successor to the MWSA, Blackwell was active in many other causes including relief for Armenian refugees, the Women’s Trade Union
League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the American Peace Society. As a young valedictorian, she had predicted her life of dissent, saying, “It’s perhaps the first, but I don’t mean it to be the last, old fence I shall break through.”
