Boston+Side+Trips

** Boston Side Trips **
 * Travel Recommendations for the Feminist Conference Goer:**
 * Places In and Around Boston to Visit During Your Free Time at ALA Midwinter 2016toc**

see also Remember the Ladies: A Walk through Boston Women's History, by Heather Soltroff


 * Boston is a city that is teeming with history.** Walk down any sidewalk and it is likely that you will see at least one historic marker. With its easy-to-navigate public transportation system and walkable neighborhoods, Boston is a great place to explore -- even in January, if you bundle up!

We've highlighted a sampling of places of interest, but the folks at the Boston Women's Heritage Trail have done an excellent job of organizing walking tours of the city, with tours focusing on specific neighborhoods. The tours are accessible at [], as well as a downloadable app of the walking tours [].

This memorial incorporates three bronze sculptures of important women in the history of Boston and the United States.. The first, Abigail Adams, served as confidante and advisor to her husband, President John Adams, and was a strong advocate of women’s rights. The second, poet Phillis Wheatley, became the first published African-American after being kidnapped from her family and enslaved as a child in Senegal and then sold as property to a couple in Massachusetts. The final figure is abolitionist and suffragist Lucy Stone, known for being the first woman to keep her own last name after marriage and one of the first American women to earn a college degree – which she personally funded.
 * [[image:boston.jpg width="220" height="127" align="left" link="@http://www.cityofboston.gov/women/history/"]]Boston Women's Memorial** Commonwealth Avenue Mall, Boston (Between Fairfield and Gloucester Streets)

African American History The museum is housed in the former Abiel Smith School, the first public school for African-American children in the country. Located next door to the African Meeting House, the oldest extant black church building in America, both sites are part of the Black Heritage Trail located on Beacon Hill. These two sites include exhibits, talks, tours, videos, exhibits, programs, and gift store.
 * [|Museum of African American History]** The Abiel Smith School and the African Meeting House, 46 Joy Street, Beacon Hill, 617.725.0022, x330[[image:Liberator.png width="320" height="99" align="right"]]

Boston's anti-slavery paper The Liberator was founded on this site in 1831 by William Lloyd Garrison (1805-1879), a leader of the abolition movement in Boston. //The Liberator// was the voice of Boston's racially integrated anti-slavery community. It became the most influential abolitionist paper in America; contributors included Charles Sumner and Frederick Douglass. The journal moved to Cornhill in 1834; the building burned in the Great Fire of 1872.
 * //The Liberator// Office Site**, 12 Post Office Square

LGBT History This volunteer-operated organization, “established in 1980 by a group of historians, activists and archivists — is the only group focused exclusively on preserving the history of Boston’s LGBT community, and on making that history accessible to future generations. This research and preservation is of paramount importance for the LGBT community, which is often excluded from history.” The History Project produces or participates in 8-12 events or projects per year with audiences that range from a few dozen people for a presentation at the Boston Center for Adult Education to the thousands of people who have purchased and read our full-length book, //[|Improper Bostonians]// (Beacon Press). In addition, The History Project maintains research files or organizational files on Boston LGBT history from the Colonial Period to the present.
 * [|The History Project]** 29 Stanhope Street, 617-266-7733

Opened in 1938, Jacques became a gay bar in the mid-1940s. In 1965, its owner also opened, directly across the street, The Other Side, the first discotheque in the city to allow same-sex dancing. After serving as the city's only lesbian bar from the late 1960s to the early 1970s, Jacques evolved into a venue for drag performers, which remains its focus to today. Jacquees was the first stop on Boston’s first official Gay Pride march, held in 1971. At this stop, organizers read a list of demands that addressed misogyny and the poor treatment of lesbian patrons of the bar.
 * Jacques Cabaret** 79 Broadway

Women and the Arts Known as Fenway Court when Isabella and Jack Gardner made their home there, this Venice-inspired mansion is home to a collection of artwork of worldwide significance, including works that rank among the most important of their type. Isabella Stewart Gardner collected and carefully displayed a collection comprised of more than 2,500 objects—paintings, sculpture, furniture, textiles, drawings, silver, ceramics, illuminated manuscripts, rare books, photographs and letters—from ancient Rome, Medieval Europe, Renaissance Italy, Asia, the Islamic world and 19th-century France and America. The Museum itself provides an atmospheric setting for Isabella Stewart Gardner's inventive creation. Musical performances and lecture series make this a hub of cultural experience.
 * [[image:gardner.jpg width="102" height="240" align="right" caption="Isabella Stewart Gardner" link="@http://%20http://www.gardnermuseum.org/home"]]Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum ** 25 Evans Way, 617 566 1401

//The Duckling Sculpture// is favorite Boston landmark, this sculpture by Nancy Schön was created in 1987 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the Public Garden. It pays tribute to Robert McCloskey’s popular children book, written in 1941, about a family of ducks who make their home here. To reach the lagoon in the Public Garden, Mrs. Mallard, the mother duck, leads her babies across a series of dangerous streets assisted by a friendly police officer. Hence the sculpture’s alternate name, //Make Way for Ducklings//. This sculpture is one of many public works of art by women located in Boston. For a walking tour that highlights the art and the female artists of Boston, visit **Women Artists of the Back Bay** (part of the Women's Heritage Trail project) at [].
 * Make Way for Ducklings Statue**, Boston Public Garden, near Beacon St. and Charles St.

Women and Religion Anne Hutchinson arrived in the Massachusetts Bay Colony with her husband in 1634. Both of them were followers of the Anglican minister John Cotton and came to the colony in search of religious freedom. Governor John Winthrop, a staunch Puritan, envisioned the colony as a religious community, and soon the outspoken Hutchinson found herself at odds with Winthrop. Holding weekly meetings to discuss sermons and to give expression to her own theological views, Hutchinson attracted between 60-80 people to her home. Hutchinson’s criticism of local ministers led to her trial before the General Court for sedition in 1637, and before the Boston Church in 1638. As a result of these trials, she was banished from the colony and the Boston Church for blasphemy. The Anne Hutchinson Memorial Association and the State Federation of Women’s Clubs funded this statue, which highlights Hutchinson’s role as a spiritual guide to women.
 * Statues of Anne Hutchinson and Mary Dyer**, State House Grounds[[image:hurchinson.jpg width="118" height="138" align="left" caption="Statue of Anne Hutchinson"]]


 * Mary Dyer** left the Boston Church with Anne Hutchinson in 1638. While visiting England Dyer became a follower of John Fox and the Quaker faith. The Quakers had been banned from the Massachusetts Bay colony for their views, which were deemed heretical by the theocratic Puritan government. Upon her arrival back in the colony, Dyer was imprisoned and then exiled from Massachusetts by Governor Winthrop for her religious views. She returned to the colony nevertheless to visit imprisoned friends and protest her sentence. In 1660, she was hanged on the Boston Common for refusing to recant her views. The sculptor Sylvia Shaw Judson has depicted Dyer in a reserved pose with no adornment. These qualities echo the value Quakers place on simplicity in speech, dress, and other aspects of everyday life.

**Mary Baker Eddy Library** 200 Massachusetts Avenue Mary Baker Eddy founded the Church of Christ, Scientist in 1879. The Boston location, known as The Mother Church, was completed in 1894 on land deeded by Eddy. The church is located adjacent to The Christian Science Publishing Company (publisher of The Christian Science Monitor) and the Mary Baker Eddy Library. Tours of the church are available, as well as tours of the [|Mapparium] located in the Mary Baker Eddy Library.
 * First Church of Christ, Scientist** 210 Massachusetts Avenue

Women and Literature Elizabeth Peabody, the first woman publisher in Boston, maintained a home and business here in the 1840s. Her bookshop was the first in the city to offer works by foreign authors, and she published the periodical The Dial with Ralph Waldo Emerson. The shop was a meeting place for Transcendentalists and intellectuals including Bronson Alcott, William Ellery Channing and Theodore Parker. Journalist Margaret Fuller gave lectures here, called conversations, that are significant in the early history of American feminism.
 * Elizabeth** **Peabody’s Bookstore**, 13-15 West Street[[image:peabody.jpg width="138" height="180" align="right" caption="Elizabeth Peabody"]]

The Katharine Lee Bates memorial is a freestanding granite tablet inset with a bronze plaque that commemorates the “scholar, patriot, poet” who wrote the poem that became part of American culture through its publication as the song “America the Beautiful.”
 * Katherine Lee Bates Memorial**, The Fenway, east side of Agassiz Bridge (closest to downtown Boston)

Established in 1848, the Boston Public Library was the first publicly supported municipal library in America. No trip to Boston is complete without a visit to the Central Library on Copley Square. [|Tours] are available throughout the day.
 * Boston Public Library** (Central Library) 700 Boylston Street

Women and Social Reform Dorothea Lynde Dix worked tirelessly for social reform for the treatment of impoverished and mentally ill patients, and her efforts led to a revolution in patient care throughout the country in the 19th Century. This fountain, however, stands as a testament to Dix’s love of animals. In her will, Dix left five-hundred dollars to the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals to provide a drinking fountain for animals, a serious need at a time when Boston’s commerce depended on horse-drawn wagons. The Dix fountain was erected near the Custom House in 1888; it remained in place into the early twentieth century. When the Jenney Building was preserved and renovated and Jenney Park created, the park was given a replica of the original fountain. What Dix intended as a horse-trough has become a monument to her dedication to caring for those in need.
 * [|Dorothea Dix Memorial Fountain]**, Jenney Building Park (Downtown)

// **--- compiled by Rebecca Roberts** //