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Oscar Wilde Stirs Up Boston

In an early display of homophobia, 60 Harvard students dressed up like the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde when he delivered a lecture at the Boston Music Hall in 1882.

Wilde, later sentenced to prison for gross indecency with men, urged people to lead beautiful lives by surrounding themselves with beautiful things. He preached, ‘art for art’s sake.’

Wilde came to Boston with that message, part of a year-long lecture. He provoked strong reactions in New England.

Oscar Wilde, photographed in New York on his 1882

Some considered him decadent and subversive. The prominent Cambridge social reformer Thomas Wentworth Higginson accused him of writing pornographic poetry. The Boston Evening Transcript questioned, in verse, whether Oscar Wilde was a man or a woman.

But a group of Boston Bohemians – many of them gay — fell under his spell. And according to at least one critic, Wilde’s visit inspired cultural developments that made Boston the center of the aesthetic movement in America.

Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde toured the United States to promote a Gilbert and Sullivan play that made fun of him. The play, Patience, mocked the aesthetic movement then the rage in Britain.

The central character, Reginald Bunthorne, appears as a caricature of Wilde, a ‘fleshly poet’ committed to sensuous beauty.

The playwrights’ promoter, Richard D’Oyly Carte, thought a lecture tour by the celebrity aesthete would help sell tickets to the U.S. tour of the play.

Oscar Wilde, then a 27-year-old Irish celebrity poet and playwright, agreed to do the lecture tour. His motive, noted historian Douglass Shand-Tucci, was not to promote a play. Instead, he wanted to give force and coherence to the aesthetic movement emerging in the United States.

Wilde had a knack for attracting attention with his flamboyant dress, signature sunflower and tart witticisms. “It is absurd to divide people into good and bad,” he said. “People are either charming or tedious.”

And he famously defined a cynic as one ‘who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.’

Oscar Wilde, photographed in New York on his 1882

Newport, R.I.

When Wilde arrived in New York in January 1882, he supposedly told a customs inspector he had nothing to declare but his genius. However, there’s no evidence he actually said that. He did say the Atlantic Ocean disappointed him – not stormy enough. A London periodical published a letter from the Atlantic Ocean expressing disappointment in Oscar Wilde.

Another publicity genius, P.T. Barnum, supposedly offered Oscar Wilde 200 pounds to ride Jumbo the Elephant carrying a sunflower, his trademark.

Thanks to his flair for attracting public notice his image appeared everywhere during his U.S. lecture tour. Drawings and photographs of him were ubiquitous in posters, newspapers, magazines, sheet music, even trading cards.

Oscar Wilde, sheet music, image courtesy Boston Public Library

He made a splash in Newport, R.I., where Julia Ward Howe entertained him at her home. He also lectured on “The Decorative Arts” at the Casino Theater.

His influence was still felt more than a hundred years later, when one of the Newport mansions, Rosecliff, mounted an exhibition in 2018 called, “Bohemian Beauty: The Aesthetic Movement and Oscar Wilde’s Newport.”

Unmanly Oscar Wilde

There were plenty of dissenting voices, though. His hair and clothing especially drew criticism. He had a flamboyant stage outfit of velvet jacket, stockings and knee breeches.

He also wore his hair long with bangs – something only women did. When he spoke in New York, the Tribune reported he attracted ‘many pallid and aesthetic young men in dress suits and banged hair.’

Boston

He visited Boston twice, in January and in June. The city then considered itself the Athens of America, proud of its writers, artists and philosophers.

By 1880, the city had shed some of its Puritanical starchiness, at least in certain quarters. A Bohemian demimonde of artists, poets and architects had emerged. And the city was wild for the frothy musicals of Gilbert and Sullivan.

The poet James Russell Lowell had given Oscar Wilde a letter of introduction to Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Lowell had debuted the drag shows known as the Hasty Pudding Theatricals in 1837.

James Russell Lowell

Wilde had lunch with Holmes, and met artists and writers at the St. Botolph Club. The Boston Herald defended him in an interview, noting his ‘dress was no more of a departure from the ordinary than that of a dozen musicians and painters in Boston.’

Then came time for his lecture at the Boston Music Hall. Sixty Harvard students marched to their front-row seats, two abreast, carrying sunflowers and wearing knee pants, stockings and long-haired wigs.

Was it a homophobic prank to embarrass Oscar Wilde? Or was it a publicity stunt dreamed up by Wilde himself? Whatever the case, Wilde knew what they had planned and came on stage wearing a conservative suit.

Wilde looked around him and said, “I see about me certain signs of an aesthetic movement.”

And then in a stage whisper, he said, “Save me from my disciples.”

Later on his lecture tour a newspaper reporter asked him about the Harvard students. He said the lecture ‘passed off brilliantly.’

“You don’t suppose for a moment that a movement of any importance can be affected by 60 young men?” he said.

The Visionists

Oscar Wilde’s 1882 lecture tour created a sensation in Boston, according to The History Project in the 1998 book Improper Bostonians: Lesbian and Gay History from the Puritans to Playland.

No other city took Oscar Wilde so seriously, argued Shand-Tucci in Boston Bohemia. He influenced one Bohemian group calling itself the Visionists

The Visionists included architect Ralph Adams Cram, a leader of the Gothic Revival in architecture; photographer Fred Holland Day, a pioneer in art photography; and interior designer Ogden Codman, who wrote a book on decorating with Edith Wharton.

Ralph Adams Cram. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Visionist Daniel Berkeley Updike, a prominent printer and type designer, called his firm Merrymount Press, after New England’s earliest Bohemian, Thomas Morton. He famously printed the Book of Common Prayer, financed by J.P. Morgan.

Bernard Berenson traveled in the same circles as the Visionists, and he advised Isabella Steward Gardner on what artworks to buy. Gardner, of course, built a Venetian palace in Boston’s Back Bay, filled it with art and then willed it as an art museum.

Gardner Museum Courtyard

The Museum of Fine Arts, Trinity Church and the Boston Public Library are also viewed as triumphs of the aesthetic movement.

Shand-Tucci quotes Mary Blanchard, who wrote a study, Near the Coast of Bohemia,

…to many Americans, Boston was a city that symbolized older standards that stood in opposition to the commercialism and modernity of a cosmopolitan New York, … [but] it was also the seat of the new ‘gospel,’ aestheticism, a gospel that attacked those very standards.

Images: Oscar Wilde sheet music By BPL – Flickr: Oscar Wilde, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16006196.

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Naked Drunken Woman Gets Kicked Out of the Boston Public Library

It was the cause celebre of 1896: a statue of a naked drunken woman was gifted to the new Boston Public Library by Charles Follen McKim. McKim, one of the men who designed the “palace for the people,” planned to install the sculpture in the courtyard.

Bacchante and Infant Faun, detail, courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Naked Drunken Woman

The bronze statue, Bacchante and Infant Faun, was of a laughing young woman – naked of course — dangling a bunch of grapes before the infant in her arms. Frederick MacMonnies created it. He also created a clothed statue of Nathan Hale, now in the National Gallery of Art. MacMonnies had given a cast of the statue to McKim as thanks for a $50 loan.

Plaster cast of Gaudens’ marble group holding library seal. Image courtesy Boston Public Library.

Harvard President Charles Eliot led the charge against the Bacchante, which the Boston Post characterized as the Naked Drunken Woman. They found especially offensive the idea that the drunken woman offered liquor to her child.

It then turned into a battle between Boston’s Puritans and Bohemians, and the Puritans won. (Some had even argued that Augustus Saint-Gaudens’ statue The Puritan be placed in the library.)

McKim gave up and donated the statue to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which called it “one of the most vibrant images in American art.”

Philistines Win

Thomas Russell Sullivan, a Boston writer, declared, “the Philistines be upon us.”

Boston had a reputation for prudery. The catchphrase “Banned in Boston” resulted from the overzealous censorship of the city’s Watch and Ward Society. From 1878 to the 1920s, the puritanical group of private citizens made Boston a target of scorn. The group also – unintentionally – heightened interest in the books and plays it banned.

Bacchante and Faun at the Boston Public Library

MacMonnies’ statue was no exception. The controversy allowed him to sell many small replicas of the sculpture.

It wasn’t the first time a nude image associated with the library caused an uproar. The sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens had sculpted two young boys holding up the library seal. The marble nudes and the seal were then mounted over the library’s main entrance.

The Boston Evening Record on Feb. 10, 1894, ran an editorial under the headline, WIPE OUT THE BLOT. It described “a pure-minded lad … [who] cried in anguish as he observed, ‘See that thing they have put up there, papa, isn’t it horrible?’ Because it offended this ‘bright, clean, Boston boy,’ the Record then argued, ‘This indecency must not remain!’

A century after the Naked Drunken Woman controversy, the Boston Public Library decided to bring back the Bacchante. It had a copy made of the original, which stands in the Museum of Fine Arts. She and her infant preside over the fountain at the library’s courtyard. And that is exactly where Charles McKim originally intended it.

This story last updated in 2022.

Brooklyn Museum version: By Daderot – Own work, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37045441.

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The Provincetown Players Revolutionize American Theater

In the summer of 1916, Eugene O’Neill arrived in Provincetown, Mass., depressed over his failure to find a stage for his plays. He would find one on an old wharf with some new friends who would become the Provincetown Players.

The Provincetown Players stage on Lewis Wharf.

O’Neill was 27, the son of an actor, a Princeton dropout who spent several years at sea in a tramp steamer and writing some plays.

Provincetown was then a ramshackle village, a haven for Portuguese fishermen, sailors on benders, Bohemians from Greenwich Village and artists and intellectuals fleeing the war in Europe. It was a place where conventions were shed and parties got out of hand.

In Provincetown, O’Neill found his stage and a whole lot more.

Provincetown Players

Charles Demuth and Eugene O’Neill in Provincetown.

In 1915, the summer before Eugene O’Neill arrived, a group of friends had come from Greenwich Village to Provincetown. They were into theater, Freud, Marx and free love.

Birth of the Provincetown Players

The group included artists Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth and William and Marguerite Zorach. John Reed, a labor activist, poet and journalist, came along too. With his wife, journalist Louise Bryant, they would cover the Bolshevik Revolution (depicted in the 1981 movie Reds). Heiress Mabel Dodge, who held a weekly salon for artists and writers in Greenwich Village, also summered in Provincetown. She and Reed had had a flamboyant affair that ended badly.

“It was in this strange atmosphere of art, mayhem and intoxication that the Provincetown Players was born,” wrote Debra Lawless in Provinceetown: A History of Artists and Renegades in a Fishing Village. “While many people founded community theater groups, this one had an indefinable magic that would bestow on its members a Nobel and five Pulitzer Prizes and, as many later said, change the face of American theater.”

The group was disgusted with the frothy comedies and tired melodramas of Broadway while millions were being slaughtered in Europe.

Provincetown and Provincetown Harbor

On July 15, 1915, writers Hutchins Hapgood and his wife Neith Boyce Hapgood put their children to bed and entertained their Bohemian friends. They staged two short plays on their veranda overlooking Provincetown Harbor. It was the first production of what would become the Provincetown Players.

The first, Neith Boyce’s Constancy, spoofed the romance between John Reed and Mabel Dodge. The audience found it highly entertaining.

Another married couple, newlyweds Susan Glaspell and George Cram ‘Jig’ Cook, wrote the second play that night, Suppressed Desires, a satire on Freudianism. Stage designer Robert Edmond Jones designed the set by moving around furniture and pillows.

This was all very new. Summer stock theatre hadn’t taken hold yet. It would be three years before the first summer venue opened in St. Louis. The Manhattan Theatre Colony in Peterborough, N.H. (now in Ogunquit, Maine), and the Cape Playhouse in Dennis, Mass., didn’t start up until 1927, and the Berkshire Playhouse in Stockbridge, Mass., wouldn’t open for another year after that.

The 1916 Season

In 1916, wealthy fiction writer Mary Heaton Vorse bought Lewis Wharf and the ramshackle fishing shack on it. She let the Provincetown Players build a small stage inside the shack and put enough wooden benches inside it to seat 100 people.

Setting up for ‘Bound East for Cardiff’ in Greenwich Village.

That summer, Eugene O’Neill moved into a cottage with Reed and Bryant and began an affair with Bryant. He had written a play about a sailor dying in the forecastle of a British tramp steamer. He called it Bound East for Cardiff. It was unlike anything the audience had ever seen before. Yank, the dying sailor, spoke the way a sailor spoke, crude but poetic.

Susan Glaspell described what happened next:

There was a fog, just as the script demanded, a fog bell in the harbor. The tide was in, and it washed under us and around, spraying through the holes in the floor, giving us the rhythm and the flavor of the sea while the big dying sailor talked.

From then on, said Glaspell, the Players “knew what we were for.”

Bound East for Cardiff was well received by Boston Globe drama critic A.J. Philpott, who wrote,

Many people will remember James O’Neil, (sic) who played “Monte Cristo.” He had a son—Eugene O’Neil (sic)—who knocked about the world in tramp steamers…and saw life “in the raw,” and thought much about it…He is one of the Players, and he has written some little plays which have made a very deep impression on those who have seen them produced here.

Four years later, Eugene O’Neill would win the first of four Pulitzer Prizes.

The Provincetown Players spent the next 10 years performing at 139 MacDougall St. in Greenwich Village. They never again played in Provincetown.

Read more about Provincetown from Provincetown by Debra Lawless and Provincetown: From Pilgrim Landing to Gay Resort, by Karen Christel Krahulik.

Image of Provincetown and Provincetown Harbor By RoySmith – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=67249669. Entering Provincetown sign by By Kenneth C. Zirkel – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=57828893.

This story was updated in 2022.

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How Irish-Catholic Louise Guiney Outwitted Her Protestant Postal Customers

When Irish-Catholic Louise Guiney got the job of postmistress in Auburndale, Mass., the town’s Protestants boycotted her stamps.

That created a problem. She needed money to support herself and her poetry, and a postmistress’s compensation depended on sales.

Fortunately, she had many, many friends in Boston’s artistic and intellectual circles who helped her get by.

Some view her as the ‘lost lady of American letters,’ but not because of her postal service job.

Louise Guiney by Fred Holland Day

Louise Guiney

She was born Jan. 7, 1861, in Roxbury, Mass., the daughter of Patrick Robert Guiney and Jeanette Margaret Doyle.

Her father emigrated from Ireland with very little money, but worked his way through college, became a lawyer and served heroically in the Civil War. He achieved the rank of brigadier general. After the war he entered politics, winning office as a Republican–one of the first Irish-Catholics to do so. He lost a bid for Congress but won as assistant district attorney. Plagued by his war injuries, he died when Louise was 16 and left little money.

A devout Catholic, she was educated at a convent in Providence, but couldn’t afford college. She continued to study on her own and to write poetry published in the Atlantic, Harper’s and Scribner’s.

Her biographer, Henry Fairbanks, called her a rare combination: ‘pure of heart, brilliant of mind.’ Critics considered her a bridge between Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

She also bridged the intellectual and artistic circles in fin-de-siecle Boston.

Ralph Adams Cram. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Bohemian

She formed a close friendship with a Bohemian group from a somewhat raffish Beacon Hill neighborhood that included the architect Ralph Adams Cram, Fred Holland Day, artist Tom Meteyard, poets Bliss Carman and Richard Hovey. Across the hill, she belonged to a group of intellectual women that included Celia Thaxter, Sarah Orne Jewett, Annie Fields and Alice Brown, with whom she is believed to have a Boston marriage.

Her financial straits forced her to take a job as postmistress in Auburndale. The postmistress’ compensation was determined by how much business the post office did. So Louise Guiney became victim of an anti-Catholic plot. Ralph Adams Cram, who organized a response, recollected,

The suburb of Auburndale was a favorite retreat of retired Protestant missionaries. …Suddenly the business began to decline rather alarmingly. Certain Sherlock Holmes procedures … revealed just what was happening… .. The situation was intolerable to the evangelical mind; therefore the Papist incumbent must be driven out by the simple expedient of transferring the trade to other neighbouring post offices – which was done.

Concerted action on the part of Lou Guiney’s friends produced notable results. We all bought postage stamps … in such quantities that the Auburndale post office advanced in the matter of business done, and with such leaps and bounds that finally an emissary from the Post Office Department was sent out to ascertain what it all meant.

Louise Guiney eventually took a job at the Boston Public Library, where she wrote poetry and essays in her spare time.

Boston Public Library

Oxford

In 1901, she moved to Oxford, England, where she used the libraries to research an anthology of Catholic poets. She also wrote several biographies and edited books about the Catholic literary tradition in England and Ireland. Though her health suffered, she stinted on food and coal to buy books.

Today, critics note her lyrical, Old English-style poems recall 17th-century English poetry. According to the Poetry Foundation.

Informed by her religious faith, Guiney’s works reflect her concern with the Catholic tradition in literature and often emphasize moral rectitude and heroic gallantry.

Louise Guiney died Nov. 2, 1920, of a stroke at age 59, leaving her work unfinished.

This story was updated in 2022.

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Kahlil Gibran Gets His Picture Taken in Boston

A Lebanese boy named Kahlil Gibran got a lift out of Boston’s slums from a wealthy Bohemian who liked to take pictures.

Kahlil Gibran by Fred Holland Day.

The boy had arrived in 1895 with his mother, his older half-brother and his two younger sisters. He spoke no English and had had no formal education. They lived in the South End, a crowded slum with the second-largest Syrian-Lebanese community in the United States.

Within three decades he would be the world’s third best-selling poet, behind Shakespeare and Lao-Tzu.

He owed part of his success to Fred Holland Day,

Early Years

He was born Gibran Khalil Gibran on Jan. 6, 1883, in Besharri, an Ottoman-ruled town in what is now northern Lebanon. His father worked as a clerk in his uncle’s apothecary shop for a while. Then his gambling debts forced him to become a strong man for a local Ottoman-appointed bureaucrat.

Untitled painting by Kahlil Gibran.

Khalil’s mother Kamila, a Maronite Christian, encouraged her son’s interest in art, which his abusive father discouraged.

His father went to jail on charges of graft. Kamila decided to escape her miserable life and brought her four children to the South End of Boston. She supported the family by peddling lace and linen door-to-door.

Gibran Khalil Gibran at 12 entered the Quincy School two months after he arrived in the United States. A clerical error eliminated his first name. He accepted the shortened version, and he also accepted the way Americans viewed foreigners.

The Road to The Prophet

Fred Holland Day, 1911

In 1896 he discovered Denison House, a settlement house that encouraged creativity in poor immigrant children. (Amelia Earhart later worked there).

There he met Fred Holland Day, an independently wealthy, avant-garden publisher, photographer, flamboyant dandy and tutor to poor children. Day belonged to the circle of Boston Bohemians that included Ralph Adams Cram , Ethel Reed and Louise Imogen Guiney.

Though Day was intensely private, he was assumed to be gay, partly because he took arty photographs of nude young men. He also photographed immigrant children in campy versions of their native garb.

Day took photos of Armenian children in turbans, of black children in Ethiopian outfits and of Kahlil in an Arab burnoose. They were Armenian princes and Ethiopian chieftains — and Kahlil Gibran was an Arab sheik.

As condescending and inappropriate as the photographs were, they gave the children a sense they were special. Kahlil especially found in the photograph a vision of nobility that he strove for in real life.

Day also encouraged him to study William Blake’s drawings and to read Walt Whitman and Maurice Maeterlinck. And he also published Kahlil Gibran’s drawings to illustrate several books.

Kahlil’s mother was probably concerned about Day’s influence over her sensitive son. So she sent him back to Lebanon to finish his education.

Kahlil Gibran returned to Boston four years later and began publishing prose poems. In 1923, he published a series of prose poems called The Prophet.

It was a pathbreaking work, part of a renaissance in Arabic literature and a breakaway from literary and political conventions.

The Prophet, considered a classic of world literature, sold more than 100 million copies and has been translated into 40 languages.

Kahlil Gibran died on April 10, 1931.

This story about Kahlil Gibran was updated in 2023.

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Ethel Reed, The Beautiful Poster Lady Who Disappeared

The beautiful Ethel Reed blazed like a meteor across Boston’s artistic firmament in the 1890s, but after a broken engagement she all but disappeared.

She was one of the first, if not the first, woman to gain prominence as a graphic designer, and she did it by her 18th birthday. At 22, she moved to Europe. By 24, she disappeared from the historical record.

One critic noted Ethel Reed’s work included tangled forms that seem full of secret and illicit meanings. What lurks in those trees, for example?

Ethel Reed

Ethel Reed was born March 13, 1874 in Newburyport, Mass., the daughter of Irish immigrants Edward Eugene Reed and Mary Elizabeth Mahoney. Her father died when she was young, his obituary described him as a “well-known and popular photographer.”

In 1890, mother and daughter moved to Boston, a good choice for aspiring illustrators. The city then was a publishing powerhouse, and the books and newspapers it produced needed decoration.

Ethel studied briefly at the Cowles Art School and apprenticed as a painter of miniatures. She mostly taught herself, however, and didn’t seem to have a plan. Perhaps her addiction to opium, dating from her teens, explains why.

One day a friend saw her doodling and suggested she submit a design to the Sunday Herald, a special edition of the Boston Herald for a women audience. She did, and rocketed to fame.

Her 1895 design, like much of her work, seems whimsical at first glance but then suggests a darker, more provocative theme.

That first illustration for the Sunday Herald includes a demure woman with a swanlike neck — and poppies, which produced the drug Reed used. It also had the caption, “Ladies Want It.” Coming from a sexually active woman, that could mean something other than a newspaper.

An unpublished watercolor by Ethel Reed.

During the 1890s Americans had a mania for posters. Ethel Reed satisfied that appetite, and then some.

In a two-year burst of creativity she gained international fame for her posters, as well as for her illustrations and endpapers.

Gossip columnists found her fascinating, and she emerged as a media celebrity, something she encouraged. She became the most famous woman artist in America.

No Man in Her Room

But she downplayed her sexual adventures. “If anyone caught her with evidence of a man having been in her room, like a top hat on the bed, she would claim that they were artistic props: ‘Obviously, there was no man in my room’,” Angelina Lippert told ARTNews. Lippert organized a show of Reed’s work at Poster House in New York in 2022.

Photograph of Ethel Reed by Fred Holland Day.

Ethel Reed fell in with a crowd of Boston Bohemians that included Ralph Adams Cram, Bertram Goodhue and Fred Holland Day. Day was one of the first to view photography as an art, and he took an arty shot of Ethel Reed as ‘Chloe with leopard skin, berry branches in hair, and shepherd’s crook.’

Ethel Reed by Frances Benjamin Johnston.

She posed for Frances Benjamin Johnston, the first woman photojournalist. Johnston took glamorous shots of Reed in a black dress, which Reed handed out to newspapers.

Love Affairs

Philip Leslie Hale was another Boston Bohemian artist, but a Brahmin as well. Hale was the son of Edward Everett Hale, the brother of Ellen Day Hale, a relative of Nathan Hale and Harriet Beecher Stowe.

Phillip Leslie Hale, self-portrait

He and Ethel Reed fell in love and got engaged to be married. His family disapproved, and broke them up. They had planned to honeymoon in Paris. When the engagement fell through, she and her mother sailed for Europe.

In England, she finished up a few commissions for the avant-garde British publication The Yellow Book, co-edited by Aubrey Beardsley, until about 1898. But with few friends and fewer connections in Europe, she couldn’t find work. A former lover offered to help. She replied, “I owe no man anything—neither fidelity nor explanations,” she wrote to him. “I am my own property.”

Then she disappeared. Little was known about her until William Peterson researched her for his book, The Beautiful Poster Lady: A Life of Ethel Reed, published in 2013. He learned she took a series of lovers and bore two children fathered by two of them. Then she married an English army officer named Arthur Warwick. The marriage fell apart quickly. They separated during their honeymoon. In her last years she lived in poverty, addicted to drugs and alcohol. She died in 1912. Her death certificate listed her cause of death as misadventure

Her work has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, the Frederick R. Weisman Art Museum of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.

This story about Ethel Reed was updated in 2023.

Images: “Ladies want it” By Ethel Reed, b. 1874 – [1], CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=84737084. Best Guide to Boston Reed, Ethel, Artist. The best guide to Boston. Boston illustrated for sale here: price 50 cents / Ethel Reed. , None. [Place not identified: publisher not identified, between 1898 and 1900] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2014645310/. Ethel Reed by Frances Benjamin Johnston Johnston, Frances Benjamin, photographer. Miss Ethel Reed. , None. [Between 1890 and 1910] Photograph. https://www.loc.gov/item/2014645308/.

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