The Williams Sisters
The Williams Sisters occupied the Otis House in the mid 19th century, operating the grand Bulfinch Mansion as a boarding house.
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Topic: Women
Women’s issues, suffrage, girls, anyone using she/her pronouns
Eva Whiting White
Eva Whiting White was Director of the Elizabeth Peabody House for nearly 3 decades from 1922 to 1950.
Harriet Tubman and the Boston Anti-Slavery Movement
Harriet Tubman, a self-emancipated slave, remains the most famous and successful Underground Railroad conductor in United States history. She played an important role in Boston as an emancipator and activist for African Americans and women.
Maria Stewart
One of the first American women of any race to give a public address in the nineteenth century, Stewart was one of Boston’s prominent Black abolitionists who lived on the north slope of Beacon Hill in the 1830s.
Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin and George Ruffin
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.
Elizabeth Peabody
Elizabeth Peabody was a teacher, publisher, and writer, who introduced kindergarten in the United States on Pickney Street.
Dr. and Elizabeth Mott
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.
Annie Londonderry
Annie Londonderry was a Latvian Jewish immigrant who became the first woman to bike around the world, and the first internationally recognized female athletic star.