Tag: women

Cotton Mather and the Women He Loved, with Helen Gelinas (episode 296)

I’m pleased to share a recent talk called “Cotton Mather and the Women He Loved” that was part of the Congregational Library and Archive’s Valentines Day celebration. Helen Gelinas spoke about Cotton Mather and the women he was closest to: his three wives, his daughters, and his sisters, as well as his lifelong mission to understand the biblical Eve, the prototype for all women in his universe.  Helen examined who he was behind closed doors, as a husband and father, and she challenged us to reconsider our assumptions that Cotton Mather would have been a tyrant over his wife and a strong disciplinarian who ruled his children with a rod. She also shared the surprising insight that between wives, Cotton Mather was one of Boston’s most eligible widowers, who was pursued aggressively by suitors.


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“This Perilous Hour of Trial, Horror & Distress”: Loyalist Exile and Return in Revolutionary Massachusetts, with Dr. Patrick O’Brien (episode 285)

In this episode, professor Patrick O’Brien of the University of Tampa will be examining the loyalist experience of our Revolutionary War, mostly from the perspectives of women and enslaved African Americans. From our vantage point 250 years later, it’s easy to view the War for Independence as a simple story of good and bad.  The good patriots battled the bad British from Lexington to Yorktown, until we had a country to call our own.  Look a little closer, however, and the story isn’t so simple.  Many of the tens of thousands of loyalists who were eventually forced to flee the new United States had roots that went back a century and a half in this country, every bit as long as the patriots who drove them out.  And, as Dr. O’Brien points out, many of those who left everything behind to start new lives in London or Halifax didn’t really have much say in the matter, as enslaved people, indigenous groups, and women were more or less forced to adopt the political positions of the white men in their lives.  Dr. O’Brien will bring those stories to light by focusing on a few prominent Boston loyalist families.

This talk was delivered as part of Old North Illuminated’s Digital Speaker Series.  Many thanks to ONI and Dr. O’Brien for sharing it with us.


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Annie’s Restaurant (episode 269)

Annie L. Burton was an entrepreneur and restaurateur, who moved to Boston as a young woman after spending her childhood enslaved on an Alabama plantation.  Annie spent decades as a domestic servant, first in the south, and then in the north, in Newton, the South End, Wellesley, Jamaica Plain, and other neighborhoods in and around Boston.  For most Black women in the years and decades after emancipation, cooking, cleaning, raising children, and washing and ironing for white families were among the only opportunities available for paid work, making Annie’s experience utterly typical.  Two things make her life unique: her decision to bet on herself and open a series of restaurants, first in Florida, then in Park Square in Boston, and then in a number of New England resort towns; and her decision, just after the turn of the 20th century, to put pen to page and write her story down and publish it, preserving the details of her life in a way that wasn’t available to most of her peers.


Continue reading Annie’s Restaurant (episode 269)

The First Ladies Forum (episode 243)

This week, the show gets a visit from four veteran historical interpreters who have joined forces on a new collaborative project called The First Ladies Forum.  Together, they portray four of America’s First Ladies, including both interpreters and First Ladies with ties to Boston.  We’ll discuss the lives of Dolley Madison (portrayed by Judith Kalaora), Louisa Catherine Adams (portrayed by Laura Rocklyn), Mary Lincoln (portrayed by Laura Keyes), and Jacqueline Kennedy (portrayed by Leslie Goddard) and how the actors choose to embody them.  We’ll also talk more broadly about what it’s like to be a costumed historical interpreter and the role of historical interpretation in helping people understand the people and events of America’s past.


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Julia Child, from the OSS to PBS (episode 222)

At the outbreak of World War II, president Roosevelt decided to create a single centralized agency to organize the nation’s many competing intelligence services. Not the CIA, which would come a few years later, but the Office of Strategic Services. Before the CIA, the OSS was America’s chief spy service. And before Julia Child was a famous chef on PBS, young Julia McWilliams was recruited by the OSS, where she traveled the world and fell in love with Paul Child and exotic food. Listen to this week’s episode to learn about Julia Child at war: how she was recruited and trained, where she served in the Asian theater of war, and why that experience helped lead her to a Cambridge house with its now famous kitchen.


Continue reading Julia Child, from the OSS to PBS (episode 222)

The Last Women Jailed for Suffrage (episode 173)

On February 24, 1919, President Woodrow Wilson visited Boston on his way home from the peace conference that ended World War I, expecting to find adoring supporters.  Instead, he was greeted by members of the National Women’s Party. After a long campaign that had the 19th amendment on the verge of passing, they now blamed Wilson for dragging his feet and shifting his attention from suffrage to the peace treaty and the League of Nations.  The protesters marched to the Massachusetts State House, where they refused to disperse for the president’s arrival. 25 women were arrested and taken to the Charles Street Jail, where sixteen of them would become known as the last women to be jailed for suffrage.


Continue reading The Last Women Jailed for Suffrage (episode 173)

Little Women in Boston (episode 171)

You don’t grow up to walk two steps behind your husband when you’ve met Jo March. The same could be said of Louisa May Alcott, in which case you may not take a husband at all, choosing instead to paddle your own canoe. It has been said that, with the penning of the semi-autobiographical novel Little Women, Alcott launched the notion of the of the All American Girl. With both Sewall and Quincy ancestry, a sharp mind coupled with a determination to succeed, and a life guided by progressive values, Alcott herself was certainly an All Boston Girl. Learn about Louisa May Alcott’s long journey to overnight success, and hear how Sirena Abalian portrays Jo in the Wheelock Family Theater’s production of Little Women, the Musical.


Continue reading Little Women in Boston (episode 171)

The Millen Gang Machine Gun Murders (episode 170)

86 years ago today, on February 2, 1934, the first murders were committed in Massachusetts using a fully automatic weapon.  Sadly, the victims were the first police officers to be killed in the line of duty in the sleepy Boston suburb of Needham.  At the center of the case were a stolen Tommy gun, a pair of brothers, and a ragtag assortment of followers. Before it was all over, the Millen-Faber gang would be tied to at least five murders, a long string of robberies, and an attempted jailbreak.  Three of the crew would be sentenced to death, and the shocking spectacle of military grade weapons being used on the streets of a quiet Boston suburb would stoke the already raging debate about gun control and the 1934 federal firearms act.


Continue reading The Millen Gang Machine Gun Murders (episode 170)

Trunk Tragedy in the City of Shoes (episode 169)

In February 1879, Jennie Clarke’s body was found jammed into a leather trunk on the bank of the Saugus river on her 20th birthday. Every detail of the case reveals yet another tragedy in the life of Jennie Clarke, who died after attempting to terminate an unwanted pregnancy, and it reveals the unexpectedly permissive approach of Massachusetts law to abortion in the mid-1800s.  


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Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement, with Barbara Berenson (episode 168)

Author Barbara F. Berenson joins us this week to discuss her book  Massachusetts in the Woman Suffrage Movement: Revolutionary Reformers. She’s also the author of Boston in the Civil War: Hub of the Second Revolution, and Walking Tours of Civil War Boston: Hub of Abolitionism. In the interview, she tells us about the critical roles that Massachusetts women played in the fight for women’s right to vote and step fully into the public sphere.


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