Cambridge Women's Heritage Project Database, B

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Back Porch Dance Company (1985-2001)
Women's Intergenerational Dance/Theater Company
In 1985, The Back Porch Dance Company was founded as an interracial, intergenerational dance company with members whose ages ranged from over three generations. The directors, Joan Green and Vicki Solomon brought together a group of women and girls for a six-week workshop that evolved into the company. During its lifespan, the company included both professional and amateur dancers, including Ann Allen, Carol Strickland, Pat Zeigler, Lise Brody, Rebecca Lay, Tatoyia Foster, Vernell Foster, Lucy Wilson, Danita Callendar, Sandra Marcelino, Maggie Goncalves, Genii Guinier, Marcie Osinksy, Shirley Santos, Evelyn Tyner, Rhea Dunn, Sara Reese, Aislinn Macmaster, Dorothy Elizabeth Tucker, Euridece Spinola, Carol Ryser, Amy Gerson Stephanie Hope, Jen Schoonover, Sally DeAngelis, and Mariah Pisha.
In May 2000, the company performed a piece of narrated dance theater at Kresge Auditorium, MIT, “Celebrating Cambridge Women and Work” honoring the diverse lives of eight working Cambridge women that included a curtain folder, biologist, homeless advocate, funeral home director, welder, library worker, MIT laboratory assistant,

and psychiatrist. The oldest member of the company , World War II welder, Evelyn Tyner, eighty-two years old at the time, was one of the narrators . Though the company had built a solid reputation and performed throughout New England, it dissolved in 2001, owing to changes in the lives of the directors. One of the directors, Joan Green, went on to teach elders and adults and to dance with the Elder Ensemble of Prometheus Dance Company, while the other director, Vicki Solomon, completed a Masters Degree in Library Science and began working full time in the Children's Room of the main branch of the Cambridge Public Library.
Pictured in photo (from left): Geni Guinier, Marcie Osinsky, Eleanor Duckworth, Mariah Pisha, Vicki Solomon and Jen Schoonover.
References: MIT Tech Talk, May 17 2000. ;Iris Fanger, “Women's Work Informs Back Porch Project” Dance Magazine. May 2000

Maria Louise Baldwin (b. Sept. 13, 1856 in Cambridge, d. January 9, 1922 in Boston)
Educator, civic leader
Born in Cambridge to Mary E. (Blake) and Peter L. Baldwin, Maria Baldwin was educated in the Cambridge public schools, graduating from Cambridge High School in 1874. She graduated from Cambridge Teachers’ Training School the following year. When she was unable to find a position in the Boston area, she began a teaching career in Charlestown, Maryland. In 1882, pressure from the Cambridge African-American community resulted in the hiring of Baldwin as a primary school teacher at Agassiz Grammar School at 28 Sacramento Street. Seven years later, she was appointed principal of that school, the first black woman to be appointed as a principal in Massachusetts. Later, in 1916, when a new, larger building was built, she was appointed master of the school. Always interested in new learning, she took many courses at Harvard and other schools throughout her life. She corresponded and worked with many men and women of distinction in the area. She also taught during the summer at Hampton Institute in Virginia and the Institute for Colored Youth in Cheyney, PA. The Agassiz school in Cambridge was rebuilt in 1995 and on May 21st, 2002, the Cambridge School Committee unanimously voted to rename the Agassiz School to the Maria L. Baldwin School in her honor.
References: Notable American Women (1609-1950) Vol I; Baldwin school online site: www.cpsd.us/BAL/index.cfm

Louisa Frances (Jones) Barlow (b. ca 1833 in Hampton, Virginia; d. November 8, 1901 in Cambridge)
Abolitionist, escaped slave
Born a slave, Louisa was given the name Mary Frances Melburn as a child which she changed to Louisa Jones when she fled to freedom. As a child, she grew up in a household in Hampton, Virginia, but was sold as a child to Captain Chapman who ran a steamboat line in that state. She was moved to Norfolk and then, as a young woman, bounded out to learn dressmaking until she was twenty-four. In 1857, being suspected of aiding slaves to escape to Philadelphia, she fled by traveling on a steamboat, disguised as a wealthy young Southerner.
When she reached Philadelphia, she found a reward being offered for her capture, which prompted her to change her name. She continued on to Boston, helped by friendly abolitionists. There in Boston, the story of her escape became known, and she was found a position as a dressmaker. Louisa continued to actively aid the abolitionist movement and abolitionists including Wendell Phillips and Charles Sumner. She knew from her first-hand experience the successful methods for escape. In 1864, she married Archer H. Barlow, also an escaped slave. The couple moved to Cambridge around 1870 and set up house on 163 Elm Street in Cambridgeport. An active member of the Twelfth Street Baptist Church in Boston and various women’s benevolent organizations, she died at the age of sixty- three. Her funeral was attended by representatives of the abolitionist families who had supported her as well as by the Black community.
Reference: Boston Globe obituary, November 9, 1901

Mary W. Barnes (b. ca 1920 in Newton, d. June 1999)
Pilot, community leader
Mary Barnes was a 35-year resident of Cambridge, who attended Beaver Country Day School and graduated from St. Timothy’s. She was one of the first female pilots in World War II. She served with the Women’s Auxiliary Service (WASP). She was a former board member of the Hospice of Cambridge and also past president of the Cambridge Visiting Nurses Association. Mary Barnes was a member of the Board of Trustees of the Fernald School in Waltham and the Christ Church in Cambridge. She was 79 when she died.
Reference: Boston Globe 6-25-99

Mary Bancroft (b.1903 in Cambridge, d. January 10, 1997 in New York City)
Writer, lecturer, intelligence officer
     Mary Bancroft, author and intelligence officer for the Office of Strategic Services, was born in Cambridge, Mass., in 1903 to Mary Agnes (Cogan) and Hugh Bancroft, later publisher of The Wall Street Journal. Her mother, who studied at Radcliffe College, died soon after Mary was born. As a child, Bancroft graduated from the Winsor School, in Boston in 1921. She entered Smith College in 1922, but left college after three months, and soon after married Sherwin Badger, figure skating champion, who had graduated from Harvard College and then took a position with the United Fruit Company. The young couple spent a year in Cuba. They had three children: two sons, one who died in infancy, and a daughter. The couple divorced in 1932.
     In 1935, she married Jean Rufenacht, a Swiss businessman, and later moved to Zurich, where she was analyzed by and studied with C.G. Jung. Psychology became one of her life-long interests. With this background and her proficiency in French and German, she was hired by the Office of Strategic Services during the Second World War to work with Allen Dulles, whose lover she was briefly. As an agent, she analyzed speeches and writings of Nazi leaders, and wrote reports on conversations with German contacts, including Hans Bernd Gisevius, a German envoy to Switzerland who was involved in the early plots against Hitler. After the war, she divorced her Swiss husband in 1947, and then worked as a freelance journalist and translator. She returned to America in 1953, settling in New York City, where she lectured professionally and wrote novels, including Upside Down in the Magnolia Tree (1952), and The Inseparables (1958). She continued to work as a translator and publish book reviews. In 1983, she published a memoir, Autobiography of a Spy.
     Bancroft became involved in Democratic politics, working on various campaigns. She continued her interest in Jungian psychology through her correspondence and membership in the Analytical Psychology Club of New York and the Jung Foundation and sat on the editorial board of Psychological Perspectives as consultant and book reviewer. She died in Manhattan on January 10, 1997. Her papers were given to the Schlesinger library.
Reference: Biographical article, Mary Bancroft papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute.

Ruth L. Barron (b. ca. 1916, d. April 21, 2001 in Boston)
Businesswoman, community volunteer
Ruth L. Barron was the former senior vice president of Putnam Furniture Leasing Co. Inc. of Cambridge. She worked throughout her life with her husband, Carl Barron (who served as the head of the Central Square Business Association and was a partner with him of the Real estate and development business, CARU Associates.. She received numerous honors including Women of the Year- Cambridge YWCA, 1999, and (with her husband) the Joint Medal of Honor Histradut Memorial Award, April 1987. She sat on the Board at Mt. Auburn Hospital. She was a lifetime member of Hadassah, member of Beth El Temple Center, the Cambridge Chamber of Commerce, and the Rental Housing Association of Greater Boston Real Estate Board. She established four annual scholarships at Cambridge Rindge and Latin School jointly with her husband and participated in the Barron Family Fund of Judaica at Widener Library, Harvard University. She was 85 when she died.
Reference: Cambridge Chronicle 4-25-01

Charlotte Fiske Bates (b. November 20 1838 in New York City. d. 1916)
Author, Poet, Translator, Teacher
Charlotte Fiske Bates was born in New York City. Her father, Harvey Bates, died in her infancy, and from the time she was nine she lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was educated in the public schools of Cambridge and began to write poetry when quite young. For the first twenty-five years of her life she taught in private schools. She offered private instruction from her own home at 10 Ellery Street in the 1860s. Bates corresponded with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow from 1866 to 1882 and assisted Longfellow in compiling Poems of Places in a series of small volumes between 1875 and 1878, making ten translations for the work. She also edited the Longfellow Birthday-Book She is best known for The Seven Voices of Sympathy (1881) a compilation of Longfellow's prose and poetry. She issued a selection of poems from English and American authors in the Cambridge Book of Poetry and Song (1882). In the late 1880s, she began to publish her poetry in Lippincott magazine and Century magazine on a regular basis and moved to New York City although she kept her ties to Cambridge. In 1891 she married a Frenchman, Adolphe Rogé, who died five years later. She organized and read at a Longfellow memorial meeting at Sanders theater that raised money for the Longfellow fund. Some of her poetry was set to music by different American composers. She continued to publish and to participate in public readings until a few years before her death in 1916.
References: Houghton Library archives under Rogé (Henry Wadsworth Longfellow collection); Appleton encyclopedia; Frances E Willard and Mary A. Livermore, American Women: Fifteen Hundred Biographies (1897).

De Ama Battle (b. in Cambridge, MA)
Dancer, storyteller, teacher of dance
De Ama Battle was born in the “Gold Coast” region of Cambridge (near Western Avenue) to James and Madge Haynes. She grew up in Davis Square, Somerville. By the time she was nine, DeAma developed into an artist whose medium was dance. Ethel Covan served as her “stage mother” and mentor which enabled her to study, perform and then teach with the Covanettes Dance Company. From the age of 14, De Ama acted as choreographer, arranged the childrens’ performances at their yearly recital at John Hancock Hall, Boston.

She pursued further study of dance at the Elma Lewis School of Fine Arts and with Chuck Davis, director of the African American Dance Ensemble. Beginning in 1972, Battle began a series of trips to West Africa, Brazil, and Jamaica to study, lecture and perform. She helped found one of the first Pan African dance companies.
She has taught African-rooted dance forms at Tufts University, Wellesley College and the Boston Conservatory and has run a performance group for teens. In 1975, De Ama Battle founded the Art of Black Dance & Music, a dynamic performance troupe comprising as many as twenty dancers and musicians. Under the musical direction of Bamedele Osumarea they developed, explored and disseminated an extended concept of African dance. Committed to the philosophy and goals of arts education as an essential part of school curricula, she has performed in Cambridge schools through the artist-in-residency program. She also holds a Masters’ degree in Education from Cambridge College.
De Ama Battle has received a series of awards and recognition including the Elliot Norton award in 1992 for “bringing the heartbeat of Africa and the Carribean Islands to Boston.” In 1995, she was recognized with the Commonwealth award for her outstanding contribution to the arts of Massachusetts and in 1996, she was awarded an honorary degree in humane letters from Mount Ida College of Newton, MA. In 2006, De Ama Battle received the Boston Dance Alliance Lifetime Achievement award.
References: Information from De Ama Battle and the Art of Black Dance & Music information sheet.

Bee, The (founded 1861)
Social and philanthropic organization
Founded in 1861, The Bee, originally called the “Banks Brigade” (in honor of the Civil War general Nathaniel Banks of Massachusetts), was a social and philanthropic group of young women from Cambridge formed for the purpose of sewing bandages, shirts, and knitting socks for the Union troops during the Civil War. Alice James was one of the early members. The organization was re-formed to sew bandages and uniforms for soldiers during the Spanish-American War and World War I. In 1918, they participated in a patriotic parade through the streets of Cambridge to help raise money for Liberty Loans. Concerned with health care, The Bee also raised money and helped design a children’s solarium in the children’s ward for the Cambridge Hospital.
References: Mary Towle Palmer. The Story of the Bee. Riverside Press, Cambridge 1924 (held in Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe)

Mabel Gardiner (Hubbard) Bell (b. November 15, 1857 in Cambridge, d. January 3, 1923 in Washington D.C.)
Founder of education association, suffragist
     Mabel Hubbard was raised in Cambridge on Brattle Street. Her father, Gardiner Greene Hubbard who had a Boston law practice, helped establish a city water works in Cambridge, was a founder of the Cambridge Gas Co. and later organized a Cambridge to Boston trolley system. Between four and five, Mabel became deaf as a result of scarlet fever. Her father founded the first American school for the deaf at Chelmsford MA and served as trustee of the Clarke School for the deaf, which Mabel attended.
     After Mabel went to Germany in her teens to study chemistry and the German language, she returned to Cambridge at the age of sixteen. Bell had taught at the Clarke School and was then professor of vocal physiology and elocution at Boston University. He was hired by Mabel’s father as a private tutor. Hubbard was also financing Alexander Graham Bell’s experiments on the telephone and helped organize his company. Mabel and Alexander became romantically involved and at first her parents opposed the marriage objecting to the age disparity and fearing that their children would be deaf, since Bell’s mother was congenitally deaf, but the two were engaged in 1875. In 1877, Bell married Mabel and the couple had two sons who died in infancy and two daughters who lived into adulthood.
     Mabel supported her husband in his work, notably in his interest in aviation (the Aerial Experiment Association). In 1910, she became a strong supporter of women’s rights and marched in the women’s suffrage national convention in Washington in 1910. During World War I, she sponsored benefits to raise money for the Red Cross and fund lifeboats for the US Navy. She later founded the Montessori Education Association and became its president. Later she opened a school in Washington, D.C. and started a magazine, Freedom for the Child. She died on January 3, 1923 in Washington D.C. and was buried on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia, Canada where the Bells had a summer home, a few months after her husband’s death. Many of her letters to and from her husband are in the Bell Family Papers in the Library of Congress.
References: Bell Family Papers , Library of Congress, Washington DC; Lilias M Toward; Mabel Bell: Alexander's Silent Partner (Methuen, 1984).; Ann J. Bishundayal, Mabel Hubbard Bell Protea Publishing Company, 2002; . Waite, Helen Make a Joyful Sound Romance of Mabel Hubbard and Alexander Graham Bell, Philadelphia: Mcrae Smith 1961

Satyra (Pearson) Bennett (b. 1892 in Rock Hill, Jamaica; d. June 1977)
Community leader, Volunteer, Linotype operator
     Satyra (Pearson) Bennett was one of four children of Frances Lavina (Gale) and William B. Pearson; their father was for many years pastor of St. Paul African Methodist Episcopal Church in Cambridge.
   Satyra was born in 1892 in Rock Hill, Jamaica, and OPB in Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1903. After the family moved to Cambridge, she graduated from Cambridge Latin School, and in 1913 from Wilberforce University in Ohio. Satyra then taught at McKinley Institute in Lynchburg, Virginia, before her marriage in 1919 to Cyril George Bennett. Their son, George Barrett Bennett, was born a year later. She returned to Massachusetts and for more than thirty years worked as a linotype operator for a number of newspapers in the Boston area.
     A member of St. Paul AME Church for over seventy years, Satyra served as treasurer, trustee, superintendent of the Sunday School, and member of the Board of Christian Education. She was co-founder (1949) and president of the Citizens' Charitable Health Association, co-founder of the Cambridge Community Center, trustee of the Massachusetts chapter of the Arthritis Foundation, and vice-president of the Boston chapter of the NAACP. After suffering a series of strokes, she was cared for by her sister Ozeline (Pearson) Wise until her death in June 1977.
Reference: Ozeline (Pearson) Wise papers and biographical information, Schlesinger Library. An oral biography is included in the Black Women Oral History Projectof Schlesinger Library.

Stephanie Beukema
Psychologist, educator
Stephanie Beukema obtained her doctorate in psychology from the Harvard School of Education in 1990. She is a developmental psychologist with special interest in systems and systemic theories. As a licensed psychologist, she has been in clinical practice in Harvard Square since 1993. She holds a clinical appointment at Harvard Medical School, where she supervises and teaches. She has held an adjunct professorship at Lesley University since 1993. She devotes an enormous amount of her time to working with women.
References: Lesley University adjunct faculty site http://www.lesley.edu/gsass/cp_adjunct.html

Anne Bernays (b. September 19 1940 in New York City)
Novelist
Daughter of Doris E Fleischman and Edward Bernays, Anne Bernays grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the household of a well-to-do Jewish family of some note. Her father was the “father of public relations” and a nephew of Sigmund Freud. As a child, she went to the prestigious girl’s school, Brearley School and then went on to Wellesley College for two years (1948-1950), finishing her education as an English major at Barnard College graduating in 1952. She entered publishing until, in 1954, she met and married Justin Kaplan. The couple moved to Cambridge in 1959 where she wrote the first of her novels while raising her family. Among the best known of her novels are Growing up Rich (1975) and Professor Romeo (1989). In recent years she has joined her husband (noted for his biographies of Mark Twain, Lincoln Steffens, and Walt Whitman ) in writing two books, one on the manner in which names have changed, The Language of Names (1997) and another, a double memoir, Back Then: Two Lives in 1950s New York (2002). She published a new novel Trophy House in 2005 and is currently teaching at the Nieman Foundation, Harvard University. She has three daughters and six grandchildren.
References: David Walton, “Gotham when they were Young” New York Times June 9, 2002: Christopher Lehmann-Haupt. “Whats in a Name: Ima Hogg Knew” NY Times, January 1997; Anne Bernays “Remembering Mrs McIntosh “ Chronicle of Higher Education, Feb 9, 2002:“Meet the Writers: Anne Bernays” (includes interview) online site, Barnes and Noble.com

Grete (Lehner) Bibring (b. 1899 in Vienna, Austria, d. 1977 in Cambridge)
Psychoanalyst
Grete Lehner Bibring obtained her degree in medicine from the University of Vienna in 1924. She went on to train in psychoanalysis in Vienna with the Freudian psychoanalyst Helena Deutsch who later also came to live in Cambridge. She served as assistant director of the Viennese Psychoanalytic Clinic (1926-1938). Forced to flee Austria in 1938, she moved first to London where she worked with the British Psycho-analytic Clinic and then moved to the United States. From the start of World War II, she lived in Cambridge in the Avon Hill area with her husband and children. She was a member of the Harvard Medical School faculty from 1946-1977, and a member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society from 1941-1971.
References: Ogilvie, Marilyn and Joy Harvey. Biographical Dictionary of Women Scientists. Routledge Press, 2000.

Elizabeth Bishop (b. 8 February 1911 in Worchester, d. 6 October 1979)
Poet
     Elizabeth Bishop was the daughter of Gertrude Bulmer and William Thomas Bishop, who owned the J.W. Bishop contracting firm in Worcester MA. Her father died before her first birthday and her mother was committed to a mental hospital by the time she was five years old. She was raised by maternal grandparents in Great Village, Nova Scotia. As a child she suffered from various physical and nervous ailments that made it difficult for her to walk and limited her early schooling. She went to boarding schools in Swampscott, and Natick where she contributed to the school newspapers. She attended Vassar College where, in addition to working for The Vassar Miscellany, the school newspaper, she was one of the founders of the Vassar literary magazine Con Spirito which endorsed socially conscious and avant-garde writing. Elizabeth's earliest work influenced by George Herbert and Gerard Manley Hopkins, appeared in the literary magazine she had founded. During this time, Bishop met the poet Marianne Moore, who became a close friend, and mentor, and who pointed her in the direction of poetry as a vocation.
     Following her graduation, Bishop's first manuscript North and South was chosen for publication in August 1946. During this period, she met Robert Lowell who helped her secure the post of poetry consultant for the Library of Congress while she worked on her second book. She traveled through France, Spain, North Africa, Ireland and Italy, but made her home in New York and Key West. She traveled to Brazil in 1951, but forced to remain in Brazil because of illness, she met and fell in love with Lota de Macedo Soares, who became her friend and companion. During this period, she came under the spell of the landscapes and cultures of Brazil.
     In 1954 Bishop published her second book A Cold Spring, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1956. Her third book Questions of Travel, included her childhood experiences and her life in Brazil. After Soares committed suicide with an overdose of tranquilizers, Bishop returned to the United States. Bishop’s book Complete Poems, was awarded the National Book Award in 1970. That year Bishop began to teach at Harvard University where she remained for seven years, also spending short stints at the University of Washington, New York University. Shortly before her death, she also taught at Massachusetts Institute for Technology. In 1976, Bishop became the first American and the first woman to be awarded the Books Abroad/Neustadt International Prize for Literature. That same year, Bishop published her final collection of poetry entitled Geography III, awarded the Book Critics Circle Award in 1977. In October of 1979, Bishop passed away at the age of sixty-eight, widely acclaimed as an important modern poet.
References: "Elizabeth Bishop". The Academy of American Poets – Elizabeth Bishop. Date accessed 30 November 2005; http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/7; Lensing, George S. and Colwell, Anne Agnes. "About Elizabeth Bishop". ;Robert Dale Parker, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Date accessed, 30 November 2005; http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/bishop/about.htm; Page, Barbara. "Elizabeth Bishop: American Poet".http://projects.vassar.edu/bishop/index/php

Alice Stone Blackwell (b. September 14, 1857 in Orange, New Jersey, d. March 18, 1950 in Cambridge)
Writer, editor, translator, suffragist, social activist
The daughter of the renowned suffragist, Lucy Stone and her husband Henry Browne Blackwell, Alice Stone Blackwell moved with her family from New Jersey to Boston at the age of ten and studied in a number of local schools, graduating from Boston University in 1881. She immediately began to work in the offices of the paper established by her mother, the Woman’s Journal with which she was connected until the beginning of World War I.. From 1887-1905, she edited and distributed the Woman’s Column, a periodical collection of suffrage news articles. She was also a founder of the Massachusetts League of Women Voters. She was a champion of women’s rights for many years as well as at one time an associate editor of Ladies Home Journal. She was involved with the National American Women’s Suffrage Association, Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the Women’s Trade Union League, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, and the American Peace Society. She sat on the board of Boston University and fought to end racial discrimination there. She was interested in the causes of other oppressed peoples, and supported Armenian and Russian protestors. She translated and published several volumes of the verses of Armenian, Yiddish, Russian, Hungarian, and Mexican poets. .She was active in the protests surrounding the case of Sacco and Vanzetti in the 1920s. In 1930, she published a biography of her mother entitled: Lucy Stone, Pioneer in Women’s Rights. Although she spent much of her life in Dorchester, she moved to Cambridge in 1936 where she lived until her death fourteen years later.
References: Cambridge Historical Commission (files), Obituary from Cambridge Chronicle. Notable American Women (1607-1950) Vol I

Ann (Keefe) Bolger (b. December 3, 1939 in Boston, d. May 23, 2001)
Activist, School Volunteer
Ann Keefe was born in Boston on December 3, 1939, the daughter of Irish immigrants. She grew up in Cambridge and graduated from Matignon High School. She married Frank Bolger ca. 1960. She worked as parent liaison at the Graham and Parks Alternative Public School for 27 years. The Parent Liason positions, now a universal feature of Cambridge schools, are based on the job she created. Her work is nationally recognized as a model for family involvement in schools. She developed a system for forming well-balanced classrooms, she created an admissions policy for CAPS, a complex process looking at race, gender, and income. She served 21 years on the board of Cambridge School Volunteers. For 5 years she was a member of the School Health Task Force, successfully lobbying for additional school nurses and for a comprehensive health policy for the schools.
Reference: Cambridge Chronicle 6-13-01

Alice Middleton Boring (b. February 22 1883 in Philadelphis, d.. September 18 1955 in Cambridge)
Biologist, Educator
Alice Boring was born to Elizabeth and Edwin Boring and educated at Bryn Mawr where she obtained both undergraduate (B. A. 1904) and graduate degrees (M.A. 1905, Ph.D. 1910). She studied genetics with Thomas Hunt Morgan and Nettie Stevens and in the summers, regularly worked at the Oceanographic Institute at Woods Hole in Massachusetts. She taught at the University of Pennsylvania while working on her PhD and then, briefly at Vassar. After obtaining her degree she went to the University of Maine where she rose from instructor to associate professor by 1913 where she remained until 1918, teaching and publishing on genetics. In that year, she went as a visiting professor to the Peking Union Medical College in China. This was to change her life. She briefly returned to the United States where she taught biology for three years at Wellesley College, but chose to return to China in 1923. She remained there for the rest of her professional life as professor of biology at Yenching University, educating the next generation of Chinese scientists during difficult political times. She retired to Cambridge in 1950 and lived near the home of her brother, the noted Harvard psychologist and professor, Edwin Boring. During her last years, she became active in Cambridge civic affairs.
References: Ogilvie, Marilyn. A Dame full of Vim and Vigor. 1998; Ogilvie, Marilyn and Joy Harvey. Biographical Dictionary of Women Scientists. Routledge Press, 2000.

Nadia Boulanger (b. September 16, 1887 in Paris, France. d. October 22, 1979 in Paris, France)
Teacher of music theory and composition, conductor
Nadia Boulanger was born to a family of musicians in Paris. Her mother was the Russian princess, Raissa Myskatskaya, and her father was famed French musician, Ernest Boulanger. She entered the Paris Conservatory at the age of ten. She studied with renowned composers including Gabriel Fauré, whose work she promoted throughout her life. However, despite her considerable talent for composition, she felt overshadowed by her younger sister Lili, who at an early age won the Grand Prix de Rome (the first woman to do so). Lili died at the age of 24. Nadia then made the choice to be a teacher of composition for which she is best known today. She was celebrated as a teacher at the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau, France. In her lifetime she taught such twentieth-century American composers as Leonard Bernstein, Elliot Carter, Aaron Copeland, Irving Fine, Philip Glass, Roy Harris, Daniel Pinkham, Walter Piston, Douglas Moore and Virgil Thomson, as well as many other performing musicians. As a teacher of twentieth-century composers, she was particularly inspired by the work of Stravinsky, and she conducted several premiers of his works in this country and Europe.
When the Second World War broke out in 1938, Boulanger joined Cambridge’s Longy School of Music where she remained until 1945. In Cambridge and Boston she lectured on Beethoven string quartets and Bach cantatas. While teaching or conducting in Massachusetts, she resided at 30 Gerry’s Landing on Coolidge Hill as the guest of J. Malcolm Forbes. In addition she stayed with her friend, Winifred Hope Johnstone, on Bay State Road in Boston. She was the first woman to conduct symphony orchestras in New York, Boston and Philadelphia. When she was not conducting workshops throughout the United States, she taught classes at Longy and also at Harvard University in harmony, score reading, counterpoint and solfege, until she returned to France. As a musician, she possessed a perfect ear and a phenomenal memory. As a teacher, she is remembered for pushing her students to their limits. After she left the United States, Boulanger continued to demand utter dedication to music from those Americans who made the pilgrimage to the American Conservatory at Fontainebleau where she was named director in 1950. She died in Paris at the age of ninety-two in 1979.
References: Abeel, Daphne, Ed. Cambridge in the Twentieth Century, Cambridge MA: Cambridge Historical Society, 2007.
Kendall, Alan The Tender Tyrant London: Macdonall and Jane’s, 1977.
Monsaingeon, Bruno Mademoiselle Manchester UK: Carcanet, 1985.
Rosenstiel, Leonie A Life in Music NY: WW Norton 1982.

Anne (Dudley) Bradstreet (b. 1612 in Northhampton, England, d. 1672 or 1675 in North Andover, Massachusetts)
America’s first published poet
Daughter of Dorothy (Yorke) and Thomas Dudley, of Northampton, England, Anne’s parents believed in educating their daughters along as well as their sons, an unusual belief at the time. She had access to private tutors and the Earl of Lincoln’s library on whose estate she grew up. Anne became fluent in Latin, and learned poetry, religion and natural science. She married Simon Bradstreet in 1628 at the age of sixteen. Her husband was assistant of the Massachusetts Bay Company which planned the emigration to New England. Along with her parents, they joined the colonists headed by John Winthrop, future governor of the colony, they arrived in New England on Winthrop’s flagship Arabella. Upon arrival, her father was named deputy governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. The positions of her husband and father gave her a place of honor in the new colony. After a year in Charlestown, they moved to Cambridge around 1631, near what is now 1384 Massachusetts Avenue in the heart of Harvard Square. Her first child, Samuel, was born in Cambridge in 1633. They lived there for about five years before moving to Ipswich and later Andover. Bradstreet reared eight children in all. Her procreative years were also a period of great poetic energy. Her most popular work included poems to and about family members, although she also wrote some formal elegies. One collection, The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America, was published in her lifetime without her knowledge or consent (1650). This group of poems, published by her brother-in-law in England, had no references to the New World. A later, superior compilation, Several Poems Compiled with a Great Variety of Wit and Learning, appeared seven years after her death (1678) and included her response to the New England landscape, reflecting a Puritan view of life.
References: Hannah Winthrop, Historic Guide to Cambridge, 1907; The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States ( 1995); Notable American Women (1607-1950) Vol I

Hermine (Brokczyna) Brand (b. ca 1908 in Vienna Austria, d. July 10 2005 in Cambridge)
Librarian, book seller
Born in Vienna Austria, Hermine Brokcyzyna was a Holocaust survivor whose family all perished. She married Joseph Brand and emigrated to New York and then to the Boston area. She and her husband worked in the foreign language bookstore, Schoenhof’s from 1940 to 1961. The couple then spent two years running a bookstore in Israel. They then moved to Cambridge upon their return to the United States. Hermine Brand joined the Harvard University Museum of Comparative Zoology library staff as a reference librarian, where she worked full time for seven years (1967-1974), and then served as a part time librarian from 1974 to 1988. Her husband died in 1971. Even after her retirement, she was active in the community, especially as a tutor to new immigrants. She entered an assisted living facility towards the end of her life.
Reference: Boston Globe July 17, 2005

Mary Agnes (Burniston) Brazier (b. 1904 in Western-super-Mare, England, d.1995 in Cape Cod)
Neurophysiologist and historian of science
Born in England, Mary Agnes Burniston was educated at Bedford College, University of London. Soon after she married Leslie J Brazier in 1928, she finished her Ph.D. degree in physiology at the University of London in 1929. When the bombing of London began at the beginning of the Second World War in 1939, she decided to bring her young son to the United States to ensure his safety. Awarded a Rockefeller Fellowship, she began to work in neurophysiology laboratories at Massachusetts General Hospital investigating peripheral nerve damage and muscular function using the electroenecephalograph as a diagnostic tool. After the war, she moved to Massachusetts Institute of Technology where she worked with Norbert Wiener and others until1960, using computers to analyze her EEG data. She then moved to the University of California Brain Research Institute soon after it was created and was named Professor of Anatomy. Besides numerous scientific articles in her field, she published a number of books on the history of neurophysiology from the 17th through the 19th century. At the end of her life she retired to Massachusetts, dying at the age of 91.
Reference: Ogilvie, Marilyn and Joy Harvey. Biographical Dictionary of Women Scientists. Routledge Press, 2000.

Bread and Roses
Women’s liberation group.
Bread and Roses was a feminist group that seized an unoccupied building owned by Harvard University in 1971. The women held the building for ten days, offering free classes and childcare before they were forced out. Sympathetic individuals donated $5,000, and Bread and Roses bought a house at 46 Pleasant Street in Cambridge. They opened the Women's Center in 1972, the longest running women’s center in the US. Annie Popkin who wrote her doctoral dissertation on this group has deposited her reference materials at Schlesinger library. See also Women’s Educational Center
References: Annie Popkin (doctoral dissertation on Bread and Roses, Brandeis University).
Annie Popkin. "Bread and Roses": An Early Movement in the Development of Socialist Feminism” (Brandeis, PhD dissertation 1978).
Annie Popkin Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute. Includes materials from the affiliated organization, Cell 16.

Charlotte Eugenia (Hawkins) Brown (b. June 11 1883 in Henderson, NC, d. Jan 11 1961 in Greensboro, North Carolina)
Educator, School Founder, Lecturer
Charlotte Hawkins Brown was born in North Carolina to Caroline Hawkins and Edmund H Hight. Her extended family moved to Cambridge in 1890 when she was seven. She graduated from Cambridge English High School and attended Massachusetts State Normal School. In 1902, after a year in North Carolina, she founded the Palmer Memorial Institute there. This began as a rural county school but gradually developed into a private preparatory school for middle-class African American children, named after the Wellesley College president Alice Freeman Palmer who had funded her education. Although originally intended to educate all county children, she soon began to emphasize secondary and junior college education. She met and married a Harvard graduate, Edward S. Brown, but the marriage lasted only five years. Attracting funding and students throughout the country, Charlotte Hawkins Brown continued to return to Cambridge each summer to raise money for the Institute and to continue her studies at Harvard, Wellesley and Simmons colleges. As the Institute grew more famous, she traveled throughout the country to lecture on African American education and interracial cooperation and received a number of honorary degrees.
Reference: Notable American Women, Modern Period (Belnap Press: 1980)

Ruth G. Brunt (b. ca 1899, d. October 1999)
Educator and volunteer
Ruth G. Brunt was a life-long resident of Cambridge. She attended the Russell School and Cambridge High and Latin. After graduating from Lesley College, she taught in Hamilton for a year and then worked at the Industrial School for Crippled Children for 45 years. She was a member of the Harvard Epworth Church where she was a committed member of the United Methodist Women’s Society. Throughout her life, she devoted her time volunteering at Morgan Memorial, knitting hundreds of mittens and hats. She was 100 when she died.
Reference: Cambridge Chronicle 10-20-99

Sara (Thorp) Bull (b. 1850, d. January 1911)
Writer and Artistic leader
Sara Thorp, daughter of a Wisconsin lumber baron, Joseph Thorp, married Ole Bull, a renowned Norwegian concert violinist, in 1870 when he was sixty years old and she only twenty. The marriage took place over the objections of her father but with approval of her mother. A daughter, Olea, was born a year later and for a few years they lived in Madison in a house her father built for them. Sara took an active role in Ole Bull’s complicated financial affairs. The family moved to Cambridge and rented James Russell Lowell’s house while they had a house built for them at 168 Brattle Street. After Ole’s death, Sara wrote his biography, Ole Bull: A Memoir, which was published by Houghton-Mifflin in 1883. She was active in the cultural and social circles of Boston and Cambridge, and became a close companion of important figures including Julia Ward Howe, Annie Allegra Longfellow Thorp, daughter of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who married her brother Joseph Gilbert Thorp, Alice Longfellow, and Sara Orne Jewett. Sara Bull’s most notable project was initiating and sponsoring the Cambridge Conferences. These were held at her home on Brattle Street, bringing together leading intellectual, artistic, and philosophical figures for a series of lectures offered each spring and fall from 1896 through 1899. She was also a charter member of the Cambridge Garden Club. In the later years of her life, Sara became interested in Eastern religions and became a follower of Swami Vivekanada and his Vedanta philosophy.
References: Dictionary of Wisconsin History (Ole Bull); Sara C. Bull, Ole Bull: A Memoir (1883); “The Bull-Curtis Collection Guide,” Cambridge Historical Society Library.

Mary (Ingraham) Bunting-Smith (b. July 10, 1910 in Brooklyn, NY, d. January 21, 1998 in Hanover, NH)
Educator, Microbiologist ,University administrator
Born to Mary (Shotwell) and Henry A. Ingraham in Brooklyn, Mary was educated as a scientist, graduating from Vassar in 1931 with a degree in physics and obtaining her Ph.D. from University of Wisconsin in 1934. Her early papers on color variations in the bacterium Serratia marcescens were significant studies in microbial genetics. In 1937 she married Henry Bunting .She taught biology at a number of colleges, including Bennington, Gaucher, Yale, and Wellesley. After the death of her husband in 1954, she took an administrative position at Douglass College for Women, Rutgers University in 1955. She was named president of Radcliffe College in 1960 and held that position until 1973. As president, she made a number of significant changes at Radcliffe. During her tenure, Radcliffe students first received Harvard degrees, women were admitted to the graduate and business schools, and the Radcliffe Graduate School merged with Harvard's Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. Bunting established the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, initially designed to encourage the furthering of the careers of talented women who taken off time to raise a family. In 1972, she left the presidency of Radcliffe and took a position as special assistant to the president of Princeton University, where she remained until 1975, guiding the university through its first years as a co-educational institution. In 1979, she married for the second time to a Harvard Medical School pediatrician, Dr. Clement A. Smith. After his death in 1988, she spent the remainder of her life in a continuing care facility in New Hampshire.
References: Ogilvie, Marilyn and Joy Harvey. Biographical Dictionary of Women Scientists. Routledge Press, 2000. Obituary in Harvard Gazette, 1998.

Antonia Neves Burke (b. in Boston, d. September 1999.)
Educator
Antonia Neves Burke graduated from East Boston High School in 1945 and was a longtime resident of Cambridge. She worked as a teaching aid and eventually got her bachelor’s degree in special education to work with children with severe learning disabilities. She also worked in the Cambridge Public School system, and taught at the Boston University Mini School. Burke occupied the position of Director of Public Relation and Recruitment for the Cambridge School Volunteers. She received the Tuskegee Airmen’s Distinguished Lifetime Achievement Award in recognition for her dedication to encouraging others on to high levels of personal achievement and the successful pursuit of individual goals. She was also involved with the Cambridge Peace Commission and the First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church. She participated as a member of the Back Porch Dance Company.
Reference: Cambridge Chronicle 09-30-99

Annie E. Burrell (b. in Cambridge, d. 1999 in )
Community leader
Annie E. Burrell attended the Houghton Elementary School and Cambridge Rindge and Latin School. She was a homemaker and also worked for many years at the Window Shop in Harvard Square and at the Cambridge Election Commission. She was an active member on the board of directors at the Cambridge Community Center from 1985 to 1993. In 1993 she was named honorary member and continued her service to the center and community by supporting their activities and events. She was 84 when she died.
Reference: Cambridge Chronicle 8-12-99

Jeanne V. Burton (b. in d. July 1999 in Cambridge)
Community Activist
Jeanne V. Burton was a member of the board of directors of the Cambridge Council on Aging. She was elected vice president in 1996 and president in 1997. She also served as vice president of the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP). She served on the city’s advisory group during the development of the accessible taxi services, and also has served on the board of the Alzheimer’s Association, the YWCA, CEOC, the Vision Foundation, the Cambridge Commission for Persons with Disabilities, and the school’s panel to interview school principals. She offered consultation to CASCAP on the development of affordable assisted living units at Harvard Place in Cambridge. She was 69 when she died.
Reference: Cambridge Chronicle 7-22-99

Caroline B. Butler (b. in , d. January 2000 )
Teacher
Caroline B. Butler was a life-long resident of Cambridge. She attended St. Mary’s High School and the University of Lowell Normal School. She taught at the Thorndike School while continuing her education at the evening school of Boston College. She was a 4th grade teacher at the Thorndike School in East Cambridge for 50 years. She was feted at her 100th birthday by the Cambridge City Council and a presentation by the-mayor of Cambridge, Sheila Russell. A few years earlier she was honored as one of the 14 women who initially and continually voted in Cambridge following women’s suffrage. She continued to vote right up to the last election in November before she died. She was 102 when she died.
Reference: Cambridge Chronicle 02-02-00

Gladys C. Butler (b. 1907, d. 1999)
Resident
Gladys C. Butler graduated from the Boston Industrial Trade School where she excelled in sewing. She was a devoted member of the Union Baptist Church in Cambridge for over 50 years, where she served on many committees.
Reference: Cambridge Chronicle 09-16-99