It has been impossible to ascertain the number of women serving as School Trustees later than 1898. Then the records showed 194 on boards in 138 towns, but, as in many cases only the initials of the prefixes to the names were given, this is probably an underestimate. Women serve on the boards of public libraries.
Women are found in the following official positions in Boston: trustees of public institutions, two; of children's institutions, three; of insane hospitals, two; of bath departments, two; overseers of the poor, two; city conveyancer in law department, one; Superior Court stenographer, one; probation officers, two; chief matron House of Detention, one; supervisor of schools, one; members of school committee, four.
Occupations: Massachusetts claims the first woman who ever practiced medicine in the United States—Dr. Harriot K. Hunt, who studied with her father and began in 1835, long before a medical college in the country was open to women. In 1881 Lelia J. Robinson applied for admission to the bar in Boston and the Supreme Court decided a woman to be ineligible. The Legislature of 1892 enacted that women should be admitted to the practice of law. No professions or occupations are now legally forbidden to them.
Education: One of the first seminaries for women in the United States was Mt. Holyoke at South Hadley, Mass., now a college with 550 students; the largest college for women in the world is Smith at Northampton, with 1,131 students; one that ranks among the four highest in existence, Wellesley, has 819; Radcliffe at Cambridge, has 407. The requirements of admission and the examinations are the same for Radcliffe as for Harvard and the courses of instruction are identical. The teaching is done by members of the Harvard faculty, over one hundred of them. All degrees must be approved by the President and Fellows of Harvard, the diplomas are countersigned by the President and bear the University seal. Nevertheless Radcliffe is not recognized as having any official connection with the ancient university. A number of graduate courses in Harvard are open to women but without degrees.
Boston University, with 1,430 students, is co-educational in all its departments, including law, medicine and theology. The same is true of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the State Agricultural College. There has been no distinction of sex in Tufts College (Univers.) since 1892; or in Clark University (post-graduate) in Worcester, since 1900. The College of Physicians and Surgeons and Tufts Colleges of Medicine and Surgery, in Boston, admit women. They are excluded from Andover Theological Seminary (Cong'l), Newton Theological Institute (Baptist), Amherst College, Williams College and Worcester Polytechnic Institute.
In the public schools there are 1,197 men and 12,205 women teachers. The average monthly salary of the men is $136.23; of the women, $51.41. Omitting the High School salaries, the average amount paid to men per month is $130.09; to women, $49.61. In some counties over one-half as much is paid to women teachers as to men, but in Essex County the monthly ratio is $127.82 to men, and $47.17 to women, and in Suffolk County $200.07 to men and $63.44, or less than one-third, to women. Boston has 215 men teachers at an average monthly salary of $213.61; and 1,762 women at an average of $69.68. In no other State is the discrepancy so great in the salary of men and women teachers.
The women's clubs of Massachusetts are as the sands of the sea. Of these 169, with a membership of 21,451, belong to the State Federation. The New England Woman's Club was organized in 1868, the same year as Sorosis in New York and about one month earlier. These two are generally spoken of as the pioneers of women's clubs as they exist to-day.
THE NATIONAL WOMAN SUFFRAGE ASSOCIATION OF MASSACHUSETTS.[328]
When the third volume of the History of Woman Suffrage closed in 1885 it left this association three years old, with Mrs. Harriette Robinson Shattuck, president, Dr. Salome Merritt, vice-president, and thirteen other vice-presidents who represented the same number of counties. To these leaders and others it seemed necessary that Massachusetts should have this society in order to give a support to the officers and the methods of the National Woman Suffrage Association, which they were not receiving from the State society, at that time auxiliary to the American Association. In those three years conventions had been held in some twenty cities.
Mrs. Harriet M. Emerson was then engaged in preparing petitions, to which she secured many signers, asking for "a statute to enable a widow who desires it, to become on reasonable terms a co-executor with those appointed by her husband's will." For several years she spent much time on this work and had the help of many of the best citizens of Boston. It was ably presented at each session of the Legislature, but no action was taken.[329]