The Park Square area and the block on Boylston Street across from the Public Garden was once a center for women editors, artists, social activists, and entrepreneurs who had offices in the small buildings that lined the street. Novelist Pauline Hopkins (1856-1930) edited The Colored American from 1900 to 1904 in an office at 5 Park Square. Her goal was to publish a journal devoted to “the development of Afro-American art and literature.” She included a series of articles, Famous Women of the Negro Race, and reported the news of the rejection of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin’s New Era Club for membership in the General Federation of Women’s Clubs in 1902. Other publications edited by women with offices in Park Square include Our Bodies Ourselves, published by the Boston Women’s Health Collective in 1970, and Equal Times, a newspaper for working women published in the mid-1970s and early 1980s. Many women artists studied and had studios in this area. Beginning in the 1890s until the mid twentieth century, women dressmakers, milliners, physicians, teachers, and artists working in many mediums had studios or offices on Boylston Street in the block across from the Public Garden. Conveniently placed among them by 1940 was the shop and lunchroom of the Women’s Educational and Industrial Union.
