Women’s Groups Remaking Boston (episode 150)

This week’s show dusts off two classic stories about times in Boston history when women’s volunteer organizations had a big impact on Boston.  First, we’ll talk about the Massachusetts Emergency and Hygiene Association, whose members introduced the concept of a playground to the American public in late 19th century Boston.  Then, we’ll fast forward a few decades to the 19 – teens, when the Women’ Municipal League sponsored Boston’s first (and so far only ) Rat Day. Both of these projects made valuable contributions to Boston’s quality of life, and they happened at a time when society didn’t generally approve of women’s work outside the home.


Women’s Groups Remaking Boston

Rat Day

When Boston Invented Playgrounds

This week’s episode was inspired by a Tweet from listener Joany:

We didn’t know anything about the sandpit referenced in the linked discussion, but we dug in and learned a lot about the history of the American playground movement.

(Photos above from the Rainwater book and Lee article)

Boston Book Club

Food and wine blogger Richard Auffrey published a five part history of restaurants in Chinatown on his site The Passionate Foodie.  The whole thing starts as an attempt to identify the first Chinese restaurant in Boston. He convincingly debunks the myth, which we repeated in our episode about the great Chinatown raid, that the Hong Far Low restaurant, established 1879, was the first one.  In order to get to the bottom of which restaurant might have been the first, Auffrey researched and wrote an admirable overview of the earliest Chinese-American immigrants to call Boston their home.  

He begins with the story of a teenaged clerk for a Hong Kong tea company who was forced to be a cabin boy on a New England merchant ship in 1840, settled in Boston, and eventually became a wealthy tea merchant in his own right.  Then, he traces several generations of Chinese-American laborers and merchants from the 1840s to the founding of Boston’s Chinatown in the 1870s. He talks about the many types of businesses that were established early in Chinatown’s history, then finally identifies the first contemporaneous reference to a Chinese restaurant in the Boston Globe in 1887.  

The story doesn’t end there, however.  That’s just the first of the five parts.  The Passionate Foodie continues tracing the culinary history of restaurants in Boston’s Chinatown for another 65 years.  The second article talks about the early 20th century, and the rampant anti-Chinese bigotry in Boston and around the country at that time.  The third installment covers prohibition, the Depression, and the second world war. The fourth part focuses on an entrepreneur named Ruby Foo, and the final installment takes the story right up to the mid-1950s.  It’s a well researched series, focusing on a slice of Boston history that’s often overlooked, and it was put together by an amateur historian on the trail of culinary history.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

Upcoming Event

And for our upcoming event this week, we’re featuring Museum Day, an annual celebration sponsored by Smithsonian Magazine.  Every year, participating museums agree to provide free tickets for one day to you and a guest if you register for them through the Museum Day website.  This year, Museum Day falls on Saturday, September 21, and there are literally dozens of participating partners in the Boston area.

In Boston, you have the USS Constitution Museum, the Gibson House, the MFA, and more.  Nearby, there’s the JFK birthplace in Brookline, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology in Cambridge, the Quincy homestead in, um, Quincy, and the Eustis Estate in Milton.  Further afield, there are museums to choose from in Newton, Watertown, Waltham, Wellesley, and more. Enter your zip code on the Museum Day site and see what pops up.  Just be sure to choose wisely.  You can only get one Museum Day pass per email address.