Sweet Auburn: The Magazine of the Friends of Mount Auburn Lives of the Past Informing the Future | Page 18

By Rosemarie Smurzynski
Volunteer Docent
T
he road to women’s suffrage was
long, but as feminist historian
Susan Ware stresses, it was
also wide. In education, in marriage, in
professional life, in politics, and in racial
justice, that road encompassed women’s
rights beyond the vote. Some activists
expanded their work to include rights of
women and men of color. Many women from
Boston who labored for these rights in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
are buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery.
Their monuments dot the landscape, and
Mount
Auburn’s
Women
WarriOrs
their stories report the struggles, losses, and
eventual successes of their activism.
Two who spent their lives in the
overlapping struggle for woman’s rights and
racial justice were Harriot Hunt (1805–1875),
Lot 2630 Poplar Avenue, and Josephine Ruffin
(1842–1924), Lot 4960 Indian Ridge Path.
Between them, their lives spanned a century
of activism, each an agitator until the day she
died.
Both were native to New England. Both
were intelligent, inspirational, dynamic
pioneers in the battle for equality. Both were
chroniclers of the battle, sharing their public
roles and private lives in their much-read
works. Both were allied with other women
who were also engaged in the movement,
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