Topic: Women
Women’s issues, suffrage, girls, anyone using she/her pronouns
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and George Ruffin were eminent African-American residents of the West End in the late nineteenth-century. Josephine’s newspaper, The Woman’s Era, was published from her home and instrumental to the founding of the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896. She was its first vice president.
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Elizabeth Peabody was a teacher, publisher, and writer, who introduced kindergarten in the United States on Pickney Street.
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Elizabeth Mott and her husband, Dr. Richard Dixon Mott, were nineteenth-century British immigrants who established a botanical medicine practice at the Otis House, located in today’s West End.
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Annie Londonderry was a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant who became the first woman to bike around the world, and the first internationally recognized female athletic star.
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Kittie Knox was a mixed-race cyclist who used her skills as a seamstress and cyclist to challenge gender and racial perceptions taking over the League of American Wheelman in the 1890’s.
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Jane Jacobs was a journalist, author, and activist who argued for the prioritization of people in urban planning projects.
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Sarah Josepha Hale was one of the most successful women in writing and publishing in nineteenth-century America, and her letters and editorials were instrumental to the creation of Thanksgiving as a national holiday. Hale is connected to the old West End because one of her poems, “Mary’s Lamb,” was set to music by Lowell Mason at the Bowdoin School.
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Veda Borg was born in the old West End, and became “Boston’s own” as an actor in many movies from the 1930s to the 1950s.
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