Cambridge Women's Heritage Project Database, G

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Cambridge Women's Heritage Project

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Megan Lynn Gaffney (b. ca 1979)
Campus leader, Advocate for women’s issues
During her college years, Megan Gaffney, a psychology major at Harvard (Class of 2002) who pursued an interest in women’s issues. For a Women’s Studies class titled, “Women, Violence, and the Law,” Gaffney conducted a study of violent music lyrics that advocated harm to women, analyzing the verses of rap and heavy metal. At the end of the semester, her professor, Diane Rosenfeld, suggested an independent study to prepare the work for publication. She assisted Rosenfeld in researching the prosecution of a case in which domestic violence led to the death of a pregnant woman. As co-director of Peer Relations and Date Rape Education, sponsored by Harvard’s University Health Services, she dealt with recruiting and advertising for this student-run group. Megan helped to foster a dialogue between the university and her fellow students on the issues of sexuality, which opened the group to some criticism for promoting too open a forum on this topic. Megan interned in the business department of Harvard Magazine as a work-study student. She also starred in many Harvard theater productions while at college, most notably as the Acid Queen in a student production of The Who’s Tommy. She sang in the a capella singing group “The Callbacks”, often counseling apprehensive performers at auditions. After leaving Harvard, she took a job as spokesperson for the US attorney’s office in Manhattan, appearing regularly in New York press reports.
References: Personal interview by Sandra Pullman, 2003. http://www.ci.cambridge.ma.us/~Historic/pullman3.html

Dorothy A. Gatherwright (b. November 13, 1903 d. January, 2002)
Pianist, organist
Dorothy A. (Wood) Gatherwright was born in Cambridge in 1903. Her family lived on Worcester Street. Dorothy learned to play the piano and became the accompanist to well-known contralto singer, Dorothy Richardson. Dorothy said, “We went to the different colored colleges. We went from Maine on down south. I guess I must have met Dorothy [Richardson] at church. I was a born member of the church. I was taking piano lessons from William Lawrence; he was the accompanist of Roland Hayes.” (Roland Hayes was a famous African American singer.) Dorothy played what she called “regular music” -- Negro spirituals and songs by black composers. According to her niece, Leora Littleton, Dorothy taught piano to half the children in Cambridge. She took organ lessons and became the organist for the Massachusetts Avenue Baptist Church’s Sunday school and director of the choir. In 1993, Mrs. Gatherwright celebrated her 90th birthday at the church where she was the oldest member. At her death, the City of Cambridge memorialized her passing.
References: Oral interview by Sarah Boyer.; City of Cambridge vital statistics, Cambridge City Clerk's office.

Caroline (Howard) Gilman (b. Oct. 8, 1794 in Boston Massachusetts, d. Sept. 15, 1888 in Washington, DC)
Poet, novelist
     Caroline Howard was born in Boston, Massachusetts to Samuel Howard and Anna (Lillie) Howard. At the age of 10, she moved to Cambridge with her widowed mother, who died that same year; her older sister then raised her. Writing was Gilman’s avocation from an early age and she published her first poem at age sixteen. She met a young Harvard College graduate, the clergyman, Samuel Gilman, marrying him, on September 25, 1819, in Cambridge. The young couple moved to Charleston, South Carolina where she remained for the rest of her life, adhering to the Southern cause during the Civil War.
     In 1832, she began to publish and edit a magazine designed for women and children that she called The Rose. It was soon renamed The Southern Rose, and was widely read throughout the country. Gilman produced most of the content herself in the form of poetry and children’s verses and stories as well as serialized novels about domestic life. Highly popular, her writings and her magazine supplemented the family’s income that was strained by the birth of seven children born between 1820 and 1840.
     Her first novel, Recollections of a Housekeeper, written under the pseudonym, Clarissa Packard, portrayed women’s lives in New England, described by her as at odds with that of the South. In her heavily autobiographical Recollections of a Southern Matron, written in 1838, she objected to the fashionable Southern belle as a woman defined by men and suggested other modes of behavior. She used her writing to comment on the societies of North and the South, comparing and contrasting their views of the domestic realm.
     In spite of the success of her novels and other writings, she reacted against her creative output and ceased to produce much original material after she lost her seventh child in 1840. Until her death, she wrote only occasional pieces and poems although she continued to republish her earlier poetry and children’s verses from her literary journal in a series of volumes through the 1850s. Her limited output in the 1860s and 1870s emphasized historical events from the period of the Revolutionary War.
Reference: Moss, Elizabeth. Domestic Novelists in the Old South. Louisiana: Louisiana State University Press, 1992. ; Haberly, David. “Caroline Howard Gilman” for Unitarian Universalist Historical Society (UUHS), 1999-2007, website includes portrait, http://www25.uua.org/uuhs/duub/articles/carolinegilman.html

Louise Gluck (b. 22 April 1943 New York, New York)
Poet and Author
Louise Gluck grew up in Long Island, New York, and attended Hewlett High School in Hewlett, New York, graduating in 1961. She attended both Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, and Columbia University in New York City, but dropped out of both schools before obtaining her degree. She was married twice, but was divorced both times. In 1986, her first book of poetry Firstborn was published and received the Academy of American Poet's Prize. This collection was known for its variety of first-person personae, all disaffected or angry.. Her next book The House on the Marshland, 1975, included historical and fairytale characters such as Joan of Arc and Gretel (of Hansel and Gretel). In 1980, she published Descending Figure with various imaginative personae. In 1985, her book of poetry, The Triumph of Achilles appeared, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Boston Globe Literary Press Award, and the Poetry Society of the America's Melville Kane Award. In 1990, her fifth book was published entitled Ararat, which won the Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. She began to write long poems with sequences connecting to tell a single story. Ararat deals with a family of three women in the aftermath of the death of a husband and a father. Her next book written as a series of poems, Wild Iris, was published in 1992 and won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1993 and the Poetry Society of the America's William Carlos William Award. She published three more books of poetry, Meadowlands, written in 1996, Vita Nova in 1999, and The Seven Ages in 2001. She also wrote a book of essays on poetry entitled Proofs and Theories: Essays on Poetry in 1994, that won the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for Nonfiction.
In addition to her other awards, Louise received the Bollingen Prize for Poetry in 2001, a Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, Boston Book Review's Bingham Poetry Prize, a Rockefeller Fellowship, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. In addition, Louise taught at Williams College for over twenty years and began to teach in the Yale English Department as Rosencranz writer-in-residence in 2004. In 1999, while teaching at Williams, Louise was elected a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and in the fall of 2003, she was designated the twelfth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry at the Library of Congress. She lives and works in Cambridge part of each year.
References: "Louise Gluck" The Academy of American Poets – Louise Gluck" Date accessed: 12/7/2005 http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/82
"Louise Gluck" NNDB: Tracking the Entire World. Soylent Communications 2005. Date accessed: 12/7/2005 http://www.nndb.com/people/036/000068829
Atkins, Christine. "Wishing for Another Poem: The Poetry and Essays of Louise Gluck" The New York State Writer's Institute Writer's Online Vol. 1 No. 4 (Summer 1997). Date accessed: 12/7/2005 http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/gluck/about.htm
Hass, Robert "About Louise Gluck" Modern American Poetry. Date accessed: 12/7/2005 http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/g_l/gluck/about.htm
http://www.artstomp.com/gluck/news.htm Date accessed 6/7/06

Alice Bache Gould (b.January 5, 1868 in Cambridge, MA, d. July 25, 1953 in Simancas, Spain)
Mathematician, Historical researcher, Educator
     Alice Bache Gould was born in Cambridge on January 5, 1868 to the astronomer Benjamin Apthorp Gould and his wife Mary Apthorp Quincy Gould. The Gould family resided at 12 Oxford Street in Cambridge. The house, built in the 1840s, was demolished in 1926 for Harvard's construction of Mallinckrodt Laboratory. As a very young child, she lived in Cordoba Argentina where her father was astronomer at the National Observatory but she returned to Cambridge in 1871 to live with relatives. She always credited her New England roots for her resolute personality but she kept an interest in Spanish culture.
     As a young woman, she determined to become a mathematician and studied at the early version of Radcliffe College in 1885. She then transferred to Bryn Mawr from which she received an A.B. in mathematics in 1889. She then began graduate work at Massachusetts of Technology and at Newnham College, Cambridge in England. She then began a doctorate at the University of Chicago under to study for her doctorate in mathematics with E. H. Moore and received a fellowship in 1895. The death of her father the following year and the loss of her fellowship caused her to drop out of her doctoral program and return to Cambridge. Although she taught mathematics occasionally, she never completed her degree. She established a fellowship in her father’s name at the Academy of Sciences. She also wrote and published a biography of the naturalist Louis Agassiz in 1900.
     Her life took a new direction when she traveled to Puerto Rico to recover from the flu. She became interest in the earliest voyages of exploration and to research information on the first sailors to risk the Atlantic crossing. During seven years in Puerto Rico and forty-two years in Spain, notably in the Archivo de Simancas, she rescued countless original documents from destruction. Her greatest accomplishment as a scholar was the compilation of the names and biographies of all the members of the crew of Christopher Columbus' first voyage. In 1942, famed Harvard historian Samuel Eliot Morison called her work, "the most important piece of original Columbian research yet done in this century."
     Although historical research was Gould's lifetime passion, it was not her only accomplishment or legacy. She was instrumental in establishing a nurses' training hospital in Puerto Rico, and she founded the first pre-school in
Simancas, Spain. She taught at universities across the United States and even taught navigation to ensigns during World War I at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center. Although she briefly left Spain during the Spanish Civil War, she soon returned there. Gould left behind permanently endowed scholarship funds and bequeathed huge collections in both the United States and Spain. The government of Spain awarded her the Queen Isabella cross in 1952. She died in Simancas, Spain on July 25, 1953. In October 2003, fifty years after her death, a two-day international celebration in Madrid recognized Miss Gould's life and accomplishments. The event was organized by Kathleen E. LeMieux, who is currently writing a biography of Alice Bache Gould for publication.
References: Kathleen E. LeMieux; Massachusetts Historical Society, Alice Bache Gould'papers Guidie to the Collection; http://www.masshist.org/findingaids/doc.cfm?fa=fa0207; “Alice in Seville” Time magazine July 7, 1952.

Suzanne (Revaleon) Green (b. September 13, 1912 in Cambridge)
Teacher and local historian
      Suzanne Revaleon Green, born in 1912 to James Albert Revaleon and Ruby Higginbotham, is a lifelong resident of Cambridge She still lives on Worcester Street, in the house in which she grew up. A former teacher, she is known for her keen love for and knowledge of history. The Revaleon family has an interesting history and is highlighted in Twenty Families of Color in Massachusetts, 1742–1998 by Frank Dorman.
     Her grandfather Albert Leroy Revaleon enlisted in the 55th regiment in the Civil War, a regiment of Black soldiers formed after the famous 54th was oversubscribed. Her father’s mother was one of five children born to James Belden, an Indian scout of the
Nipmuc tribe in Northfield, Massachusetts, a territory seized from the Indians without compensation.
      She recalls that her maternal grandfather sold fruits and vegetables from his horse and wagon and ran a store in Cambridge, selling grains, beans, and flour. He gave her grandmother the house at 9 Worcester Street in the 1880s as a wedding present. She recalls being a member of the Cambridge Neighborhood House and the Margaret Fuller House, where she took piano lessons and then played. She attended the Fletcher school, graduating at the top of her class, but was at first blocked from speaking at the graduation because of her race. When her father objected strongly, a concession was made to allow her to speak. Her father was a man who did not believe in being blocked by racial prejudice, and when he was not welcomed in the white Masonic Lodges, he started a Masonic Lodge for young African Americans in 1937.
     Suzanne continued her education at Cambridge High and Latin and then went on to Salem State Teacher’s College, graduating in 1933. Although she and her “colored” classmates were encouraged to seek positions in the South, Suzanne stayed in Cambridge and was the seventh Black woman to be hired in the Cambridge Public schools since the time of Maria Baldwin. In 1937, she was appointed to the Houghton School.
     Five years later, when she decided to get married, she was fired from her position along with two other recently married women, one Catholic and one Jewish. Her new husband, the attorney Robert H. Green, sued the city contending that the firing had been illegal. The battle dragged on, but it was resolved in their favor and all three women were reinstated and awarded their back pay. Green decided to resign (as she had initially planned to do before the firing, but the other women continued to teach in the schools. It was some years more before the law was changed and all married women were permitted to teach in the schools.
Green has served and volunteered for the Girl Scouts, the Cambridge Community Center, and the Cambridge YWCA. She worked for 11 years as assistant director of training from the OIC (Boston office of Opportunities Industrialization Center), a movement begun by a group of ministers in the 1960s to increase working possibilities for African Americans. In the 1960s, she was also one of those who fought to prevent the proposed Inner Belt highway from destroying much of Central Square.
     Devoted to her community, she is depicted in the top left-hand corner of the mural behind the Harvest Cooperative Supermarket in Central Square. In 2002, on her ninetieth birthday, she was awarded the key to the City of Cambridge. Since then, she compiled a booklet entitled African-American Women—Firsts that celebrates in words and photographs the accomplishments of Black women U.S. history. She has served as a member of the Cambridge African American Heritage Trail Committee and the Cambridge Historical Commission, and in 2004 she was the first recipient of the Margaret Fuller Lifetime Achievement Award at the 17th Annual YWCA Tribute to Outstanding Women and an invited guest at a conference on “Slavery, Freedom and Abolition” in New England at Yale University.
References: Cambridge Tab 2-25-99; 4word article, November 2003, "A Conversation with Suzanne Revaleon Green," http://masonrypage.org/Area4/4word/2004-01-i18.pdf ; Cambridge Historical Commission Special History Issue #18; Salem State Alumni site. http://www.salemstate.edu/alumni/statement/docs/ALA-Statement_1.pdf