Explore the digital portal!
Mary Eliza Mahoney (1845 - 1926)
The Mary Eliza Project: Boston Women Voters in 1920
I co-direct the Mary Eliza Project, a collaboration with the Boston City Archives to create a free public digital database of over 50,000 women who registered to vote in Boston between August and November, 1920. The rich data is a valuable resource for historians, genealogists, digital humanists, academic scholars, and other researchers and storytellers.
The project’s name honors Mary Eliza Mahoney, a Black Bostonian, professional nurse, and civil rights activist, who was among the first women to claim their full suffrage rights upon ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment.
Along with the digital portal itself, the project team blogs about our research findings on the City of Boston’s website. We run presentations and workshops on the dataset for community groups, libraries, and historical societies. We also publish a monthly newsletter, Between the Lines, with news, links, interviews, and other original content.
The Simmons College Social and Civics Club officers from the 1917 yearbook. This club functioned as a student-led suffrage club during a period when the college president publicly opposed voting rights for women.
The digital exhibit features dozens of suffragists connected to Simmons, including these.
Suffrage at Simmons
My digital exhibit, Suffrage at Simmons, explores the ways that students, faculty, alums, and other members of the Simmons College community engaged with the movement for women's voting rights.
The galleries show the Simmons community's involvement, on and off campus, in the fight for women's right to vote -- in suffrage associations and marches, and as the movement increased its recruitment of college women. Which academic departments, and professions, were the hotbeds of activism? What did students think about the pro- and anti-suffrage views of their professors? Who embraced the cause of “Votes for Women,” and was there an underground student suffrage club at Simmons? How did the struggle for voting rights, and civil rights, for all women continue after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920?
I collaborated with two of my students on the research and writing.
At Suffrage at Simmons on Twitter, you’ll find stories that draw from and build on parts of the exhibit, including new research discoveries.
Corner of Spring and Chambers Streets in Boston’s West End, 1910. Courtesy of the Trustees of Boston Public Library.
Learned from Our Neighbors exhibit
I worked with a team of undergraduate students in 2019-2020 to create a series of exhibits about immigrant life in Boston’s West End, before that neighborhood was razed in the name of urban renewal in the late 1950s. We drew from the archival papers of pioneering social worker Eva Whiting White and records from the Boston City Archives. We curated Learned from Our Neighbors: Stories from the Elizabeth Peabody Settlement House, first as a digital exhibit, then as a conventional exhibit which opened at the West End Museum in April 2021. This project was made possible through funding from the “Humanities for the Public Good” initiative of the Council of Independent Colleges.
Eva Whiting White (1885-1974), longtime director of the Elizabeth Peabody House, a settlement house in Boston’s West End. Simmons University Archives.