At the turn of the century, “Boston marriages” enabled women to live independently from men. These relationships were common among educated female employees of settlement houses in Boston and in the greater United States. In the West End, evidence for these relationships can be found among the literary women of the period.
Inviting all West End residents! Stop by WEM on September 25th to meet your neighbors.
Come by and see all the entries from WEM’s Summer Art Competition! Winners will be announced.
A Beatles anniversary concert! Studio Two will faithfully perform the setlist from The Beatles’ 1964 concert at the Boston Garden.
F. O. Matthiessen was a literary critic and Harvard professor who lived in the historic West End from 1939 until his death in 1950. His life and work were heavily influenced by his identity as a gay man and his twenty-year relationship with the artist Russell Cheney, even though they were, for all intents and purposes, secret. Matthiessen is credited with founding the discipline of American Studies, and his major works explore key figures of nineteenth-century American literature through the historical context that shaped their writings.
Boston, like its West End, is no stranger to marked population changes. Recent studies have predicted further transformations for Boston’s and Massachusetts’ populations that could have meaningful economic and political impacts. Such changes, current and future, are influenced by various interrelated factors: immigration patterns, cost of living, major disruptors, anchor institutions, and global population growth rate.
Bernard Berenson (1865-1959) was a Lithuanian-born, West-End-raised art historian and commercial art dealer specializing in the Italian Renaissance. His knowledge and expert connoisseurship greatly impacted the art world of the 19th and 20th centuries, and his dealings with wealthy Americans bolstered the flow of Old Masters into the country. His publications on Italian Renaissance artists were hugely successful and are still used in classrooms today.
