The Boston Women's Heritage Trail is a series of walking tours in Boston, Massachusetts, leading past sites important to Boston women's history. The tours wind through several neighborhoods, including the Back Bay and Beacon Hill, commemorating women such as Abigail Adams, Amelia Earhart, and Phillis Wheatley. The guidebook includes seven walks and introduces more than 200 Boston women. [1]
The BWHT was created in 1989 by a group of Boston schoolteachers, librarians, and students. It is funded by the nonprofit Boston Educational Development Foundation. The BWHT presents teacher workshops, guided walks, and other activities to promote women's history. [2]
The list of BWHT walking tours currently includes tours of the Back Bay (East), Back Bay (West), Beacon Hill, Charlestown, Chinatown/South Cove, Dorchester, Downtown, Jamaica Plain, Lower Roxbury, Roxbury, the South End, and West Roxbury. It also includes the Artists Walk, which focuses on local women artists, and the Ladies Walk, which commemorates Abigail Adams, Lucy Stone, and Phillis Wheatley. [3]
The Artists walk centers on the Back Bay, where many women artists have lived, worked, and exhibited. The walk was designed to complement the 2001 Museum of Fine Arts exhibition, A Studio of Her Own: Women Artists in Boston 1870–1940. Women mentioned include Helen M. Knowlton, Anne Whitney, and others. [4]
The Back Bay East walk begins and ends at the Public Garden. Women mentioned include: [5]
Also mentioned are Fisher College, Simmons College, and the Winsor School.
This walk starts at the Boston Public Library in Copley Square and ends at the Boston Women's Memorial on the Commonwealth Avenue mall. Women mentioned include: [6]
The Beacon Hill walk begins at the State House and winds through Beacon Hill, often in parallel with the Black Heritage Trail. Women mentioned include: [7]
Women mentioned on the Charlestown walk include: [8]
The Chinatown/South Cove walk begins at the Boston Common Visitor Center, passes through Chinatown, and ends at Park Square. Women mentioned include: [9]
The Uphams Corner walk in Dorchester, developed by students at Codman Academy, is the first in a planned series of Dorchester walks. Women mentioned include: [10]
Starting at the State House and ending at the corner of Franklin and Washington Streets, the Downtown walk passes some of Boston's oldest historic sites. Women mentioned include: [11]
Women mentioned on the Jamaica Plain walk include: [12]
The Ladies Walk celebrates the lives of First Lady Abigail Adams, suffragist Lucy Stone, and poet Phillis Wheatley. It starts at the Boston Women's Memorial on Commonwealth Avenue and ends at Faneuil Hall. [13]
Women mentioned on the Lower Roxbury walk include: [14]
The North End walk begins at Faneuil Hall, passes through the North End, and ends at St. Leonard's Church, one of the first Italian churches in the U.S. It overlaps at several points with the Freedom Trail. Women mentioned on this walk include: [15]
Women mentioned on the Roxbury walk include: [16]
The South End walk starts at Back Bay Station and ends at the Boston Center for the Arts. Women mentioned on the Sound End walk include: [17]
Women mentioned on the West Roxbury walk include: [19]
Forest Hills Cemetery is a historic 275-acre (111.3 ha) rural cemetery, greenspace, arboretum, and sculpture garden in the Forest Hills section of Jamaica Plain, a neighborhood in Boston, Massachusetts. The cemetery was established in 1848 as a public municipal cemetery for Roxbury, Massachusetts, but was privatized when Roxbury was annexed to Boston in 1868.
Judith Winsor Smith was an American women's suffrage activist, social reformer, and abolitionist. She was involved in the suffrage movement until the Nineteenth Amendment was passed in 1920, when she voted for the first time at the age of 99. She was a founder and the first president of the Home Club of East Boston, one of the first women's clubs in Massachusetts.
Harriet is a female name.
Boston Latin Academy (BLA) is a public exam school founded in 1878 in Boston, Massachusetts providing students in grades 7th through 12th a classical preparatory education.
Anne Whitney was an American sculptor and poet. She made full-length and bust sculptures of prominent political and historical figures, and her works are in major museums in the United States. She received prestigious commissions for monuments. Two statues of Samuel Adams were made by Whitney and are located in Washington, D.C.'s National Statuary Hall Collection and in front of Faneuil Hall in Boston. She also created two monuments to Leif Erikson.
Virginia Women in History was an annual program sponsored by the Library of Virginia that honored Virginia women, living and dead, for their contributions to their community, region, state, and nation. The program began in 2000 under the aegis of the Virginia Foundation for Women and Delta Kappa Gamma Society International; from 2006 to 2020 it was administered by the Library of Virginia. In 2021, it was replaced by the Strong Men and Women in Virginia History program.
The National Park System preserves and interprets the history of women in American society. Many national parks, monuments and historic sites represent America's women's history as a primary theme, while numerous others address American women's history somewhere in their programs and preservation activities. The lists of sites below is not exhaustive, but includes sites closely related to themes in U.S. Women's History. Click here for an article on Women in the National Park Service.
The Salem Women's Heritage Trail was created in 2000 by local historians, curators, librarians, and interested citizens to remember the women who have contributed to the development of Salem, Massachusetts for over four centuries since colonial times and far beyond when Native Americans occupied "Naumkeag," as Salem was originally called. Salem is known the world over for the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, but this walking trail discusses many more women's stories.
The Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (1833–1840) was an abolitionist, interracial organization in Boston, Massachusetts, in the mid-19th century. "During its brief history ... it orchestrated three national women's conventions, organized a multistate petition campaign, sued southerners who brought slaves into Boston, and sponsored elaborate, profitable fundraisers."
African-American women began to agitate for political rights in the 1830s, creating the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, and New York Female Anti-Slavery Society. These interracial groups were radical expressions of women's political ideals, and they led directly to voting rights activism before and after the Civil War. Throughout the 19th century, African-American women such as Harriet Forten Purvis, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper worked on two fronts simultaneously: reminding African-American men and white women that Black women needed legal rights, especially the right to vote.
Harriet Forten Purvis was an African-American abolitionist and first generation suffragist. With her mother and sisters, she formed the first biracial women's abolitionist group, the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. She hosted anti-slavery events at her home and with her husband Robert Purvis ran an Underground Railroad station. Robert and Harriet also founded the Gilbert Lyceum. She fought against segregation and for the right for blacks to vote after the Civil War.
Florida Ruffin Ridley was an African-American civil rights activist, suffragist, teacher, writer, and editor from Boston, Massachusetts. She was one of the first black public schoolteachers in Boston, and edited The Woman's Era, the country's first newspaper published by and for African-American women.
Until 1950, African Americans were a small but historically important minority in Boston, where the population was majority white. Since then, Boston's demographics have changed due to factors such as immigration, white flight, and gentrification. According to census information for 2010–2014, an estimated 180,657 people in Boston are Black/African American, either alone or in combination with another race. Despite being in the minority, and despite having faced housing, educational, and other discrimination, African Americans in Boston have made significant contributions in the arts, politics, and business since colonial times.
Fern Cunningham was an American sculptor. One of her best known works is the Harriet Tubman Memorial, which was the first statue honoring a woman on city-owned land in Boston.
Sarah Davids Bills Fish (1798–1868) was a 19th-century American suffragist and abolitionist. She has been variously known as Sarah Fish, Sarah D. Fish, Sarah David Bills, and Sarah David Bills Fish.
Further reading