In an earlier building on this site, nineteenth-century women held many meetings urging the abolition of slavery, adoption of woman suffrage, and temperance reform. Mary Rice Livermore (1820-1905) was a prominent national lecturer after the Civil War who often spoke at Tremont Temple. Her first speech there was in 1869 on woman suffrage. Her Boston speeches in 1874 led to the founding of the Massachusetts Women’s Christian Temperance Union, for which she served as president for ten years. Livermore was the first editor of the Woman’s Journal. She later held the office of president of the American Woman’s Suffrage Association and was the first president of the Association for the Advancement of Women.
In March 1885, Mary Baker Eddy (1821-1910), founder of the Church of Christ, Scientist, was given ten minutes to respond to a barrage of criticism from members of the Boston clergy. Her ideas about God as father-mother and of man and woman as co-equals—both created in God’s image—angered the ministers of the time. Her book, Science and Health, was a bestseller. In the years following her talk, Eddy emerged as one of the most important women reformers of her day, pioneering in the field of mind-body medicine. Soon after she spoke in Tremont Temple, she wrote, “Let it not be heard in Boston that woman…has no rights which man is bound to respect….This is woman’s hour, with all its sweet amenities and its moral and religious reforms.” The Mother Church of the Church of Christ Scientist is at 250 Massachusetts Avenue.
