In 2000, Thayer Dietrich, a member of the Rhode Island LGBT Pride Committee, suggested a performance to raise funds for Pride events while showcasing the talents of local Lesbian musicians. Mary Ann Rossoni, a musician herself, joined the efforts and together they produced the first Goddess Show at the Avon Cinema in Providence. At this sit-down event, the audience of 200 (predominantly Lesbians) enjoyed the sounds of Lesbian solo and group acts singing in a variety of genres. Some songs were original pieces by the musicians themselves. The Goddess Show proved successful both in fundraising and in elevating the visibility of Lesbian artists within the Lesbian community.

In those days, for many, it was still too threatening to be out due to professional, family, and other community concerns. The performers were not ashamed of being Lesbian but worried about the repercussions. In the initial show, only Mary Ann Rossoni and Laura Berkson were formally out as Lesbians. The Goddess Show gave an opportunity for closeted Lesbians to safely perform. More importantly, their music could be heard and appreciated. They initially volunteered their performances, though Mary Ann, who believed musicians should always be paid for working, did insist they receive small stipends.

The Goddess Show offered a rare and unique opportunity for both Lesbian performers and audiences. While many of the event’s performers remained “closeted” for some years, the Goddess Show created a much-needed space for Lesbians to perform and for women to be together in a welcoming women-centered space. Generally, the musicians did not perform music with strong Lesbian themes, but there definitely were undertones of women’s love for each other.

Lesbian musicians, especially if they were out, had limited opportunity to establish broader audiences. Generally, they were underrepresented in most music venues. This was true even for most LGBTQ Pride events as well. Ironically, though these women would have “their night” at the Goddess Show and raised significant (and much needed) funds for Pride events, they weren’t usually invited to perform on the main stages at RI Pride events (a few were, sure, but those performances were generally very limited).

Andy Smith, a writer for the Providence Journal, interviewed Mary Ann about the event in 2001. Unfortunately, the headline read something like “a Rhode Island Pride event.” So, several residents of RI, not really aware of the meaning of Pride, mistakenly thought the show was music about proudly living in Rhode Island. What a shock for them when they entered a room filled with 200 Lesbians and heard the sounds of women musicians not really singing about Rhode Island!

Mary Ann Rossoni planned and organized the Goddess Show for nearly 13 years. She set up the musicians, created the schedule, and generally kept things moving while a crew of volunteers would assist with many other tasks. Over time, The Goddess Show shifted from a sit-down event into a more “club” type atmosphere (for example, at the Hi-Hat Club at Providence’s Davol Square). As more people got involved, the acts started to include a broader array of performers. The annual Goddess Shows continues today at Askew Bar and Lounge, though the focus has changed and it no longer highlights or includes only Lesbian performers.

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Equality was the vision driving Elizabeth Carter Brooks’ (1867-1951) work as an educator, social activist, and architect. She wove these seemingly separate paths into a long life of advocacy for African Americans of New Bedford and beyond in a time when African Americans faced many obstacles and overt racism in both the South and the North in the United States.

In 1901, Elizabeth became the first African American woman hired as a public-school teacher in New Bedford. She taught at the William H. Taylor School for over 25 years. When she retired the New Bedford’s Superintendent of Schools noted that “her work was characterized by a sympathetic understanding of children...Thousands of children in New Bedford will remember Miss Carter and her kindly influence over them for many years to come.”

As a social activist, Elizabeth organized local, regional, and national groups that supported African American achievement. In 1896, nearly 200 clubs across the country combined to establish the National Association of Colored Women Clubs (NACWC). Elizabeth was elected vice president of NACWC in 1906 and served as the group’s fourth president from 1908-1912. During her administration, Elizabeth set up a scholarship, started a newspaper, and strengthened the NACWC. She was the first Association president to travel across the country meeting with local and regional organizations. African American women’s clubs like the NACWC, and the local chapter of the Martha Briggs Educational Club, are rooted in a long history of activism against racism and sexism including anti-lynching and voting rights campaigns. They promoted education and training as the means to lift up and advance women of color. The NACWC and its affiliated clubs continue the work set out in their original mission.

Elizabeth joined the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) soon after it was formed and later headed the NAACP’s regional and local New Bedford branches. Elizabeth used her educational expertise and activism to organize the Elizabeth Carter Brooks Jr. Girls Club. Meeting on Friday afternoons, the young women studied African American history, explored current events and advocacy, worked with senior community members, and promoted kindness and good deeds.

As a child, Elizabeth enjoyed cheering up elderly people. She noted how they “all seem to feel that I understand them.” Yet she saw a lack of loving care for the city’s elders. With the endorsement of the Women's Loyal Union, she raised enough money and support in 1897 to create New Bedford's first organized home serving elderly women of color. Eleven years later, she designed the Home for the Aged’s permanent location at 396 Middle Street. A stately establishment, the Home provided a comfortable life for the city’s aged residents until the 1990s.

Through her educational, architectural, and organizing skills, Elizabeth Carter Brooks’ activism enriched the lives of New Bedford’s students, elderly, and people of color. To honor her legacy, the New Bedford Public Schools dedicated a school building in her name. Elizabeth’s activism and accomplishments are still remembered in the city and the country. Her work lives on in the women still fighting for equality today.

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With careers marked by a series of firsts in New Bedford politics, Rosalind Poll Brooker (1928-2016) and Rosemary Tierney (1932-2020) were trailblazers for women in law and politics. Rosalind, the first woman elected to the City Council, the first female City Council president, and the first female City Solicitor; and Rosemary, the first and only woman to be elected mayor, as of 2021, used political office to mobilize change from within the walls of City Hall.

Rosalind Poll Brooker overcame every obstacle to make her community a better place. Not only did Rosalind enter the fields of law and politics at a time when women were expected to focus on home and family, she also did not let polio, which left her using crutches, hold her back. She began her public service career in 1969 when she was elected to the New Bedford City Council. Although she was first passed over to be City Council president, Rosalind was elected to the role at the next opportunity. Her colleagues described her as tough, kind, fair, and tenacious.

Mayor John Bullard, who named Rosalind as New Bedford’s first female City Solicitor, the chief legal officer of the city, stated “As a city councilor she had a strong personality. She was a great lawyer and a dynamic person.” Former New Bedford City Solicitor Irene Schall remembered Rosalind as an intelligent leader dedicated to advancing women attorneys. Shortly after her 1969 election, Rosalind stated, “I’m not going down in history, I’m going up.” She continued to rise up throughout her life bringing other women with her.

Committed to public education, Rosemary Tierney was elected to the New Bedford School Committee in 1971, where she served for several years. Beginning in 1984, she was elected to the Massachusetts Governor’s Council three times. Rosemary’s trademark grassroots campaigning style, which she perfected in these early elections drove her to victory in the 1991 mayoral race. Former Mayor Scott Lang remembered Rosemary as someone who "understood that door-to-door neighborhood campaigning and personal relationships drove public policy. No one in the City has ever built coalitions to drive an issue like Rosemary Tierney."

Rosemary succeeded in the arena of male-dominated politics by working hard to create programs and policies that included all New Bedford residents. During her first year in office, she unveiled her “Cornerstone for Change” plan to rebuild New Bedford. Perhaps her most important accomplishment was restoring New Bedford’s financial stability through tough budgetary controls.

As firsts in their offices in New Bedford, Rosalind and Rosemary encouraged other women to be politically active by supporting female lawyers and harnessing the networking power of women and women’s groups to strengthen grassroots campaigning. They brought traditional community-based organizing into the formal halls of city government, opening new avenues for women to enact change in areas dominated by men.

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Have you ever imagined yourself juggling six children’s needs, housework, and professional career? It may sound like a bit of a challenge; yet, these two women, Sarah (“Sally”) Harkness, a mother of seven, and Jean B. Fletcher, a mother of six, were able to manage their professional lives while fulfilling their duties as mothers and wives. They both were graduates of Cambridge School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture for Women, originally affiliated with Harvard University and Smith College after 1942. In 1945, the two talented women teamed up with six other architect friends and founded The Architects Collaborative (TAC), a leading architecture firm based in Boston, MA.

Thanks to the “permissive attitude of the office,” Sally and Jean did not have to work full-time. Instead, they worked in shifts--one in the morning and the other in the afternoon--and shared the same babysitter. Yet, their professional and domestic lives inevitably overlapped. Sally said she “learn(ed) [an] awful lot of things from domestic life” especially when she thought about her kids and envisioned an environment surrounding them, a school. The application of their real-life experience to architectural practice must have contributed to TAC’s projects for numerous school buildings including Classical and Central High Schools.

Classical and Central Education Center was the first project to which TAC applied the design of “a really urban school.” In 1963, TAC in collaboration with the local Providence architectural firm Harkness & Geddes won the first prize for the new design. However, it was not until 1970 that the buildings took the shape as we see today. Apart from the main building of Central School, everything that exists today was developed in the 1950s under “The Master Plan for Public School Sites.” The original Classical School building was proudly built in a mixed Italianate and Colonial style in 1878 as the first public high school at the City of Providence. It was a three-storied, massive structure with a basement with a high ceiling. TAC made a radical change to the design of the original masonry Italianate style by introducing raw, grey, concrete Brutalism. In addition, they changed the school's interiors by introducing novel concepts like multifunctional classrooms with movable walls which might have reflected the philosophy of TAC and experience of Sally and Jean's domestic lives.

This drastic alteration is probably the main reason why Classical High School is still subject to frequent negative comments about its appearance. Even the well-known architectural historian William McKenzie Woodward made harsh comments on the buildings in his book PPS/AIAri Guide to Providence Architecture: “The Modernist vision here, intended to challenge, now merely defeats. It’s no wonder Modernism has gotten such a bad reputation in Rhode Island.” Though not everyone agreed with its aesthetic, the majority of the public praised the working ethos and concept. John Ware Lincoln, chairman of the Division of Design at RISD recognized the new building as “exemplary of the new concept of the architect as an environmental planner, working with social and civic sciences, demography, transportation engineering, building technologies, and, in this case, education philosophy.” Both school buildings are celebrated as the first of their kind in Providence but they should also be understood as a rare vestige of the work of pioneering female architects.

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Upon entering the nineteenth-century stable that is now 48 Crestwood Road during the Great Depression, a visitor to the old Waterhouse estate ‘on the hill’ which lies between Warwick and East Greenwich would have found a gloomy, cavernous space. They might have seen a young girl playing on a tire swing that hung from a beam on the first floor, or perhaps they would have seen her father watching vigilantly out of one of the building’s few windows. His bargain with the landowner? To keep an eye on the comings and goings of workmen in lieu of paying the rent that he could not afford to pay.

What a surprise that visitor would have had when returning to the same property just over thirty years later… Upstairs: a light-filled and airy modern home replete with fashionable furnishings imported from Copenhagen, geometrical light shades, pale birch woodwork, crisp white walls and an abstract painting, all arranged around a black, cantilevered hearth of reinforced concrete set into white masonry. Downstairs: a barely begun drafting room soon to be fitted out with bespoke cabinets and bookshelves. Outside: a sprawling garden of one and a quarter acres with magnificent views of Greenwich Bay, also in the process of being tamed…

The authors of these changes were Elizabeth Greenleaf Pattee and J. Carol Fulkerson. Pattee was an architect and landscape architect by profession and a keen traveller, photographer and conservationist by avocation who purchased the property in 1955. By that point the stable had already been converted into a habitable dwelling by its previous owners, but a lot of work remained to be done in order to bring the house and its grounds up to Pattee’s exacting standards. These emphasised a comprehensive understanding of design which integrated approaches to architecture, landscape architecture, ecology and interior decoration ‘for [the purpose of healthy] living’.

This was a philosophy that Pattee developed over many years as a result of her educational background. She began her career as an architectural draftswoman, having obtained a BS degree in architecture from MIT in 1916, before shifting her focus to landscape architecture, which she studied at the Lowthorpe School of Landscape Architecture for Women from 1916 to 1918. Here, she would have learned about botany, planting and surveying. Ecology and conservation issues would have been present in her training too, but it was not until the 1950s that these came to the forefront of her work as an educator and advocate for good design practice.

One topic of concern to Pattee and the nascent conservation movement in Rhode Island in general at this time was the sustainable development of the local shoreline. For Pattee, this necessitated a reconciliation of the functional needs of people and the requirements of the natural environment. In recent times, this has been realised in the planning of the nearby Buttonwoods Beach. Today, these principles are so often taken for granted that it is easy to miss the novelty of the way in which Pattee's home reconfigured the relationship between house, user and landscape in order to reflect the integrity of all three.

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In 1904, ten women gathered together, led by former school teacher Julia Lippitt Mauran, to form a club in Providence devoted to “the promotion of interest in all kinds of handicraft and to provide a place where such work could be done.” This was, in part, a response to the growing interest in hand crafted design sweeping the country in the later decades of the 19th century, which saw the establishment of the first American arts and crafts society, founded in Boston in 1897.

In a report on the arts and crafts convention held in Boston in 1907, Mary Parsons, president of the Handicraft Club from 1904 – 1909, emphasized the crucial role of the Club in creating a center of activity for those interested in arts and crafts in Providence. Thus, the Club’s embattled search for a permanent home in the first ten years of its existence caused a great deal of alarm amongst its officers and members alike. Between 1904 and 1925 the Club had to move premises four times. This begun with informal meetings at the Froebal School, where Julia Mauran had been a teacher, and a brief period at Maxcy House at 7 Cushing Street, to a twelve year stint at the Truman Beckwith House, 42 College Street, from 1907 to 1919. They were forced to move again when the House was rented to another party, at which point they established what they thought would be their permanent home in Mitchell House, 227 Benefit Street, only to return to Beckwith House for good in 1925.

With the purchase of Beckwith House, the Club also took on the responsibility of preserving the historic building, designed by the architect John Holden Greene, and completed in 1826. Renovations included extensive redecoration, and the installation of a bow window in the south wall of the carriage house, the first floor of which was occupied by the workshop and showroom for the miniature furniture company, Tynietoy, established by Club members Marion Perkins and Amey Vernon in 1917.

Through providing the equipment required for crafts such as metalwork and book binding, among many others, and in encouraging the entrepreneurial activities of its members, the Club brought such endeavors out of the home and into a more public arena, endowing these women with a sense of pride and accomplishment in the skills they gained and the crafts they produced. In addition to offering classes and lectures by external practitioners from a wide range of geographic and disciplinary backgrounds, the Club served as a site in which women could exchange ideas and draw inspiration and knowledge from one another. The Club also staged exhibitions of members’ work, which were open to the public, and thus encouraged an interest in and support for handicrafts within the local community. During both first and second World Wars the Club devoted much energy to the war effort, knitting socks and scarves for the Red Cross and raising money for their Red Cross Unit by selling craft items.

The Club remains active in the community to this day, maintaining a strong sense of its heritage. In an effort to preserve the work of Perkins and Vernon, the Club acquired a Tynietoy dollhouse in 2013, and is still in the process of furnishing the Colonial style mansion with Tynietoy furniture. Thus, the Club continues its dual mission of promoting an interest in handicraft and historic preservation.

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The structure, six stories of Second Empire architecture, was the largest private building in the area when it was built at 55 Exchange Place in 1872, which had by 1893 had changed to 123 Westminster. (The Superman Building, which currently occupies the plot of land, is officially addressed as 111 Westminster.)

In 1911, sister dressmakers Anna and Laura Tirocchi moved their new business into room 438. Their only competition in the building was Henry R. Domenico, Ladies’ Tailor and Furrier, who worked out of room 448. An Edwardian society lady could promenade through the building and come out with a full new wardrobe and makeover, as the Butler Exchange also hosted a milliner, a purse manufacturer, a manicurist, a masseuse, two hairdressers, and seven shoemakers. She could even leave her children with one of its two dozen music teachers and take an hour or two at the Providence Ladies’ Gymnasium, founded and popularized by author Charlotte Perkins Gilman in 1881. The building was also the first home of the Providence Public Library before it moved in 1900.

The Tirocchi’s design business hosted by the Butler Exchange fit in well with their neighbors; dressmaking businesses flourished in the Arcade, as well as out of ladies’ apartments in the Lederer and Conrad buildings several blocks away. (The Conrad Building, at 139 Mathewson, is now the Hotel Providence.) These small shopfronts and office spaces enabled women to publicly make their own money within the profession, when the most common style of business in sewing was piecework within the home. Over 800 women were listed as dressmakers in the 1911 city directory, but only about a dozen of them had separate shops or workplaces of their own. The downtown area around Westminster street facilitated this independence and placed their businesses in the public sphere, where new costumers could more easily find them, instead of having to rely on neighborhood word-of-mouth.

The Butler Exchange’s closest neighbor was Providence’s first rail station, and its proximity to the station along with its prime position in the east side of the downtown area made it a heavily trafficked location. It would likely still be in place today were it not for a devastating 1925 fire, which destroyed most of the building.

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The Tirocchis began their dressmaking business downtown, and in only four years amassed enough elite clientele to move shop.The building they had been working in was beautiful, but it was also surrounded by the hustle and bustle of traffic, competing shops, and downtown life. When Laura married Dr. Louis Cella in 1915, they set their eyes on moving to the fashionable West Side of Providence – specifically, to Broadway Street, home to the wealthy and fabulous. 514 Broadway had been built in 1867 by prominent local architect Perez Mason and had housed two impressive businessmen: John Kendrick from 1867-1880, and George W. Prentice from 1881-1915. It was set up and furnished to present the appearance of wealth, and the Tirocchis capitalized on the space and effect. Surely both the family and their upper-class clients appreciated the display of affluence that the house created, inside and out. Its Italianate and Second Empire architecture – featuring sunburst gables and a mansard roof, capped with a three and a half story tower – stands out, even among the other beautiful homes of Broadway.

The large house became the perfect mix of public and private for the Tirocchi-Cella family; Dr. Cella took space on the first floor – eventually, they renovated and created an addition to the house that he relocated his practice to - and the public dressmaking business occupied the opulent second floor, while the sewing (and living!) took place on the third.

A. & L. Tirocchi Gowns flourished in the teens and twenties, despite the increasingly difficult economic situation for dressmakers. Ready-to-wear clothing at department stores had become more popular since it was introduced in the decades beforehand – the sisters’ saving grace was their elite clientele and their Italian training.

Anna Tirocchi’s beautiful gowns made waves in the Providence community and changed enough with the times that she was still a relevant designer more than thirty years after her debut. She and her sister made business connections in New York, Rome, and Paris that they visited with some regularity, bringing back brochures of the newest fabrics and fashions. Anna also invested smartly and bought several properties to rent, as well as a beach house on the Narragansett Bay. This relative affluence enabled her to support her workers and community in more ways than simple employment: shop girls were invited along on vacation, given housing when necessary, and had their wedding dresses made for free. In one instance, Anna wrote to a judge with familiarity, begging for leniency on the part of a community boy who had once worked for her when he was brought to court. The workers at A. & L. Tirocchi gowns functioned as apprentices; they were given rounded, practical instruction for years as they worked, and after a period of time they were able to strike out on their own as dressmakers in their own right.

The business ended in 1947 with Anna’s death, and its archives and collections were donated to RISD and URI in 1989. The house has undergone a few restoration efforts in the years since, most recently by the Dirt Palace collaborative, which plans to turn it into artist residences.

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While the Dorr Rebellion is of course centered in Rhode Island, the conflict became national news, and leaders across the country took sides. One such leader, Connecticut Governor Chauncey Cleveland, a Democrat, was a known supporter of Thomas Wilson Dorr.

When Dorr fled Rhode Island through Connecticut, he was granted safe passage, even when Rhode Island Governor Samuel Ward King demanded the return of fugitive Dorr. Despite the fact that women would not achieve their own suffrage until the next century, many were vocal, active supporters of political causes, Dorr’s among them. Six Dorrite women, Mary Hidden, Eliza Shaw, Sarah A Davis, Mary Stiness, Ann Buffington, and Maria L. Gardiner, believed so strongly in Dorr’s innocence that they wrote a collaborative letter of thanks to the Connecticut governor:

“It is impossible for us to find language sufficiently strong to express our heartfelt gratitude for your many manifestations of kindness and generous devotion to that man, whose name will ever be held in grateful remembrance by every lover of freedom; we mean Sir, Thomas Wilson Dorr . . . We have to the best of our ability endeavored to impress upon you the minds of those over whom we have been able to exert our influence, the sentiments of that Champion of American Freedom (Lafayette). Nothing shall deter me from the exercise of this right of a free man, to fulfill the duty of a citizen; neither the momentary errors of opinion; for what are opinions when they depart from principles? None say respect for the representatives of the people for I respect still more the people whose sovereign will it is to have a Constitution.”

These writers invoked the Marquis de Lafayette not simply for his apt description of the Dorrite ideal, ignoring public opinion for the good of the state and the sanctity of the Constitution. Since the colonists’ victory during the Revolutionary War, Lafayette had been lauded as a national hero. Four decades after the Treaty of Paris, Americans still wished to express their gratitude for the beloved French general: in 1824 Lafayette embarked on a tour of 24 states across the U.S. where he received accolades and the dedication of countless monuments, parks, and street names. During his visit to Providence, Lafayette was deeply impressed by a spectacle of female supporters, who lined the path to the State House to welcome him. The Providence Patriot reported: “The poplar avenue . . . was lined on each side with nearly two hundred misses arrayed in white, protected by a file of soldiers on each side, and holding in their hands bunches of flowers, which (as the General proceeded up the avenue . . .) they strewed in his path, at the same time waving their white handkerchiefs.”

Unlike the very public display of gratitude for Lafayette in Providence, the six women who wrote the letter to Gov. Cleveland expressed a clear support for Dorr, but were nonetheless concerned about their privacy. It appears that as strong as their convictions were, they did not wish that their families or neighbors discover where their alliances lay. A postscript written in the bottom lefthand corner of the letter indicates a wish to remain invisible: “P.S. Keep our names from the public.”

151 North Main Street was along the route of Marquis de Lafayette's parade when he visited Rhode Island.

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A strange-smelling package arrived at the residence where Thomas Wilson Dorr was staying during his exile in 1842. He opened the box to find the following: “one prime codfish weighing 15 lbs., 2 mackerell [sic], 1 peck of clams, and a few oysters.” Since Dorr would have been well aware that his female supporters organized massive clambakes to support his cause, perhaps he would not have been surprised to discover the leftover seafood. Through their thoughtfulness, the clambake organizers ensured that Dorr did not miss out on the flavor (or, presumably, the odor) of the day’s festivities. 

The clambake in question had occurred here on Acote’s Hill, Chepachet, on September 28, 1842, and drew crowds upward of 5,000-8,000 people from Rhode Island and Massachusetts, according to different reports. Rhode Island women organized several clambakes during the summer months of 1842, which served both as rallies and fundraisers. Although universal suffrage did not extend voting rights for Rhode Island women, they nonetheless participated fully and ardently in Dorr’s cause, as these clambakes suggest. These massive political events garnered statewide attention and support for the Dorrites and raised funds for “needy Suffrage families.”

Women addressed the crowds at the clambakes, often extemporaneously, like Providence-native Ann Parlin, whose husband, a physician, had been imprisoned in June following the failed capture of the Providence arsenal by Dorr’s forces. Making it clear that she had maintained an appropriately modest role in public, Parlin wrote to Dorr that she had given a “brief speech on impulse” at a clambake in August. Parlin emphasized that she had not spoken for long, and that it had been unplanned. If Parlin was brief in her remarks in Rhode Island, she was not in New York two months later. She addressed a crowd of Dorr supporters at the Shakespeare Hotel in New York City, and her speech was later printed by the New York Daily Plebeian. Parlin told the crowd: 

"After untoward events, too recent to require a recital, had destroyed their hopes of immediate emancipation from aristocratic thralldom, the patriots who had not fled were thrown into prison, and there dealt with as felons.  A band of ruthless aristocrats strode over their State, spreading terror throughout the land.  Informers, spies, denunciators crowded the cities, the hamlets, and the isolated abodes of husbandmen, violating everywhere the sanctities of private life—vengeance, and all the resentments of individual hatred mingling all the while their vile worship to the despotic measures of the victorious party." Parlin speaks at length about the so-called patriotic cause of the Dorrites, making it eminently clear that it is Governor King’s Law and Order Party who are the true villains in the conflict.

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Is it a stretch to see Benefit Street as a sweatshop for girls of the cultural elite? Probably; but it is interesting to note that in the years that Mary Balch’s School was teaching its young pupils the art of needlepoint, a young girl named Betsey Metcalf started Day’s Academy in Providence, teaching girls to braid straw hats that resembled the straw bonnets then in vogue in England from patterns she developed. When asked why she did not patent her technique, Metcalf replied that she did not want her name to be sent to Congress; her contemporary, Mary Kies, who lived in Connecticut, did not suffer this qualm and applied for and won a patent to protect her method of braiding straw into bonnets in 1809.

Betsey married Obed Baker in 1807 and moved to Westwood, Massachusetts. She continued to teach women to braid straw bonnets at the local Baptist and Unitarian Churches so they could raise funds for causes such as relief during the Irish Potato Famine. She and her husband were anti-slavery activists and may have helped slaves escape to the North through the Underground Railroad.

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If anyone deserves a blockbuster biopic on this tour, it is Sissieretta Jones. Jones, a soprano, studied voice at the Providence Academy of Music, the New England Conservatory and the Boston Conservatory and in 1892 became the first African-American to perform at Carnegie Hall. That year, she also performed at the White House for President Benjamin Harrison, and later for three other presidents after him. By 1895 Jones was the highest paid African-American performer of her day.

Married at age 14, she divorced her husband in 1899 due in part to his gambling and mismanagement of her musical career, and formed a traveling dance-comedy-musical group called the Black Patti Troubadours as many opera houses barred African-Americans from singing (it wasn’t until 1955 that Marian Anderson broke this barrier at the Metropolitan Opera in New York).

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Today, needlepoint samplers that were done by students – many of them age 10 and under – at Mary Balch’s School can fetch over $100,000 at Sotheby’s auctions; they fill Pinterest pages and have had starring roles on PBS’ Antiques Roadshow. At its heyday, the school – founded by Mary’s mother, Sarah, in the 1780s after the family left Newport when the city was under siege during the Revolution – had over 100 students, many of them boarders, and was one of New England’s best known and respected needlework schools through to its closing in the 1840s. One of the factors that distinguish the work done at Balch’s school, in addition to its technical sophistication, is its subject matter: Balch’s students were unique during this period in their depiction of architecture, including buildings designed by John Holden Greene.

What purpose did these needlepoint artworks serve? At the time, young girls would receive the most basic tutoring in reading and arithmetic before being placed (if they were from families with means) in schools that taught “female accomplishments”: music, watercolor painting, comportment and sewing. Sewing was an important skill as married women were expected to sew clothes and linens for her family. Needlepoint work laid the foundation for this work, but it also showed off the accomplishments of a young girl to prospective suitors – the best work was often framed and hung in the parlor.

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The worn wooden collection box, passed from hand to hand, slowly made its way through the crowded Quaker meeting. Many looked away, while some murmured angrily . . . radicals . . . disturbing the peace! A few people contributed coins, perhaps moved by the plaintive sentiments inscribed on the plain wooden box of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society. Founded in 1836, the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society tirelessly advocated for the rights of African Americans – with limited success. Despite New England’s reputation as a hotbed of abolitionist activity, the efforts of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society were far from welcome in a state whose economic interests were closely interwoven with slavery. Southern plantation owners supplied Rhode Island’s textile industry with raw materials like cotton and indigo. In return, many mills produced low-quality, inexpensive fabrics – generically marketed as “negro cloth” – deemed suitable for clothing enslaved peoples. Rhode Island also had strong social ties to the south. A number of plantation owners summered with their families in luxurious Newport mansions, and intermarriage with Rhode Island residents was not uncommon. For many Rhode Island elites, it was easy to condemn the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society as a radical, fringe organization. The most egregious offense of the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society was their call for “immediate, unconditional, and universal” emancipation. At the time, many abolitionists favored “gradualism” or the slow emancipation of slaves over many years. Instead, the Rhode Island organization supported the views of Bostonian William Lloyd Garrison, who, from 1831 until 1865, published The Liberator, a highly controversial newspaper. Due to some states’ laws banning any anti-slavery speech, it was not unheard of for people to even be arrested for possessing an issue of The Liberator. The Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society’s decision to ally themselves with the radical “Garrisonian abolitionists” cost them the support of some other anti-slavery supporters. By the beginning of the nineteenth century, most Quaker meetings banned their members from owning slaves and advocated for gradual emancipation. As the abolitionist community became more divided, however, some Quaker meetings began to expel radical Garrisonian abolitionists from their ranks. In Rhode Island, abolitionist Elizabeth Buffum Chace didn’t wait to be banned from the congregation – when her Quaker meeting refused to take a more radical and active stance against slavery, she stopped attending meetings, turning all of her attention to the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society. Chace became a tireless advocate for immediate emancipation, even harboring fugitive slaves in her own home. She and other women managed most of the day-to-day aspects of running the Rhode Island Anti-Slavery Society, particularly after a scandal and political conflict weakened the organization’s male leadership. As fellow abolitionist Daniel Mitchell remarked: “I must say that it is mainly by their efforts that the office is sustained…The devotion of these women to the cause of suffering humanity is probably second to none, and none labor more assiduously for its support than does this little band.”

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“In Memory of Duchess Quamino, A free black of distinguished excellence: Intelligent, Industrious, Affectionate, Honest, and of Exemplary Piety, Who deceased June 4, 1804, aged 65.”

Quamino’s weather-worn marker, along with nearly 300 others, comprise a section of Newport’s Common Burial Ground known as “God’s Little Acre,” one of the oldest and largest colonial African burial grounds in the United States. Dating from the late 1600s, “God’s Little Acre” offers insight into the lives of enslaved and free Africans such as Quamino through the commemorative words and images etched into stone.

Although described as a “free black” on her marker, Quamino was enslaved in the home of William Channing until she bought her freedom. Quamino also lived in her master’s house, which was customary in urban seaports where slaves worked in trades and crafts rather than on plantations. Many of the slaves brought to Newport were young children who worked alongside their masters to learn skills like rum making, rope braiding, stone carving, candle making, and chocolate grinding. Quamino used her culinary skills to run a catering business out of her master’s house. Her entrepreneurial success allowed her to purchase her freedom and earned her the title “Pastry Queen of Rhode Island.”

Quamino’s inscription praises her “Exemplary Piety” and includes a hymnal verse: “Blessed thy slumbers in this house of clay, And bright thy rising to eternal day.” With these words, William Ellery Channing, the founder of the Unitarian Church and the author of the epitaph, recognized Quamino’s involvement in the religious community of Newport. Quamino’s husband John was also a devout Christian. After gaining his freedom, he studied alongside a minister at Princeton in preparation for missionary work in Africa, but their plans dissolved when John was killed aboard a privateer ship during the American Revolution.

Like many slaves in colonial Newport, the Quaminos experienced the wave of Christian revival known as the Great Awakening during which Protestant America sought to convert the African population. In Newport, some slaves were provided religious education, converted to their master’s religion, and worshipped with the family in the home and at church. The burial ground reflects the breadth of religious diversity present in the city through carvings of angels, Biblical verses, and acknowledgements of those who lived with virtue and piousness.

The markers also tell about the origins of the deceased through the traditions of names. The prevalence of Anglicized or phonetically spelled versions of names from the African Gold Coast revealed the homeland of many Newport slaves to be Ghana. Upholding the naming tradition of the Akan people, the Africans often had names that identified the day of the week and order in which they were born. The name “Quamino” is given to boys born on a Saturday. In Duchess’ case, “Quamino” was her married name after her husband.

Walking through “God’s Little Acre,” the leaning, faded colonial stones are joined by the new markers of their descendants, a tribute to the resilience and preservation of African heritage in Rhode Island.

In November 2025, Duchess Quamino played a prominent role in “Life After Life,” a live performance developed through research and performed by 50 community members in Newport Common Burying Ground in November 2025. Actress Rebekah Acquah embodied Duchess, a transformative experience that gave her profound insight into Duchess’s character: “[This play] allowed me to honor not just [who the characters] were in the books, but also who the person was. It gave me the ability to give life to the dead.” As Rebekah noted, Duchess sparked opportunities for generations to come through her entrepreneurship, determination, and drive: “[Duchess] purchased her freedom and her children’s freedom and then bought a home next to the people who enslaved her. That’s a boss…If it wasn’t for someone like Duchess Quamino and so many others, I wouldn’t have been free to express [myself], to be sitting in this room right now.” You can see Rebekah portray Duchess in the Image Gallery below, and can learn more about “Life After Life” here: centeraquidneck.com/life-after-life-about

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In 1861, five young ladies, attendees of a prominent Providence academy for girls, met together for an afternoon of sewing. Unlike many of their classmates, they were concerned with more than the latest fashions, juicy local gossip, and their future matrimonial prospects. With the country ensnared in the Civil War, hospital supplies and handmade comforts for soldiers were in great demand. In Providence, the wartime economy had also made life increasingly difficult for the city’s poor. Motivated to improve their community, the girls began to canvass their neighborhoods for funds and supplies. After an encounter with a crusty Yankee tycoon who declared that the young lady was “positively irrepressible,” the Irrepressible Society was born.

Nineteenth-century Rhode Island was a world dominated by men. Until 1874, married women had no control over their own earnings. Until 1917, women could not vote. Nonetheless, the women of the Irrepressible Society exerted their independence, refusing to allow men to serve in the society in anything other than an advisory capacity. Initially, even married women could not hold offices within the society, reflecting its inclinations as a “spinster society.”

By the early 1870s, the Irrepressible Society had expanded beyond its humble beginning as a ladies’ sewing circle. They even had a coat of arms: two pairs of scissors rampant on a gold field, crowned by a thimble. Now, most of the actual sewing work was done by needy women compensated for their labor by the society. Although the Irrepressible Society’s mission included “charitable work of the city” more generally, they were particularly concerned with the plight of women without means to support themselves. Providing instruction in hand and machine sewing, the society made it possible for disadvantaged women to find gainful employment and improve their lives.

The Irrepressible Society was also remarkably forward-thinking in regard to the its finances. Acknowledging the impossibility of funding their work solely through donations, the ladies of the society endeavored to make it as self-supporting as possible. By 1929, half of the society’s revenue came from the sale of its goods and clothing. Although some items were made available to impoverished residents of the city at little or no cost, the Irrepressible Society also operated a small retail store. In addition, the society cultivated clients who placed large wholesale orders. For example, the Providence Lying-In Hospital purchased thousands of layette bundles for newborn infants over the years.

Part charitable society and part social club, most of the ladies of the Irrepressible Society were members of well-connected Providence families. Fundraising events hosted by the society were the talk of Providence. In 1884, the society hosted an elaborate “Charity Ball” that quickly became an annual winter tradition. Reviewing another society event, a local reporter began thusly: “The tea party of the Irrepressibles – we have been obliged to write that word three times, because our pen would slip into Irresistibles, as anybody’s would after coming from the blaze of matron beauty and maiden loveliness that lighted up the nice old rooms in which this society held its housewarming last evening.”

In 1929, the Irrepressible Society merged with three other social service agencies in Providence to form the new “Bureau for the Handicapped.” Seven years later, the society officially disbanded, turning all of their remaining funds over to the bureau. Although the new agency would continue to provide many of the same services – including job training, temporary employment, and financial relief – the days of the Irrepressible Society’s croquet parties and elaborate theatricals were over.

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In 1876, a well-dressed young lady in her early twenties joined Alexander Graham Bell on the stage of the old Providence Theatre. Bell, the noted teacher of vocal physiology and inventor of the telephone, had invited Jeanie Lippitt and her parents to join his public demonstration of one of the first long-distance telephone calls. Jeanie followed the conversation with interest and answered politely when spoken to – even though she could not hear a single word of the messages transmitted over the telephone.

Jeanie, the eldest daughter of Governor and Mrs. Henry Lippitt, was completely deaf.

Twenty years earlier, in the spring of 1856, a scarlet fever epidemic struck Providence. In less than a month, the disease carried off three of Jeanie’s older siblings and completely destroyed four-year-old Jeanie’s hearing. Her mother, Mary Ann Lippitt, responded to this tragedy by adamantly deciding that Jeanie’s loss of hearing would not be a handicap. Stating that no daughter of hers would “go through life flipping her fingers to make herself understood,” she resolved that Jeanie would be taught to lip-read and speak.

Mary Ann Lippitt devoted hours to teaching her daughter. When Jeanie was able to communicate adequately, she began to attend a private day school in Providence. Although her hearing loss necessitated some changes to the traditional curriculum, she was an exemplary student. Jeanie even learned to speak French, serving as the Lippitt family’s translator when they lived for a time in France.

Jeanie’s success made her a key figure in the campaign to establish new schools for the deaf in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Existing schools in the United States favored manualism, an early form of sign language that eventually developed into ASL – the “flipping fingers” that Mary Ann Lippitt deplored. Oralism, teaching the deaf to speak and lip-read, slowly became mainstream in the 1860s, along with the understanding that people with hearing disabilities should be integrated into mainstream society.

In 1877, during her father’s tenure as Rhode Island governor, Jeanie visited the Rhode Island Statehouse and urged members of the General Assembly to create a school for the deaf. With her father’s political endorsement and Jeanie’s articulate and impassioned pleas the General Assembly passed the necessary bill.

Concerned that Jeanie’s voice did not sound entirely normal, Mary Ann Lippitt arranged for her to take private voice lessons in Boston. She studied with a young teacher of vocal physiology who “always arrived for her lesson with a curious box under his arm, about the size and shape of a carpenter’s box.” Jeanie worked for several months with the young instructor, before he finally begged off of his teaching responsibilities to devote his energies to his invention—an apparatus housed in the “curious box.” Jeanie’s teacher was the inventor of the telephone, Alexander Graham Bell.

In later years, Jeanie Lippitt Weeden recounted the story of Alexander Graham Bell, her voice lessons, and the invention of the telephone with pride, remembering her experience waiting on the stage of the Providence Theatre as a thrilling moment in her life. Jeanie lived up to her mother’s expectations that she would be able to succeed in life, devoting herself to her family and involving herself in a busy Rhode Island social life.

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