The Women’s Heritage Trail

Massachusetts State House, front of the West Wing, Beacon St · Free

Cyrus Dallin’s bronze of Anne Hutchinson, her young daughter Susanna at her side, has stood before the West Wing since 1922, a gift of the State Federation of Women’s Clubs and a memorial association. Hutchinson, a trusted midwife and a prosperous merchant’s wife, drew crowds of women to her house to talk over sermons. Her teaching that grace was God’s gift alone, never earned by good works, made women’s souls the equals of men’s and alarmed the ministers. Condemned for heresy, she was driven out in 1638.

Massachusetts State House, front of the East Wing, Beacon St · Free

Sylvia Shaw Judson’s quiet seated bronze of Mary Dyer has sat on the east lawn, looking toward Beacon Street, since 1959, paid for by a descendant’s bequest. When the Boston church cast out Anne Hutchinson, Dyer rose and walked out at her friend’s side. Later she became a Quaker, though Massachusetts had outlawed the faith, and three times she returned to Boston to testify for freedom of worship. The colony banished her twice. On her third return, in 1660, it hanged her.

Massachusetts State House, second floor, outside Doric Hall, 24 Beacon St

Hours Mon–Fri 8:45 a.m.–5 p.m.; free tours 10 a.m.–3:30 p.m. · Admission Free

Six bronze busts look out from a long wall of two-toned marble beside Doric Hall: Lucy Stone, Dorothea Dix, Sarah Parker Remond, Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin, Florence Luscomb and Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, with lines of their own writing carved into the stone. The designers Sheila Levrant de Bretteville and Susan Sellers created it, and it was unveiled in 1999, three years after the legislature admitted that women barely figured in the State House art collection.

In this book: Massachusetts State House

Massachusetts State House, second floor, 24 Beacon St

Hours Mon–Fri 8:45 a.m.–5 p.m.; free tours 10 a.m.–3:30 p.m. · Admission Free

The bronze at the heart of Nurses Hall, a nurse caring for a wounded soldier, was a 1914 gift of the Massachusetts Daughters of Veterans. Two plaques behind it name two nurses: Clara Barton, who tended Civil War soldiers and in 1881 founded the American Red Cross, and Frances Slanger, a Boston Army nurse who reached Normandy with a field hospital in 1944 and died under enemy fire that October. After her death, Stars and Stripes printed her letter in praise of the GIs.

In this book: Massachusetts State House

Massachusetts State House, third floor, Senate Chamber, 24 Beacon St

Hours Mon–Fri 8:45 a.m.–5 p.m.; free tours 10 a.m.–3:30 p.m. · Admission Free

Women could petition this legislature generations before they could vote for it. In February 1838 Angelina Grimké spoke to a committee of the legislature for a women’s antislavery petition bearing 20,000 signatures, the first woman to address an American legislative body; her sister Sarah’s Letters on the Equality of the Sexes appeared that year. In 1843 Dorothea Dix told lawmakers how mentally ill people were suffering in the state’s jails and almshouses. The free weekday docent tours take in both chambers.

In this book: Massachusetts State House

10½ Beacon St

Hours Mon–Thu 9 a.m.–8 p.m., Fri–Sat 9 a.m.–5 p.m. · Admission First floor $11; ages 13 and under $5

Amy Lowell roamed this membership library freely as a child, and when the trustees proposed tearing the building down in 1903 she led the fight to save it. She was also the first woman on its board, and she became a leading Imagist poet. The collection has women in it too: Harriet Hosmer’s sculpture Puck and Owl; a portrait of the scholar Hannah Adams, the first woman given reading privileges here; and John Singer Sargent’s portrait of the salon hostess Annie Adams Fields.

In this book: Boston Athenaeum

5 Park St · Free

In 1973 the present building hosted the first monthly meetings of 9 to 5, a union for women office workers. The building before it held the New England Women’s Club and the Woman’s Journal, the suffrage weekly that Lucy Stone wanted as close to the State House as she could get it. Stone famously kept her own surname when she married Henry Blackwell, and their daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell, edited the Journal from 1883 until 1917.

Hamilton Pl, off Tremont St · Free

In the late 1800s the short blocks between Tremont and Washington streets, Temple Place, Winter Street and Hamilton Place, were Boston’s dressmaking and millinery row, and women owned many of the shops. Dress reform parlors arrived in the 1880s, selling less constricting clothes such as the emancipation waist. Irish-born Ellen Hartnett worked for a milliner in 1860; 25 years later she owned a shop and had capital behind it. The dressmaker Josephine McCluskey, hoping for a finer clientele, renamed herself “Miss Delavenue.”

Tremont St, beside Park Street Church

Hours Daily about 9 a.m.–4 p.m. · Admission Free

The granite obelisk at the center of the Granary marks the grave of Benjamin Franklin’s parents; his mother, Abiah, also bore Jane Franklin Mecom (stop 23). Boston lore adds a more famous mother. Elizabeth Foster Vergoose, a widow, supposedly kept her grandchildren amused with rhymes, which her son-in-law, the printer Thomas Fleet, is said to have printed as Mother Goose. Enjoy the tale, but no stone marks her, no copy of Fleet’s book has ever surfaced, and the rhymes probably originated in France or England.

In this book: Granary Burying Ground

120 Tremont St at Bromfield St (Suffolk University Law School) · Free

Suffolk University’s law school fills the corner where the Studio Building stood; Edmonia Lewis worked there from 1863 to 1865. Born free, of African American and Chippewa descent, she made emancipation her central theme, then joined the women sculptors gathered around the actress Charlotte Cushman in Rome. Her Forever Free, a couple breaking their chains, is at Howard University. Pride in her Chippewa roots drew her to Longfellow, author of Hiawatha; her bust of him is at Harvard’s Fogg Museum.

88 Tremont St · Free

In March 1885 Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, was given 10 minutes on this site to rebut the Boston ministers she had angered by teaching that men and women stand as equals before God. She spoke in the hall that preceded today’s, long a platform for women campaigning against slavery and drink and for the vote. Mary Rice Livermore made her first suffrage speech there in 1869, and her Boston lectures in 1874 spurred women to form the Massachusetts Women’s Christian Temperance Union.

45 School St · Free

Boston women helped run the city’s schools while still barred from the polls. Pushed by the New England Women’s Club, the city’s all-male voters put six women on the School Committee in 1875, when it met here in what was then City Hall. Abby May won the girls a Latin School of their own; when she lost her seat, women statewide petitioned and in 1879 won a vote in school elections. Lucretia Crocker, another of the six, became the Boston schools’ first woman supervisor.

Pemberton Square, outside the John Adams Courthouse · Free

Jennie Loitman Barron spent more than 30 years as a judge. Named to the Boston Municipal Court in 1937, she was the first woman in Massachusetts to hold a full-time judgeship; two decades later she became the Superior Court’s first woman justice and served there into 1969, the year she died. Earlier she had exposed run-down school buildings as a Boston School Committee member in the late 1920s and, as counsel to the League of Women Voters, won the argument for women on juries.

Site of 34 Howard St, now Center Plaza, Government Center · Free

In 1853 Sarah Parker Remond, granddaughter of a free Black Revolutionary War veteran, bought a ticket to Donizetti’s Don Pasquale at the Howard Athenaeum, refused a segregated seat and was forcibly removed. She sued and won $500, then lectured against slavery on both sides of the Atlantic and later trained as a physician in Florence. The Howard, long Scollay Square’s best-known theater, is gone: urban renewal cleared the district for Government Center, and Center Plaza covers the site.

City Hall Plaza · Free

Under the plaza in front of City Hall lies colonial Brattle Square, where John and Abigail Adams lived with their young children from about 1768 to 1771; the Boston Massacre broke out a short walk away in 1770. Through the long years when public duties kept John away, Abigail ran the farm, the household and the family money, and her letters to him made her famous. Mercy Otis Warren, one of the friends she wrote to, brought out a three-volume history of the Revolution in 1805.

Carmen Park, Union St at Congress St

Hours Open 24 hours · Admission Free

Six glass towers stand in a row down this narrow park, etched with six million numbers, and steam rises from the grates as you walk beneath them. Dozens of Boston women helped plan and fund the memorial, dedicated in October 1995, among them Nazi camp survivors who had rebuilt their lives here. It remembers all 11 million people killed for their race, religion, nationality, disability or sexual orientation, and honors those who helped survivors.

In this book: Holocaust Memorial (New England Holocaust Memorial)

Faneuil Hall Square

Hours Great Hall Wed–Sun 10 a.m.–4:30 p.m.; closed for city events · Admission Free

Women filled Faneuil Hall and the market beside it for every sort of cause. The Women’s Trade Union League was born here in 1903, and here in 1879 Susette La Flesche, an Omaha activist, condemned the reservation system. Suffragists answered the Tea Party’s centennial in 1873 with a Woman’s Tea Party. Earlier, antislavery bazaars filled the buildings through the 1830s and 1840s, and in 1840 a weeklong fair inspired by Sarah Josepha Hale took in $30,000, enough to complete the Bunker Hill Monument.

In this book: Faneuil Hall

Near Court St and Washington St (colonial Corn Hill and Queen Street) · Free

Scottish-born Elizabeth Murray was 23 when she reached Boston in 1749. Near this corner, then Corn Hill, she opened a shop selling British cloth and dry goods that soon made her fully self-supporting, rare for a colonial woman. Married three times but childless, she raised her nieces to be independent and helped them and other women of modest means set up shops. Usefulness, she told a friend, mattered more than being one of the age’s fine, delicate creatures.

Spring Ln, off Washington St · Free

Mary Chilton was about 13 when she crossed on the Mayflower in 1620, and tradition, with no record behind it, makes her the first European woman to set foot on Plymouth’s shore. She married John Winslow, raised 10 children with him and moved to Boston with the family in the 1650s. She died in 1679. A plaque on Spring Lane marks the site of their house, and she lies two blocks away in King’s Chapel Burying Ground, beside the governors.

Corner of School St and Washington St (283 Washington St)

Hours Exterior only · Admission Free

Anne Hutchinson, whose statue opens this walk, lived on this corner in the mid-1630s, across the street from Governor John Winthrop, and held the women’s prayer meetings that worried the ministers in her house here. It burned in the Great Fire of 1711. The brick building now on the site housed Ticknor and Fields, the publishers at the heart of The Boston Literary Walk, and their authors had a hostess of their own: Annie Adams Fields, wife of the publisher James T. Fields, gathered them at 148 Charles Street.

In this book: Old Corner Bookstore

Corner of School St and Washington St · Free

The trail uses this plaza to honor Irish women, Annie Sullivan Macy above all. The daughter of poor Irish immigrants, she was going blind when she left the state almshouse in Tewksbury for the Perkins School for the Blind. While she was a student there, two operations restored enough sight for her to read; she graduated first in her class and became Helen Keller’s lifelong teacher. The memorial’s two bronze families are stop 5 of The Irish Heritage Trail.

310 Washington St

Hours Daily from 10 a.m., closing at 5 or 6 p.m. by season (6 p.m. in Oct, 5 p.m. Nov–Dec); closed Thanksgiving, Dec 24–25 and Jan 1; occasional event closures · Admission $18 adults; $16 seniors 65+; $10 ages 6–17; 5 and under free; one ticket also covers the Old State House and includes the Ruckus! show

Revolutionary Boston packed this meeting house for its protest meetings, yet a century later Old South was sold for scrap. A group of women stepped in and bought the building, and the philanthropist Mary Hemenway gave $100,000 toward saving it, a gift that made her an early leader of historic preservation in America. Long before, Phillis Wheatley had belonged to this congregation. Bought as a child by the Wheatley family, she became, in 1773, the first African American to publish a book of poetry.

In this book: Old South Meeting House

17 Milk St · Free

The trail claims this spot, Benjamin Franklin’s birthplace, as that of his youngest sister, Jane, too, though other accounts put her 1712 birth at the family’s next house, the Blue Ball on Union Street. She was Ben’s favorite family correspondent. Jane Franklin Mecom raised nine children and many grandchildren; widowed in 1765, she took in boarders near the Old State House, legislators among them, who kept her up on politics. At 76 she was content with little: early nights, a good fire, homemade bread.

Franklin St at Federal St · Free

In 1802 Deborah Sampson took the stage of the Federal Street Theatre, which stood at this corner, to tell how she had fought in the Revolution disguised as a man, Robert Shurtleff. Susanna Haswell Rowson, author of Charlotte Temple, America’s first best-selling novel, had acted here in 1796–97, late in a career credited with 129 stage parts, many in her own plays. Leaving the stage in 1797, she opened a Young Ladies Academy nearby, one of the first schools to teach girls beyond the elementary level.

100 Federal St · Free

The Federal Street Church stood here, and in William Ellery Channing’s day two of its members were among Boston’s fiercest abolitionists. Maria Weston Chapman helped launch the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, ran 22 of its yearly antislavery fairs, a series begun in 1834, and in 1840 joined the American Anti-Slavery Society’s executive committee. Eliza Lee Cabot Follen wrote antislavery hymns and moral tales for children; her A Letter to Mothers in Free States told women they could end slavery.

Franklin St at Arch St · Free

Franklin Street curves because it follows the Tontine Crescent, Charles Bulfinch’s arc of townhouses, begun in 1793, named Franklin Place and for a time the smartest address in town; Arch Street ran through an archway at its center. Judith Sargent Murray moved into No. 5 in 1794. Writing as the Gleaner, she made the case that women deserved an education equal to men’s and the means to support themselves. Abby May, later of the School Committee, lived there as a young woman.