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Originally published in the Historic Nantucket, Vol 40, no. 4 (Winter 1992), p. 80-81

On the Trail of Nantucket's Women's History
Condensed from On the Trail of Women's History: New England and Upper New "York State, by Barbara Westmoreland. In press, 1993.

1. First Congregational Church. North Centre Street. Louise Southard Baker was an early and earnest worker in the temperance crusade of 1875, just after the Women's Christian Temperance Union was organized. Experience speaking and organizing in the WCTU enabled many women to become active in public life for the first time.

2. Harriet Swain. 9 Gay Street. Like many of Nantucket's whaling wives, Harriet went to sea with her husband. They sailed on Christmas Day, 1852. They were deeply attached to one another and Obed built her a little house on the deck so that she could sit out without getting sunburned.

3.Atlantic Silk Company. 10,12 Gay Street. Abolitionist women tried to use materials other than cotton raised by slave labor. Perhaps this was one of the reasons silk manufacturing was tried on Nantucket. It provided women with employment during its 8 years of operation but closed in 1844.

4. Delia Hussey's Cent School. 8 Quince Street. Many Nantucket women worked outside the home. Every neighborhood had a cent school like Delia Hussey's. The children brought the penny charged each day in their lunchpails.

5. Maria Mitcheil Birthplace. 1 Vestal Street. Astronomer. As the most important American woman scientist in the 1870s, she did much to encourage other women to enter the public sphere. Maria was born here in 1818, and learned astronomy on the roofwalk of this house, assisting her father in astronomical observations. Her father built a tiny study on the second floor where she could study apart from her eight siblings.

6. Pacific National Bank. Maria Mitchell's family lived in an apartment here after her father took a job with the bank. It was on the roof of this building, on the night of Oct. 1,1847, that Maria spotted and tracked the comet that made her famous.

7. Mary Coffin Starbuck, "Parliament House." 10 Pine Street. When John Richardson, a Quaker missionary, came to Nantucket in 1701, he was impressed that Mary Starbuck had ".. .soundness of judgment, clearness of Understanding, and an elegant way of expressing herself." In fact, she was already a leader in the community before John converted her to the Society of Friends. Quaker meetings were first held in the Great Room of this house, and Mary was important in Nantucket's becoming substantially Quaker.

8. Black Cemetery. Behind the hospital. Buried here are Eunice Ross and Phoebe Ann Boston. Their appeals and court action for education for black students finally led to integration in 1847.

9. "Petticoat Row." Centre Street between Main and Broad. In the early and middle years of the 19th century, the preponderance of women merchants, selling everything from daily necesssities to exotic goods, gave this street its name. Generally, in the 19th C, women's roles became increasingly confined to the home as the shortage of male labor was overcome. But on Nantucket, whaling husbands were away for long stretches— as long as five years—and the dangers of whaling often left women widows. The Quaker influence, which valued competence of all sorts in women, and hard work and thrift in everyone, was crucial as well.

10. Atheneum. Anna Gardner called the first Nantucket Anti-Slavery Convention here in 1841. Famous orators such as William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips spoke but Anna is said to have worried that the audience was not responding until 23-year-old Frederick Douglass, recently escaped from slavery, rose. He began this, his first public speech, nervously, but his real-life account roused the audience to cheers. Seven years later, by then editor of the Northstar in Rochester, he attended the first Woman's Rights Convention in Seneca Falls, NY, and persuaded Elizabeth Cady Stanton that the Declaration of Sentiments must include a demand for women's suffrage.

11. Unitarian Church, 11 Orange Street. Phebe Ann Coffin Hanaford, the first woman ordained in New England, was born a Quaker in Siasconset in 1829. She gravitated toward the more cheerful Unitarian doctrine, however, and became a member of this church. She was ordained a Universalist minister in 1868 and spent a long career pastoring, writing, and working for women's rights.

'12. Lucretia Coffin Mott was born in a house no longer standing at 13 Fair Street. The epitome of the strong, spiritual Quaker woman, Lucretia was one of the foremost reformers of the 19th century and a mentor of Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

13. The African School and the African Baptist Church. York and Pleasant. This small building served many functions—school, church, and meeting. In 1834, both a black woman, Zilpha Elaw, and Salome Lincoln, who was white, preached sermons here.

14. Anna Gardner. 40 Orange Street. Anna was raised a Quaker here and remembered her abolitionist parents smuggling fugitive slaves as part of the Underground Railroad. She taught in the African School on York St. and after the Civil War went to the South to teach in the Freedmen's Aid Society schools of the Reconstruction Era.