The Tontine Crescent was a fashionable place to live in late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century Boston. The long row of elegant townhouses, designed by Boston architect Charles Bulfinch, was built in 1793 and named Franklin Place after Benjamin Franklin. With the opening of the Back Bay for settlement, they declined in fashion and were demolished in 1872 after the Great Fire. Franklin Street still retains the curve of the buildings.
Among the notable women who lived there was Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820), a native of Gloucester, who moved with her husband, John Murray, to No. 5 Franklin Place in 1794. Judith Sargent Murray was already a successful writer, publishing a regular column (“The Gleaner“) in the Massachusetts Magazine, a new literary monthly.
Using a male persona, Judith expressed her opinions on female equality, education, federalism, and republicanism. She wrote that not only should a woman be educated to be “the sensible and informed” companion of men, but she should also be equipped to earn her own living. Murray saw the many new female academies as inaugurating “a new era in female history.” In 1798, she published her “Gleaner” essays in a book she also called “The Gleaner,” selling it to a list of subscribers including John Adams and George Washington.
“The Gleaner” became a minor classic, and Murray became the first woman in America to self-publish. She was also a poet, publishing in various Boston periodicals under the pen names “Honora Martesia” and “Constantia.” An avid letter writer, the copies of letters Murray wrote from 1765-1818 (ages 14-67) were discovered in 1984 and offer a new eyewitness account of early American history. Abby May (1829-88), also an advocate for women’s rights, lived at what was once known as 5 Franklin Place with her family as a young woman. Among her many achievements, May succeeded in starting a separate Latin School for girls and served as one of the first women on the Boston School Committee.
