This week’s show profiles Angela and Ezra Heywood: writers, activists, free-love advocates, suffragists, socialists, labor reformers, and abolitionists who shocked the sensibilities of Victorian Boston.
The Radical Heywoods
- Read the Heywoods’ seminal essay Cupid’s Yokes, about how marriage enslaves women.
- Another Heywood essay called , asserting that women are ruled without their consent.
- Notes from an “indignation meeting” in support of free speech, held at Faneuil Hall after Ezra Heywood was arrested.
- Free Love and Anarchism: The Biography of Ezra Heywood, by Martin Blatt
- A feature on the Heywoods from WGBH.
This Week in Boston History
- November 6, 1894: “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald becomes the first Irish-American Congressman from Massachusetts. Read of how he met the future Rose Fizgerald Kennedy as a result of the campaign.
- November 7, 1916: Boston Elevated Railway car 393 plunges through an open drawbridge into Fort Point Channel, killing 47. Read coverage from the next morning’s Globe.
- November 8, 1861: The Trent Affair occurs, in which a Union captain stops and boards a British ship to arrest Confederate “diplomats,” who will be imprisoned on Boston Harbor. Learn more in Episode 51.
- November 9, 1775: Pennsylvania riflemen march a quarter mile through ice cold water to push back a British foraging party, near the location of today’s Cambridgeside Galleria.
- November 10, 1771: Future Continental general Israel Putnam shares a classic joke with John Adams. Do you know the one about the innkeeper, the Indian, and the hogshead of rum?
- November 11, 1630: The Puritan settlers of Boston tell two strangers who want to settle here, essentially, “You can’t sit with us!“
- November 12, 1928: Amelia Earhart returns to Dennison House, where she had worked as a social worker, after becoming famous as the first woman to fly across the Atlantic.
Correction
- Our instance of Puritan voter fraud actually took place in May 1647, not November as we reported last week. We regret the error. Check out this article from the Congregational Library for more.