Although the neighborhood is now known for its large Italian and Hispanic populations, a century ago the area was densely populated with Scandinavian and Russian immigrants, many of whom were Jewish and clustered around East Boston’s first synagogue on Chelsea Street. In East Boston, where more than 2,500 women registered to vote in 1920, the logs provided a window into the area’s immigrant communities. Project team members from Simmons University and the Boston City Archives collaborated together to create a database of women’s voting history in Boston. In addition to name, age, address, and occupation, women were asked for their place of employment, marital status, and documentation confirming that their closest male relative was a US citizen, since a woman’s citizenship at the time was determined by her husband, father, or father-in-law. Transcription began in 2021 and the team hopes to finish next year so far, researchers have completed nine of the 26 wards, and digitized more than 14,600 entries. In several cases, clerks would presumptuously begin to scribble “housewife” before crossing it out and replacing it with the woman’s actual job - often as a seamstress or saleswoman or telephone operator. Particularly in the final days of registration, Prieto said, the handwritten logs reveal scores of women’s professions indiscriminately labeled as “housew-” with letters missing off the end of the word. “The women completely overwhelmed the system, and we see that even in the handwriting, in some of the hasty mistakes and abbreviations the clerks made.” “It was huge,” said Laura Prieto, a history and women’s studies professor at Simmons University and one of the project leaders. Members of the Mary Eliza Project from left: Marta Crilly, Coco Lynch, Laura Prieto, and Anna Boyles stood at the Boston Public Library in East Boston.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |