Wild Women of Boston: Mettle and Moxie in the Hub

By Dina Vargo

The sons of liberty are celebrated in the rebellious history of Boston--but what of their sisters? An audacious and determined procession of reformers, socialites, criminals and madams made the city what it is today. One hundred years before Rosa Parks, African American abolitionist Sarah Parker Remond refused to give up her seat while attending a play in Boston. Fiery activists Harriet Hemenway and Minna Hall led a boycott against bird plumage in ladies' dress and brought the fashion industry to its knees. Rachel Wall was the last woman to be hanged in Massachusetts after leading a daring life as a robber and pirate. Later, women like Boston Marathon runner Kathrine Switzer also blazed their own trails. Author Dina Vargo unearths the remarkable stories of the wild women of the Hub.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: May 25, 2015
• ISBN: 9781625853080

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Writing a Wild Women of Boston book would seem to be almost a nobrainer. There are countless female firebrands, matronly mavericks and rabble-rousing reformers throughout Boston’s history who could literally fill a book, or two or three. For example:

The first African American poet in America’s history? Phyllis Wheatley.

The only Mayflower passenger to make her way to Boston? Mary Chilton is buried in King’s Chapel Cemetery.

The first African American female doctor and registered nurse? Rebecca Lee Crumpler and Mary Eliza Mahoney.

Writers of classic literature? Authors Louisa May Alcott and Harriet Beecher Stowe both wrote and lived in Boston.

Looking for the leader of the campaign to make Thanksgiving a national holiday? Give thanks to Sarah Josepha Hale.

Searching for suffragettes? My vote goes to Julia Ward Howe, Lucy Stone and Maud Wood Park.

Teachers of the blind? Annie Sullivan taught Helen Keller after being educated at the Perkins School for the Blind in South Boston.

Nobel Peace Prize winners, scientists, doctors and nurses. Architects, composers and artists. Writers and teachers. Collectors and patrons. Entrepreneurs. Abolitionists. Reformers. Boston has many women to be proud of. There is a Boston Women’s Heritage Trail with no fewer than sixteen self-guided walks through almost as many Boston neighborhoods. Boston is not lacking in celebrating the impact of women on its history.

This, however, is not one of those books. Or at least not traditionally so.

Wild Women of Boston goes off the beaten path of the usual array of celebrated women. Although there is some overlap, Wild Women focuses on the outliers who don’t get as much attention. Some of these women are perhaps better left unknown, like Alice Thomas, the Massachusetts Bay Madam. Nightmare Nurse Jolly Jane Toppan murdered so many people while claiming to care for them that she forgot how many exactly she’d killed. Rachel Wall was a thief and pirate. And even though Salem gets all the notoriety for trying witches, Boston hanged its fair share too.

Then there are those under-the-radar women like Elizabeth Murray and the Cuming sisters who were entrepreneurs in colonial Boston. Mercy Otis Warren did her job to galvanize the public in supporting independence from England in the run-up to the Revolutionary War. Sarah Parker Remond refused to be moved over one hundred years before Rosa Parks boarded a bus, and Kathrine Switzer ran her own rogue marathon in Boston.

Save the murderers, thieves and adulterers, many of these women had a lot in common. None of them really set out to be mavericks—well, except for Isabella Stewart Gardner, who was a natural at thumbing her nose at Boston’s elite while they had no choice but to bow to her wishes. Most of these women found themselves in extraordinary circumstances and had the fortitude to meet their challenges head on. They by and large claimed no wish or need for the spotlight. One can picture Mary Brown Patten shrinking after being lionized in the newspapers after she piloted a clipper ship around Cape Horn in the stormiest of winter seasons. She died in practical anonymity, and she wanted it that way. Others were concerned about not stepping out of proscribed boundaries; Mercy Otis Warren in part wrote anonymously because her writing would not have carried the weight that it did if people knew she was a woman. Harriet Hemenway and Minna Hall put the leadership of the Audubon Society in the hands of men, knowing they faced the same problem as Mercy. And that was over one hundred years later! And our most modern of Boston’s wild women sits quietly by the sea, secure in the fact that she got her job as the nation’s first and only female U.S. Coast Guard lighthouse keeper because she was the best person for it. Have we come a long way, baby? There’s hope yet.

There are most likely countless additional stories that are waiting to be told and stories that are still being made every day. Carry on, wild women of Boston!

Chapter 1

WITCHES AMONG US

Ann Hibbens and Goody Glover

Imagine calling a contractor to do some work around your house. It may have taken some time and effort to get the contractor’s quote, and it may have taken making multiple calls to multiple contractors (for some reason, this is never easy!). But finally you hire a contractor for your prescribed scope of work and price, and then you proceed. The contractor’s work is fine but unfinished. Promises are made to come back to complete the job. Still, the invoice arrives at double the amount of the quote. The work is unfinished! The price is too high! What do you do?

Nowadays, you would make no bones about calling the contractor and arguing the point of paying when the work is complete. You would argue for the agreed-upon price. If you weren’t satisfied, you might call the Better Business Bureau to file a complaint. In your frustration, you might put a negative review of the contractor on a website. You might even go to court. Taking these any of these actions are well within your twenty-first-century rights. But a woman in the 1650s who did something similar and publicly asserted herself risked being excommunicated from her church and maybe even hanged for witchcraft.

The modern homeowning scenario, relatively common today, has a history at least as far back as the 1650s. In 1656, Ann Hibbens expressed her frustration with a contractor publicly and tried to negotiate a fair price on a contract. For her efforts, she was tried and hanged for witchcraft in Boston.

ANN HIBBENS

Ann and her husband were some of Boston’s first settlers, arriving in the 1630s. By the 1640s, Ann’s husband, a prosperous merchant, was becoming an important local player in the town’s elected leadership. It was also around this time that the Hibbens family had some work done at their home by a carpenter. Ann felt that the family was grossly overcharged and cheated. She did not take this lying down; she made her feelings known publicly. Considering the population of Boston in 1640 was approximately 1,200 people, there were few who didn’t hear about Ann’s crusade against the contractor. Rather than gaining support for her cause, she actually came off as a harridan, causing a lot of discomfort among the townspeople. As a woman living in colonial times, by seeking a remedy to her family’s problem and doing it in a very public way, she overstepped social boundaries, and the community turned against her in a very big way.

First, in 1640, she was censured by the First Church of Boston, Boston’s oldest and most exclusive church, in a bitter trial. For her turbulent passion in seeking damages from the carpenter, she was charged with transgressing the rule of the Apostle—basically, she was charged with overstepping her husband’s authority. Church members felt that she’d misbehaved and embarrassed her husband—an ugly offense. What’s worse, she refused to apologize, which led to her excommunication from the church for being unrepentant.

When Thomas Hutchinson wrote about the event in his History of the Colony and Province of Massachusetts Bay in 1764, he surmised that several bad business decisions Ann’s husband had made, with consequent loss of cash, increased [her] natural crabbedness, which in turn made her turbulent and quarrelsome. This quarrelsome behavior came out one afternoon as Ann, walking into town, saw two women whispering to each other. She confronted them and wanted to know if they were talking about her. Big surprise, they were! How would she know such a thing? Perhaps because she was the talk of the town, but no matter, suspicions of her precognitive abilities were raised.

She became a pariah in Boston. When her husband died of old age in 1654, the floodgates of accusations against her opened. In 1655, she was tried for witchcraft.

The case against her was flimsy, at best. As was the custom, her body was searched for witches’ teats, an extra teat from which an imp or familiar would suckle human blood, and none was found. The so-called extra teat could have been anything from an actual extra nipple to something as simple and ordinary as a skin tag, a mole or any sort of blemish. A search of her house for poppets or any small hint of performing witchcraft also turned up nothing. This may be why magistrates ruled in her favor during an initial trial. Public sentiment, however, demanded a retrial, and it was no surprise, not even to Ann, when the general court reversed the initial court’s finding and condemned her to hang for witchcraft.

Ann maintained her innocence but accepted her fate, putting her estate in order. In June 1656, she met the hangman’s noose. She wouldn’t be the first to be hanged in Boston for witchcraft, and she wouldn’t be the last.

This illustration depicts the execution of Ann Hibbens on Boston Common. It was published in 1886 in a book called Lynn and Surroundings by Clarence W. Hobbs.

IT’S WITCHCRAFT

While accusations of witchcraft in colonial Boston weren’t common, they weren’t unheard of, either. Even before the Salem witch trials in 1692, in New England alone, there were more than one hundred people accused of witchcraft.

The belief in witchcraft was a direct transfer from the settlers’ lives in England. Up and down the Atlantic coast, there were witchcraft accusations in each of the colonies of the New World. However, in New England, these accusations were far more numerous and taken far more seriously. This was due to the more conservative viewpoint of the Puritans compared to their colonial counterparts and the Puritanical obsession with making the world a more ordered and orderly place to live. When people talk about Puritans today, they use terms like strict, rigid, prim and proper and austere. All of these descriptions have a basis in history—Puritans were obsessed with controlling their world, and if a perceived devil was interfering with that goal, then the devil must be rooted out. This was serious business.

Witchcraft was also very real, although today we wouldn’t call it witchcraft, we’d call it superstition. More specifically, counter-magic was practiced in daily life in colonial New England. This was not meant to be hurtful; it was used more for protection. Our wintertime evergreen wreath on the front door was yesterday’s magic for warding away evil spirits. Similarly, hanging a horseshoe over a doorway served the same purpose. Fortunately, most of us no longer fill bottles with our urine; then add nails, pins, hair and fingernail clippings; and bury them under the hearth for protection. In the same vein, reading fortunes by mixing up egg whites, asking a question of a mirror in the candlelight or reading the letters formed by discarded apple skins might be a popular activity among the slumber party set today. These practices were more prevalent in colonial New England—again, another way of controlling the environment—but the line between counter-magic and witchcraft was a fine one. If persons accused of witchcraft were found to have dabbled at all in counter-magic, the case against them was stronger.

THE ACCUSED

But why were people accused to begin with? What brought on accusations of witchcraft? By and large, these accusations were made after a dispute among neighbors, were generally worked out in the minor courts and may have resulted in payment of a fine or some other negligible punishment. Men could be accused as well as women. However, occasionally, the accusations resulted in a full-blown trial for witchcraft, and when that happened, the accused routinely had several things in common.

First, they were women. Women were accused at least four times more often than men, and when men were accused, they received less severe punishment. In Boston, no men were ever accused of, much less executed for, witchcraft. In colonial New England, women were considered to be inferior, weaker and more easily corruptible by Satan.

They might have been healers or used physick. They were considered healers if their concoctions worked and witches if they didn’t.

Often, they were alone in the world,