In her pioneering book Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), writer and thinker Margaret Fuller articulated the goal of women’s progress in America: “We would have every arbitrary barrier thrown down. We would have every path laid open to Woman as freely as to Man.” Spoken seventy-five years before women had the legal right to vote, Fuller’s words served as a rallying cry for generations of people who fought to live and work as they pleased. 

On a broad historical scale, the path to gender equality was marked by incremental but meaningful victories in the courtroom and at the ballot box. Against the backdrop to these highly reported events were hundreds of smaller moments where women of Concord, sometimes in defiance of propriety or tradition, made their mark on the world. Each of them encountered the social and political barriers of their time, and while some persisted in their chosen occupation, others eventually took a different path. 

Sophia Peabody (1809-1871) was a well-known member of the early nineteenth-century Boston art world. Trained in the arts while she and her family lived in Boston and Salem, Peabody viewed herself as a professional rather than an amateur at a time when few women could claim such a distinction. Peabody had the support of her teachers and mentors, including Washington Allston, one of the most important American landscape painters of the early nineteenth century. Sophia Peabody eagerly copied Allston’s work for practice before embarking on her own landscape paintings to great success. 

Profile of Margaret Fuller, Boston, before 1830

| Concord Museum, Gift of Miss Mary Gill (1935), Pi1611

In 1841, American educator Samuel Gridley Howe reached out to Sophia Peabody to commission a portrait bust of one of his students, Laura Bridgman, who lost her sight and hearing as an infant. Bridgman (1828-1889) learned to read and communicate at the Perkins School for the Blind under Howe’s tutelage, becoming the first deaf-blind person in America to receive a formal education. This was Sophia Peabody’s first serious work in sculpture, and she modeled it on twelve-year-old Bridgman, who was described by Howe as having a face “radiant with intelligence and pleasure.” Sophia Peabody’s portrait-bust not only commemorated Laura Bridgman’s achievements, but Howe had dozens of plaster copies made to take on his travels across the nation to promote schools for the blind, and these copies now reside in libraries, schools, and private collections throughout the country. 

One article praised the Laura Bridgman bust as an “early product of [Sophia Peabody’s] genius as a sculptor” though it was Peabody’s last major work of art. The following year, she married Nathaniel Hawthorne and the two set out for Concord to begin their lives together. For over three years, the pair lived at The Old Manse, and became affiliated with Concord’s circle of intellectuals known as the Transcendentalists. Sophia Peabody Hawthorne remained a critical voice in her husband’s work, but her marriage marked a shift in her artistic career. She no longer painted or sculpted, but instead transitioned to making inlaid fire screens and hand painted lampshades to sell, supporting her family while Hawthorne wrote The Scarlet Letter.  

While in Concord, the Hawthornes frequently socialized with Ralph Waldo Emerson and his wife Lidian Jackson Emerson. Witty and feisty in her conversations, Lidian Emerson (1802-1892) gave her attention to the causes she supported, including the rights of women and Native people, and the humane treatment of animals. She was also a “zealous member” of the Concord Female Anti-Slavery Society, according to her daughter Ellen. Lidian Emerson supported the immediate emancipation of enslaved people and the more radical notion of “disunion,” splitting North from South, long before the Civil War. 

A painting completed in 1882 by the artist Rose Lamb (1843-1927) portrays 80-year-old Lidian Emerson as a formidable presence with dignified bearing. Born in Boston, Lamb hailed from a wealthy and socially elite family and studied under William Morris Hunt and Helen Knowlton during the 1870s. Through her friendship with writer Sarah Orne Jewett, Lamb became acquainted with Edith Emerson, daughter of Lidian and Ralph Waldo Emerson. It was likely this friendship which brought Lamb to Concord in 1882 to observe her next portrait subject. 

In a letter written to her husband, Lidian Emerson recalled a pleasant day spent in Rose Lamb’s company, unaware that Lamb was actually in Concord to “slyly study your old lady’s face.” Edith presumably set up the meeting as a way for Lamb to view Lidian Emerson without the rigid formality of a portrait sitting. Afterwards, Lidian felt somewhat tricked by the encounter, but “I am reconciled to having been unconsciously subjected to surveillance.” The resulting portrait depicts a luminously lit Lidian Emerson against a dark backdrop, brows furrowed, and mouth pursed as if struggling to hold back her opinion of the viewer.

Around the time Rose Lamb established herself as a portraitist in Boston, a young Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts (1871-1927) began to make waves in Philadelphia as an artist of uncommon talent. She studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and, at the age of seventeen, she won the Mary Smith Prize for a work of art “showing the most originality of subject, beauty of design and drawing, and finesse of color and skill of execution.” She then went to Paris to study at the Julian Academy under Jules Lefebvre, a French figure painter. By 1898, Roberts was back in the United States. While staying at a family homestead in New Hampshire, she met Grace Keyes of Concord. The two women formed a strong bond and soon after Elizabeth purchased a home on Estabrook Road for them to live together. Over the next two decades her career blossomed, with Roberts exhibiting works at museums around the country and in major galleries in New York and Boston. 

As war broke out in Europe, Elizabeth Roberts turned her attention to the thousands of Belgian women and children displaced by the conflict, and who were now refugees in England. She organized groups of artists to create exhibitions at Concord’s Town House and Trinity Episcopal Parish House, and proceeds went directly to aid the victims of war. At the same time, the women of Concord mobilized to assist in the relief effort. From 1914-1919, women meeting at the Episcopal, Trinitarian, and Unitarian churches of Concord hand-knit over a thousand mufflers, socks, and fingerless gloves. The Red Cross Society organized their work to send overseas, and Roberts documented these historical moments in two small paintings. 

These works of art demonstrate Roberts’ expressive style, characterized by fast, broad brushstrokes and a heavy application of paint. John Singer Sargent, one of her contemporaries, allegedly remarked that she “painted like a man, slap, dab...fast and large...and it’s done.” The women in the paintings are hard at work, faces obscured, taking part in a communal activity for a cause they all believed in. Roberts did not necessarily aspire to “paint like a man,” but the recognition of her talents paid off: both paintings earned Roberts $10,000, which she used to purchase an ambulance and have it driven in France during the war. Elizabeth Wentworth Roberts left behind another legacy in Concord several years later with the founding of the Concord Art Centre in 1922 (now Concord Art). 

Throughout the town’s history, the women of Concord strove to advance their liberties and the liberties of others. Many of them achieved national recognition, while others remained, for many years, virtually unknown. With the recent 100th anniversary of the passing of the 19th amendment, giving American women the right to vote, the time is ripe to revisit these women and tell their stories once more. 

To learn more about these and other remarkable women be sure to go to Concord Museum’s exhibition: Every Path Laid Open: Women of Concord and the Quest for Equality open now through November 7, 2021. For more information go to concordmuseum.org.