Cambridge Women's Heritage Project Database, D

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Elizabeth Ellery Dana (b. 1846 in Cambridge, d. 1939 in Cambridge)
Family and city historian,
A daughter of the author Richard Henry Dana, Jr and Sarah (Watson) Dana, she was a life long resident of Boston and Cambridge living for most of her life at 152 Brattle St. A graduate of Cambridge Latin School, she developed a strong interest in the Colonial and Revolutionary history of Cambridge from the time she was nineteen.. She contributed to A Historic Guide to Cambridge in 1907, and served on the board of the Cambridge Historical Society. She is responsible for collecting the correspondence, notes, legal records and photographs of the family preserved at the Longfellow House archives.Her history of the Dana family The Dana Family in America was published only after her death. Her papers are useful in reflecting the life of a middle-class woman of a well-known family.
References: Finding aid, Elizabeth Ellery Dana Personal Papers, Longfellow House archives. Cambridge; Additional correspondence in the Dana papers in Houghton, Harvard University Library.

Dandelion School (founded 1971)
Pre-school
This school for young children was opened and co-founded by Kathy Roberts and Beth Rumnorzy in 1971 in Cambridge. It is a childcare center influenced by the Freedom Schools of the 1960s, with a peace and justice philosophy. Freedom Schools were temporary, alternative free schools for African Americans. They were originally part of a nationwide effort during the Civil Rights Movement to organize African Americans to achieve social, political and economic equality in the United States. The most prominent example of Freedom Schools was in Mississippi in the August of 1964.
Kathy Roberts remained as the director from 1971 to 2002. She envisioned the school as a place where the young children could escape the media barrage of commercial toys and programs and “focus on topics from nature, children's own experiences and literature.” She also felt that this would provide children with some ability to handle the influence of television when they entered elementary school.
Reference: Teaching Tolerance magazine Number 24, Fall 2003.

Mabel Wheeler Daniels (b. November 27, 1876 in Swampscott MA d. March 10 1971 in Cambridge)
Composer
Mabel Wheeler Daniels was the daughter of Sarah (Wheeler) and George Frank Daniels. Her father who was in shoe manufacturing was the president of the Handel and Hayden Society and he introduced his daughter to music at a young age as had both her grandfathers who were church organists. She attended Girls Latin School in Boston and then went to Radcliffe College where she sang in the Glee Club and directed operettas. She also studied composition and began to compose choral music. After graduating in 1900, she studied for two years at the New England Conservatory of Music and then went to Germany to study in the Royal Conservatory of Munich. On returning to America, she published a book on her experiences in Munich (An American Girl in Munich) in, 1905 and proceeded to direct the Radcliffe Glee Club and music director at Simmons Glee Club. She sang soprano in the Cecilia Society and began to win prizes for her composition. Marion MacDowell produced the first performance of her cantata,The Desolate City (1913) at the MacDowell Colony following which she was regularly invited to use the studios of the colony in Petersborough NH to create her musical compositions. Although her first compositions were more conventional, she became interested in modern music while preparing a piece for soprano, chorus and orchestra based on a poem The Song of Jael (1940) by her friend Edwin Arlington Robinson. Her pieces began to be played by major artists, by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and in programs of significant American music in Carnegie Hall, and for NBC radio. She made important gifts to women’s colleges to support young women musicians and served as an alumnae trustee of Radcliffe College from 1940-1951. Her papers are held at Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute.
References: Notable American Women, Modern Period (1980); Madeline Goss, Modern Music-Makers: Contemporary American Composers New York, (1952); Biography, Finding Aid Mabel Wheeler Daniels Papers, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute.

Eleanor D’Antuono (b. 1939 in Cambridge)
Dancer
Eleanor D’Antuono was born in Cambridge and trained in ballet by the founders of the Boston Ballet. She joined the American Ballet Theater in 1961 and was a principal dancer from 1963, gaining wide recognition for her roles in Giselle, Swan Lake, and Petrouchka. Choreographers Alvin Ailey and Lorenzo Monreal created original roles for her in their ballets. She was the first American ballerina to be invited to perform as a special guest artist with the Kirov Ballet of Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1978 and 1979, where she danced in Giselle and performed the role of Odille in Swan Lake, touring other Soviet cities with them. She was also the first American ballerina to appear with Chinese companies. After retiring, she coached professional and regional ballet companies nationwide, staged many classical ballets, and served as the artistic director of a number of ballet companies, and most recently served as artistic director of the New York International Ballet Competition.
References: Phyllis J. Read and Bernard L. Witlieb The Book of Women’s Firsts, 1992.
Carolyn Warner,Treasury of Women’s Quotations, 1992; New York International Ballet Competition online site http://www.nyibc.org/about.htm as retrieved on May 19, 2006

Sybil C. D’Arbeloff (b. ca 1931, d. 2000 in Cambridge)
Hospital administrator
In 1992, Sybill d’Arbeloff was the first women to be elected chairman of the board of a Harvard Teaching Hospital. Served as the director of development of Mt. Auburn Hospital. A trustee of the hospital since 1986, she continually demonstrated her commitment to the hospital and community service. In addition to her contributions to Wheaton College and Mt Auburn Hospital, she served as a member of Cambridge Community Foundation. She was a member of the Board of Overseers at the Museum of Science and WGBH, and was an associate of the Museum of Fine Arts. She was recognized by many organizations for her community service including Women in Philanthropy and the New England Association for Hospital Philanthropy. She was awarded the Cambridge YWCA’s Tribute to Women Award in 1993. She was 69 when she died.
Reference: Cambridge Chronicle 1-17-01

Daughters of Bilitis (DOB)
Feminist and lesbian rights organization
The Cambridge Chapter of DOB is one of the surviving chapters of one of the first lesbian rights organizations formed in San Francisco by Del Martin, Phyllis Lyon, and six other women. It was created initially to provide an alternative to the gay bar scene. Bilitis was the fictional lesbian lover of Sappho as described in the poetry of Pierre Louÿs in Songs of Bilitis (1894). The “Daughters of Bilitis” name was intended as a sly reference to conservative organizations like the Daughters of the American Revolution and other similar groups. The DOB achieved national prominence during the 1950s and 1960s, but split over disagreements in the 1970s about whether it should support gay rights or feminism. During its heyday, it had chapters throughout the US and Australia. Between 1959 and 1972, the DOB published a national newsletter, The Ladder. Among the notable women who joined the organization were the playwright, Lorraine Hansberry, and the activist, Barbara Gittings.
Reference: Gallo, Marcia M. Different Daughters: A history of the Daughters of Bilitis and the Birth of the Lesbian Rights Movement, Carroll & Graf, 2006.

Mary (Andrews) Denison (b. May 26 1826 in Cambridge, d. October 11 1911 in Cambridge)
Popular novelist
Mary Andrews was daughter of Thomas Jefferson Andrews and his wife Juliette Robbins She was educated in the Boston public schools and in 1846, married a Baptist Minister Rev. Charles Wheeler Denison, editor of the Emancipator, the first antislavery journal in New York. When her husband became an assistant editor to the Boston Olive Branch, the journal published her first written piece. In 1847, she published her first novel, Edna Etheril, The Boston Seamstress, which was a success. During her lifetime, she published over eighty novels, writing under the pen names of N. I. Edson and Clara Vance. She also crusaded against alcohol in her book, Gertrude Russel (1849), published by the American Baptist Publication Society. Her novels, written in a lively style with colorful dialogue often depicted poor and struggling individuals overcoming temptations, concluding with the triumph of good over evil. With titles such as Out of Prison (1864), Carrie Hamilton (1866), Led to the Light (1867.) That Wife of Mine (1877) and Cracker Joe (1889) she endorsed conservative religious and social ideas, but did so with humor. Denison also contributed on a continuous basis to a number of popular periodicals, principally Frank Leslie’s Monthly, Harper’s Weekly, the People’s Home Journal, and Youth’s Companion. During the last two years of the Civil War, her husband was a hospital chaplain in Washington D C and Mary served as a volunteer nurse. Soon after, the couple went to England where he wrote articles in defense of the Northern cause and later edited an American newspaper. In 1867 they returned to Washington where they lived for many years. After his death in 1881, she remained at her home in Baltimore. Fourteen months before her death she came back to Cambridge to live in the house of her brother Dr. R. R. Andrews, where she died.
References: American Women Writers (1979); Boston Evening Transcript, October 17, 1911

Helene (Rosenbach) Deutsch b. October 9 1884 in Przemysl, Poland d. March 29, 1982 in Cambridge.
Psychoanalyst
Helene (Rosenbach) Deutsch was born in Przemysl, Poland to Wilhelm and Regina Rosenbach. As a young girl she wrote for the local newspaper and planned to attend university against the wishes of her family. In 1910, she went to study medicine in Munich, graduating with a Doctorate in Medicine in 1912. That same year, she married a physician, Felix Deutsch. Soon after, she began to work at the Vienna Psychiatric Clinic under Julius Wagner-Jauregg, and then went to Munich to study with Emil Kraepelin. After a series of miscarriages, she had one son, Martin in 1917. During her studies in Munich, she had read Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams which determined her to become a psychoanalyst. In 1916, she began to work with Freud, first attending his Wednesday night meetings, then joining his Vienna Psychoanalytic Society two years later. She was one of the first women to join and one of the first women to be analyzed by Freud.
From 1925 to 1933, Deutsch was director of Freud’s Vienna Psychoanalytic Clinic that trained psychoanalysts. She published her first book, The Psychology of Women's Sexual Functions, the first psychoanalytic study of women by a woman. With the rise of Hitler in 1934 and the take-over of Austria the following year, Helene Deutsch, with her son, fled Austria for the United States. When her husband joined her the next year, they settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts where she lived for the rest of her life. She became an Associate Psychiatrist at the Massachusetts General Hospital and an active member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society, publishing a two volume book on women's psychology, The Psychology of Women (1944-45). In 1964, Deutsch's husband, Felix, died . She continued to live an active professional life, publishing an interesting memoir Confrontations with Myself. (1972). She died in 1982 in Cambridge at the age of 97. Her papers, including some correspondence with Freud, are deposited at Schlesinger Library.
References: Sayers, J. Mothers of Psychoanalysis. New York, 1991. Roazen, Paul. Helene Deutsch, A Psychoanalyst's Life, (Garden City, N.Y, 1985); Finding aid, Helene (Rosenbach) Deutsch papers, Schlesinger Library.

Dorothea Lynde Dix (b. April 4, 1802, Hampden, Maine, d. July 18, 1887 in Trenton, NJ)
Educator, Reformer
Dorothea Dix was the daughter of Joseph and Mary (Bigelow) Dix. She opened her own school for young children in Worchester. Her talent as a teacher was so great that in 1819, she opened a school for girls in Boston but was forced to close it because of illness. Dorothea wrote several books for young readers, including an elementary science textbook, Conversations on Common Things (1824), Hymns for Children (1825), and American Moral Tales for Young Persons (1832). In 1831, Dix opened a new school in Boston, where she taught until 1836, until she collapsed from phsycial and nervous exhaustion. While recuperating in Liverpool, England, she met several leading British reformers who shared with her their new ideas about the treatment of the mentally ill. In 1838, Dix returned to America to live quietly on the income left to her upon the death of her grandmother. Three years later, when a Harvard Divinity student asked her to teach Sunday school classes for women at the East Cambridge House of Correction she discovered that some women were incarcerated simply because they were mentally ill. Dix began to publicly expose the deplorable conditions in which both prisoners and the mentally ill were housed. With the support of Boston social reformers, such as Senator Charles Sumner and his close friends Samuel Gridley Howe, and Horace Mann, Dix spent the next eighteen months surveying jails, almshouses, and hospitals across the state. She then presented the Massachusetts Legislature with her findings, resulting in the immediate enlargement of the Worcester Asylum.
Despite her recurring health problems, Dix expanded her investigations of conditions for the insane and mentally retarded throughout New England, New York, and eventually throughout most of the country. She pushed state governments to assume their proper care by producing “memorials” describing the appalling conditions. Altogether, Dix inspired the establishment of 32 state hospitals and 120 private and county hospitals. She expanded her survey to the prisons and published a book Remarks on Prisons and Prison Discipline in the United States (1845). During the Civil War, she was named superintendent of army nurses and caused controversy when she excluded those attached to religious orders or anyone under thirty. After the war, she continued to visit hospitals, expanding her surveys to the South. She died in New Jersey, worn out at the age of eighty-five and was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge.
References: Ogilvie, Marilyn and Joy Harvey. Biographical Dictionary of Women Scientists. Routledge Press, 2000; Notable American Women (1950) Vol I.

Cora DuBois (b. 1903 in Brooklyn, NY, d. 1991 in Brookline, MA)
Anthropologist
Educated at Barnard, Cora Du Bois obtained her Ph.D. at University of California, Berkeley in 1932.. After teaching at U.C. Berkeley, she became interested in the links between psychology and anthropology, and began to work with Henry A. Murray and Abram Kardiner. She then taught at Hunter College and began ethnographic field work in Alor, Indonesia During World War II , she worked with the Office of Strategic Services as research chief of the Indonesia Section.and then with the State Department (1943-1949). In 1954, she was offered the Radcliffe College Zemurray Professorship and taught in the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Social Relations at Harvard until 1970, becoming the second woman to be tenured at Harvard. Her field work continued in both Indonesia and India, where she studied sociocultural change at an Indian temple city and supervised a number of Harvard doctoral theses. In 1970, she retired from Harvard and went to Cornell where she remained for five years as Professor-at-large. She returned to Brookline at the end of her life where she died at the age of 88..
References: Ogilvie, Marilyn and Joy Harvey. Biographical Dictionary of Women Scientists. Routledge Press, 2000; http://www.peabody.harvard.edu/maria/bois.html

Louise Dunlap (b.July 28 1939 in Berkeley CA)
Writer, teacher, social activist
     Born in Berkeley to Elizabeth and David Dunlap, Louise Dunlap attended the University of California, Berkeley where she studied literature to the level of the PhD. During the 1965-1966 Free Speech movement on the Berkeley campus, she first lectured on writing on behalf of the cause of social justice. She came to Cambridge in 1967. She was married for ten years, divorcing in 1980. A few years later, she began to teach writing as a lecturer in the Urban and Planning Department at MIT. In 1990, she encouraged Cambridge residents to join in the Bigfoot Memorial Ride in commemoration of the centennial of the Wounded Knee massacre of the Sioux Indians. In 1994, she left MIT and some years later joined the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning at Tufts where she has continued to introduce students to her writing techniques.
     Dedicated to Buddhist peace missions, Louise was a key organizer for the Interfaith Pilgrimage of the Middle Passage when it came to Boston and Cambridge in 1998. She participated in the pilgrimage, for which she walked about one thousand miles. In the same spirit she helped organize local routes for the justice and peace Buddhist sponsored Walks for a New Spring. She has written for many periodicals including the American Friends Service Committee’s PeaceWork and the Buddhist Fellowship, Turning Wheel. Her book on writing for social change: Undoing the Silence: Six Tools for Writing to Make a Difference will be published in November 2007.
     She continues to teach writing workshops for community activists and, for the last five years, to teach yoga. A slide show, "Walk the Witness," about Buddhist-led pilgrimages and peace walks produced by Louise Dunlap’s partner, photographer Skip Schiel, with the participation of Louise Dunlap, appears on Schiel’s website. Dunlap has been a member of the Cambridge Peace Commission since 2003.
References: Information from Skip Schiel; Louise Dunlap, “Hiroshima Flame Interfaith Pilgrimage” Peacework December 2001; “Hiroshima Flame at New York’s Ground Zero” Peacework, September 2002; Vanessa E. Jones "The way of oneness"; Boston Globe April 19, 2006

Elizabeth (Harris) Glover Dunster (b. ca 1600 in England, d. August 1643 in Cambridge)
First Proprietor of a Printing Press in America -1638
     Elizabeth Harris Glover established the first printing office in colonial America. Around the year 1630, Elizabeth Harris married Reverend Joseph (sometimes referred to as Jose or Josse) Glover in England with whom she had three children. Joseph Glover had been a minister in Surrey, England, but left his family to come to Boston as a member of the Massachusetts Bay Company, through which he obtained a two hundred acre farm near Boston. He returned to England in 1638 to bring over his family, which included Elizabeth, their three children, and another two children from his previous marriage. The family brought with them a printing press and other supplies. Also on board was Stephen Daye, a locksmith by trade who was contracted to Glover, and Daye's family. Unfortunately, Joseph Glover died on their ocean voyage of a fever in 1638.
     Elizabeth.Glover, with the approval of local magistrates and elders, set up the printing press in Cambridge and settled in a house in close proximity to Harvard College and bought another house in which the Daye family lived and operated the printing press (later to become the Cambridge Press), that printed the first books in the colonies, The Whole Book of Psalmes, The Liberties of the Massachusetts Colonie in New England (now in the Boston Athenaeum), and the Almanack for the Years of 1639, 40, and 41.
     In 1641, Elizabeth Glover married Henry Dunster, president of Harvard from 1640-1654, who took over the supervision of the printing business upon her death in 1643. The Glover children later sued Dunster for a share of the estate.
References: Hudak, Leona M. Early American Women Printers and Publishers 1639-1820, The Scarecrow Press, Inc.; Metuchen, New Jersey, 1978.; Cambridge Historical Society Proceedings, vol. III:12-17; VI:22; XDIV: 64; See also History of Printing in America (1878).