Topic: Women
Women’s issues, suffrage, girls, anyone using she/her pronouns
The Hotel Waterston, built in 1874 through a remodeling and expansion of the Charles Bulfinch House on 8 Bulfinch Place in the West End, maintained Bulfinch’s facade while adding additional stories. The Waterston had many prominent guests, including Walt Whitman, during the late nineteenth century, and the hotel stayed in business until it was demolished by urban renewal in 1961.
The West End branch of the Land League made political and financial contributions to the original Land League in Ireland, an organization of tenant farmers and Irish nationalists that resisted high rents and evictions in the 1880s.
Chloe Russell, a Black woman who owned property on Belknap Street in the West End during the nineteenth century, was the attributed author of The Complete Fortune Teller and Dream Book in an era when fortune telling and dream interpretation was popular and entertaining.
Adelaide Cromwell, the late sociologist who taught at Boston University and founded BU’s African American Studies program in 1969, documented and visualized the West End’s historic Black community in the 1800s.
At the age of five, Sarah Roberts was at the center of a lawsuit against racially segregated public schools in Boston in 1847. Roberts, a Black girl, was denied the equal right to attend the public school of her choice, forced instead to walk past five public schools to the Black-only Abiel Smith School in the old West End.
Marilyn Hurvitz, an eleven-year-old girl of Polish descent in the West End, took pride in growing a vegetable garden that was ordinarily inaccessible in tenement life.
Harrison & Sally Otis Harrison Grey Otis was a major political and business figure in Boston during the Federalist Period. He is best known as a supporter of Charles Bulfinch, as Boston’s third mayor, and as a leader of the Hartford Convention. His wife, Sally, was a skilled socialite and hostess, who provided significant support for…
One of the West End’s most prominent settlement houses, the EPH served as a community center, education space, and more for more than half a century in the West End, and continues its work today in Somerville.
