This week we’re digging into our archives to bring you discussions of three Bostonian ladies who forged new paths for women. Katherine Nanny Naylor was granted the first divorce in the Massachusetts Bay Colony, allowing her to ditch an abusive husband and make her way as an entrepreneur. Annette Kellerman was a professional swimmer who popularized the one-piece swimming suit and made a (sometimes literal) splash in vaudeville and silent films. And Amelia Earhart took to the skies after humble beginnings as a social worker in a Boston settlement house.
Tag: women
Mary Dyer, the Quaker Martyr (episode 108)
Mary Dyer was an early Puritan settler of Boston. Born in England, Mary moved to Boston in 1635 and was soon drawn to the Quaker religion, in part because of the opportunities it afforded women to learn and lead. New laws forbade her from professing her faith publicly. Not one to back down, Mary was arrested and banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony several times before finally being hanged on Boston Neck, becoming one of our city’s four Quaker martyrs. Today, a statue of Mary Dyer stands in front of the State House, just to the right of the Hooker entrance.
Miss Mack, from Wellesley to the WAVES (episode 106)
In honor of Veterans Day, we’re talking about the women who served in World War II in a Navy outfit called the WAVES. Specifically, their commanding officer, Mildred McAfee (later Mildred McAfee Horton). When the war started, she was president of Wellesley College, but before it was over, she would be the first woman to become a commissioned officer in the US Navy, commanding a force of nearly 100,000 people.
Continue reading Miss Mack, from Wellesley to the WAVES (episode 106)
The Girl in Pantaloons (episode 105)
Emma Snodgrass defied the gender roles of the 1850s, getting arrested multiple times in Boston for appearing in public unchaperoned and dressed as a man. Was she a troublemaker looking for thrills? Was she trying to pass as a man in order to find work and independence in a society with few opportunities for women? Or was she a trans person in an era that didn’t yet have words to describe that concept? Unfortunately, the historic record leaves us with just as many questions as answers.
Margaret Sanger, Uncensored (episode 98)
This week, we’re discussing Margaret Sanger’s thwarted attempt to present a lecture on birth control to the good citizens of Boston in April of 1929. The 1920s were a fairly liberating time for women – women were voting, drinking alcohol socially, cutting their hair short, and dancing the Charleston in short dresses. However, Boston was slow to let its hair down under the stern gaze of the Watch and Ward Society, and birth control remained one of the ultimate taboos.
Amelia Earhart in Boston (episode 94)
You probably know about Amelia Earhart’s famous career as a groundbreaking aviator, and you almost certainly know about her famous disappearance over the Pacific. But you may not know about Amelia Earhart’s first career as a social worker in one of Boston’s many settlement houses. This week, we discuss her early exposure to aviation, the famed Friendship crossing, and also her reflections on her career of service to newly immigrated Americans.
Bathing Beauty Baffles Bashful Boston (episode 82)
We’re taking you to the beach for Memorial Day weekend. 111 years ago, champion swimmer Annette Kellerman was arrested on Revere Beach. Her crime? Appearing in public in a one piece bathing suit of her own design. Along with being a record setting swimmer, Kellerman was a fitness and wellness guru, a vaudeville producer, movie actress, and a clothing designer. Besides her athletic prowess, she was known for her physical beauty, appearing in Hollywood’s first nude scene. A Harvard professor would go so far as to claim that he had scientific proof that she was “the most beautifully formed woman of modern times.” Puritanical Boston wasn’t prepared to see the exposed arms of such a specimen, so Kellerman was arrested for indecent exposure.
Continue reading Bathing Beauty Baffles Bashful Boston (episode 82)
Rat Day (Ep72)
The Boston Women’s Municipal League was a civic organization made up of mostly middle and upper class women, at a time when most women didn’t work outside the home. In 1915, they declared war on rats. Over the next few years, Women’s Municipal League published literature on eradicating rats, carried out an extensive education campaign, and in 1917 hosted a city-wide Rat Day with cash prizes for the citizens who killed the most rats.
Episode 58: Harvard’s Human Computers Reach for the Stars
During an era more associated with the Wild West, a group of women in Cambridge made historic advances in the field of astronomy, discovering new stars and fundamental principles about how our universe works. In the beginning, they were treated as menial clerical workers and paid a fraction of what their male counterparts got. Only decades later did they win academic respect, earning advanced degrees and finally the title Professor. They were the Human Computers of the Harvard University Observatory.
Continue reading Episode 58: Harvard’s Human Computers Reach for the Stars
Episode 53: The Radical Heywoods
This week’s show profiles Angela and Ezra Heywood: writers, activists, free-love advocates, suffragists, socialists, labor reformers, and abolitionists who shocked the sensibilities of Victorian Boston.