BOSTON — Boston is a city rich in history, from the Revolution to the site of the first public school and park. There are so many stories to tell—but did you know the history of influential women in the city wasn’t memorialized until 20 years ago? For Women’s History Month, local women are making sure their stories are told.
“It seems like we shouldn’t need it, honestly,” said Meg Campbell, one of the founders of the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail. “It seems that women’s history should just be braided into everyday history, but it’s still not.”
Campbell was inspired to tell the history of women in Boston after her daughter asked her a simple question while she was working at the State House.
‘Mom, where are the women?’ Campbell said her daughter asked. “There were no women. There was no precursor in the United States for a trail honoring women. And so that’s what was the birth of it.”
After many years of work and the help of Angela Menino, Campbell, and other founders, they created the Boston Women’s Heritage Trail—a self-guided tour of 13 sites that remember female activists who helped shape Boston and beyond.
“She said, let women’s sphere be bounded only by her capacity,” Campbell quoted what suffragist Lucy Stone once said.
One of the trail’s focal points—the Women’s Memorial on Commonwealth Ave that features Lucy Stone, Abigail Adams and Phyllis Wheatley Peters—not on a pedestal but instead showing their actions that paved the way for women.
“All of these women, these were not sit-at-home gals,” said Campbell. “These were movers and shakers and didn’t let the conventional definitions and boundaries and even tropes limit them.”
The memorial also features a QR code you can scan with your phone to hear their monologues, narrated by female elected officials. While the trails are considered a museum with no walls, the West End Museum is honoring women this month with special walking tours.
“It’s such a small area of, you know, a relatively small city, and to be able to have so much depth of history and celebrate these women and their accomplishments,” said Jaydie Halperin, the West End Museum Interpretation Manager.
Boston’s West End is just three-quarters of a square mile—but Halperin says it was the most ethnically diverse neighborhood before urban renewal.
“That kind of community, you know, lent itself to a lot of different people doing a lot of different things,” said Halperin.
Halperin is leading the women’s history walking tours this month through the West End—focusing on 11 women who were activists, fighting for change.
“We have Senda Berenson, who was known as the founder of women’s basketball,” said Halperin. “And we also have Mariah Stewart, who was an abolitionist and one of the first recorded women to give speeches to mixed audiences of men and women.”
Halperin says many of the women were either immigrants or escaped enslavement—— and put their freedom to work.
“And they ended up in this one spot and made the best of what they had and innovated and worked to make things better, which I think is just really incredible,” said Halperin.
And by learning from these brave women—is what Halperin and Campbell hope will inspire the next generation to create a better future.
“I think you can’t have a different future if you can’t imagine it,” said Campbell. “And the people from the past who were so ahead of themselves help us imagine what’s possible.”
The Boston Women’s Heritage Trail is looking to expand—and it’s relying on the public’s help, including an incredible find. A person came across a mass grave for 133 women in Dorchester’s Cedar Grove Cemetery. Grad students helped identify a descendant of one of the women, and now there is a plan to create a permanent memorial in the fall.containing the remains of 133 women at Cedar Grove Cemetery on Beacon Hill
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