Boston’s Ladies: Gender, Class, and Cultural Heritage in Gilded and Progressive Age Massachusetts

In the years following the American Civil War, ladies of high social class and status assumed responsibility for preserving and commemorating their cultural heritage. Preserving buildings, historic homes, artwork, and other forms of material culture afforded women the opportunity to work and shape in the male-dominated public sphere. Similarly, elite women invested in cultural custodianship found themselves in positions of public power – a class stratification that is remarkable considering the defined boundaries of women’s lives, even of the most elite, in the late nineteenth/early twentieth-centuries. In Boston, Massachusetts, women channeled extortionate sums of resources and money into cultural philanthropic efforts. One such effort was the crusade to save the Old South Meeting House on Washington Street in downtown Boston. Heeded by Mary Hemenway, one of the richest women in New England, the movement that successfully saved the building was not only a tale of preservation, but also of gender and class. Building off previous research and primary sources, this presentation investigates Mary Hemenway and the Old South preservation movement in connection with the social and cultural responsibilities of elite women in gilded and progressive age Boston. This presentation also elucidates on the primary material, such as newspapers, oral histories, and church records, crucial to the research as well as the various iterations of the project