I became a walking tour guide in my early 40s. In the midst of a fulfilling and busy career in fire safety education and outreach, I was looking for something that would get me outside and challenge other parts of my brain. I found it when I stumbled across Boston By Foot, a nonprofit walking tour company that trains and organizes volunteers to talk about history and architecture. Since my “day job” involved commuting and travel around but not in Boston, I really missed being in the city on a daily basis. I was excited to share what I knew and was learning about the tourism stock in trade, events in the 1760s and 1770s leading to the American Revolution.
After all, growing up in Quincy, Massachusetts, in the 1970s, pretty much all I’d ever learned in public school history classes was about the riches surrounding us involving the birthplaces of Presidents John and John Quincy Adams, the USS Constitution, the Bunker Hill Monument, and Faneuil Hall. Boston By Foot helped me better appreciate the connection between individuals of that time, and how the colonial and early republic eras shaped Boston and America. It also taught me a lot that I just didn’t absorb in what I saw as boring, one-dimensional presentations in history class. As I gained confidence along with new knowledge, there were many more tours, developed by fellow volunteer guides, that I started to explore. Slowly, my knowledge expanded to include the stories of immigrant groups in Boston in the 1800s and early 20th century. So it wasn’t just white British Protestant fellows who shaped the city we live in now – hmmm!
And then in 2015, some fellow guides put together a tour dubbed Champions of Freedom that rocked my world. It focused on the unbelievably brave people – black and white, women and men – who risked their lives, livelihoods and reputations to end slavery, and at the same time, insisting on women’s rights on the long road to the women’s vote. A whole world of radicals, activists, resisters, and protestors came vividly to life. I was fascinated. And I was frustrated that, at my own mid-century mark, I had never heard a single thing about most of these people and the turbulent era of the Civil War and Reconstruction as it played out in Massachusetts. As I scrambled to catch up on all that I had missed learning throughout my life, I had my first epiphany. I was discovering the other side of the story – all the stories.
The women – half the population now, and then – began to wave hello to me from hidden corners of the tour manuals and history books. And not only the women behind the scenes, at home or on the farm making sure their men got fed and clothed. The women who spoke up, the women who spoke out, the women who started their own towns, their own religious denominations, their own schools, their own museums, their own movements. The women who saw problems and came up with solutions. The women who sued for their freedom, who fought to be heard, who changed not only their own lives but the course of history for everyone after them.
I had my second epiphany when my fellow guide Lucinda Gorry created a tour about women in the suffrage and labor movements, centered on a woman I’d never heard of named Mary Kenney O’Sullivan. In the process of learning so much new-to-me history — about settlement houses, labor unions and voting rights –- it dawned on me that Mrs. O’Sullivan was one of the most remarkable people I had ever encountered in my historical education. She was a bright, outspoken and passionate young woman as Mary Kenney in Missouri, who grew up working class but came to know the most powerful and well-educated upper-class women and men in the country. She struggled to be accepted as a respectable woman when society’s idea of one did not involve factory work and strikes. She built bridges between working people and the wealthy and well-educated power brokers of her time that helped to get labor laws on the books and women’s right to vote enshrined in a Constitutional amendment.
I’ve read the one and only book about her, and have visited the Schlesinger Library to get access to her unpublished autobiography, her letters and fragments of her belongings. And I still want and need to know more. This first “season” of my blog will trace my learning path and share not only what I’ve learned about Mary Kenney O’Sullivan, but how I’ve learned it, and how you might learn, too.
My heroines - amazing women in history 