Walk across State Street and go between the buildings to Faneuil Hall. Go right in the front door and up the stairs.
Faneuil Hall and the adjoining Quincy Market are the historic locations of Boston’s great women’s fairs and protest meetings. The Anti-Slavery Bazaars (see below), sponsored by the Female Anti-Slavery Societies, were held there in the 1830s and 1840s. In September 1840, women held a seven-day fair to raise money to complete the building of the Bunker Hill monument. Inspired by Sarah Josepha Hale (1820-79), the women raised $30,000. Among the women’s suffrage meetings held in Faneuil Hall was a New England Woman’s Tea Party, sponsored on the centennial of the Boston Tea Party by the New England Woman Suffrage Association. They invited the public to join themin the celebration, noting that women were still subject to “taxation without representation.” In an alcove behind the stage, note the bust of Lucy Stone, a main speaker at the Tea Party.
Suzette “Bright Eyes” LaFleshe (1854-1903), an Omaha Indian, inspired the Indian Rights Movement when she spoke in Faneuil Hall in December 1879. LaFlesche, wearing native dress and a bear-claw necklace, protested the reservation system: “Did our Creator…intend that men created in his own image should be ruled over by another set of his creatures?” After hearing Bright Eyes speak in Boston, many Boston women became her supporters. Helen Hunt Jackson (1830-85) was inspired by her speech to write A Century of Dishonor, a book that cited injustices to the Indian peoples, and works of fiction about Native Americans including Ramona. Working women saw Faneuil Hall as a place for a forum for their demands. In 1903, the Women’s Trade Union League was founded in Faneuil Hall. Massachusetts nurses also chose the hall to rally for professional status in 1903 when they founded the Massachusetts Nurses Association. Among the organizers was Lucy Lincoln Drown (1848-1934), superintendent of nurses at Boston City Hospital from 1885 to 1910. In 1919, the call for the women telephone operators’ strike brought two thousand angry women to the hall.
