Topic: Women
Women’s issues, suffrage, girls, anyone using she/her pronouns
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.
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.
Mary Antin, a Russian Jewish immigrant at the turn of the twentieth century, was a notable author who lived briefly in the tenements shared by immigrants in the old West End.
Rebecca Lee Crumpler was the first African-American woman to receive an M.D. degree, overcoming the dual discrimination of racism and sexism. She briefly resided on Joy Street at the north slope of Beacon Hill.
