Meeting of the Committee of Remonstrants

The Committee of Remonstrants met at this location, formerly 90 Boylston Street.

NPS Photo/Woods

Quick Facts

Location:

90 Boylston Street

Significance:

Meeting place of the Committee of Remonstrants

OPEN TO PUBLIC:

No

MANAGED BY:

Private Building

In 1882, Mrs. Charles D. (Eliza Lothrop) Homans formed the unofficial anti-suffrage organization “Committee of Remonstrants” in Boston. The 13 women of this committee came from Boston’s upper class, known as the “Boston Brahmins.”¹ For over ten years, the Committee of Remonstrants met unofficially in the parlors of stately Boston homes, including this one. Using their connections to powerful husbands and family members, the Committee wrote and distributed literature across the country.²

For more information about the Committee of Remonstrants, please visit the article “Anti-Suffrage in Massachusetts.”

Footnotes:

1. Susan E. Marshall, Splintered Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Campaign against Woman Suffrage (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 29-30.
2. James J. Kenneally, “Woman Suffrage and the Massachusetts ‘Referendum’ of 1895,” The Historian 30, no. 4 (1968): 617-633; Lois Bannister Merk, “Massachusetts and the Woman Suffrage Movement,” (Phd diss., Radcliffe College, 1961).