As Tough as It
Gets:
Women and the Boston City Council, 1920–2004
by Kristen A. Petersen,
Assistant Professor of History
Kristen Petersen joined the PMC faculty as assistant professor of
history in 2003. Last summer, she was the Polly Logan Scholar at UMass/Boston’s
Center for the Study of Women in Politics and Public Policy. Her
research project, “As Tough as It Gets: Women and the Boston
City Council, 1920–2004” explores the history of women
who have run for and been elected to the Boston City Council. The
research builds on oral histories conducted by UMass graduate student
Karla Armenoff and is co-authored with Center director, Carol Hardy-Fanta.
The paper will be published as a research report by the Center in
2005, and Petersen will present her findings at a public forum at
UMass/Boston in March 2005.
When Mildred M. Gleason Harris won a seat on the Boston City Council
as a representative from Roxbury in 1937, she broke a barrier for women
in municipal politics. Despite passage of suffrage in 1920, and despite
women’s participation in local politics for decades prior to
that, the city’s ruling body was an elusive goal. With her election,
women finally achieved access to city governance. Harris’s election
mirrored the entry of women into municipal politics nationwide; however,
in Boston as in most U.S. cities, very few women were subsequently
elected to city offices. The barriers held firm. Since 1921, 83 women
have run for Boston’s City Council, but only 9 women have been
elected, and to date, no women of color.
The League of Women Voters,
which grew out of suffrage organizations after 1920, actively recruited
women candidates. While its original motivation was to break Irish-dominated
ward politics from its control of the Council, Bostonians were not
inclined to elect women—old
Boston stock or Irish Catholic. It was not until the 1960s that women
earned a sustained presence on the Council, producing some of the most
colorful and influential figures in the history of Boston politics.
Maureen Feeney
Maura Hennigan
In the 1960s and 1970s, successful candidates Katherine “Kitty” Craven
and Louise Day Hicks tossed their hats in the ring in order to fight
for issues that threatened their communities: urban renewal and school
desegregation, respectively. The heyday for women in Boston city politics
came in the mid-1990s when women held 4 of the 13 City Council seats.
Between 1993 and 1997, Maura Hennigan, Maureen Feeney, Peggy Davis-Mullen,
and Diane Modica constituted a critical mass, and with the support
of City Council president Jim Kelly, they rose to positions of power
on committees and became a galvanizing force for women in positions
of leadership in other government offices and from the business community.
In 1997, though, individual political ambitions and the realities
of Boston’s political culture began to erode the alliance. Since
then, only two women have retained seats on the council: Maureen Feeney,
who joined the Council in 1993, and 2005 mayoral candidate Maura Hennigan,
who has the longest tenure of any current councilor. Today there are
a number of opportunities for women to become involved in local politics,
but few consider running for office.
