Cambridge Women's Heritage Project Database, C

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Cambridge Neighborhood House (1878-1973)
Neighborhood house, community organization
In 1878, Pauline Agassiz Shaw (Mrs. Quincy Shaw), influenced by Elizabeth Peabody’s kindergarten movement, realized that working mothers needed a safe space for their children during working hours. She rented and then bought a building at the corner of Harvard and Moore streets in which she established a day nursery and a kindergarten. In 1879 she opened a library and reading room and held sewing classes, and in 1883 she began a club for mothers, a playground, and dressmaking and woodworking classes for children. The kindergarten that was established was taken over in 1889 by the Cambridge Public Schools. By 1900, Shaw had established classes in music, drawing, and painting. In 1914, a Health Committee was organized. Eventually, the neighborhood house expanded to offer industrial training and economics classes. As a result of lectures on hygiene and health, the Mothers' Club was organized in 1896. The club was renamed in 1902 as the Neighborhood Women’s Club.
The Cambridge Neighborhood House began to involve a broader group of women, catering to working class women of any ethnic background or religion. It served as an educational, social, and recreational center for nearly a hundred years. The house, which had been listed on the National Register of Historic Places to commemorate Shaw’s work, burned in 1973 and had to be torn down. The activities of the organization were relocated to the Margaret Fuller House at 71 Cherry Street.
References: George Wright Collection at the Cambridge Historical Society. 37th Annual Report of Cambridge Social Union.; 4word, October 2001

Annie Jump Cannon (b. December 11, 1863 in Dover, Delaware, d. April 13, 1941 in Cambridge, MA)
Astronomer
Born in Delaware to Mary Elizabeth (Jump) and Wilson Lee Cannon, a Delaware politician, Annie was educated in the public schools and at the Wilmington Conference Academy. She became interested in astronomy at a young age with her mother’s encouragement. She then went to Wellesley College where her professor, Sarah Whiting encouraged her interests in astronomy and physics. She turned to music after graduation in 1884, but was shocked out of a more traditional life by the death of her mother in 1893. She returned to Wellesley for postgraduate study and as an assistant to Professor Whiting and then enrolled as a special student at Radcliffe (1895-1897).
Cannon was hired by Professor Edward Pickering at the Harvard College Observatory as a staff assistant beginning in 1896, joining Williaminia Fleming in studying stellar spectra on photographic plates. She was awarded a Master’s degree from Wellesley in 1907, and after the death of Fleming, she succeeded her as curator of astronomical photographs (1911-38) at the Harvard College Observatory. Classifying stellar bodies according to their temperatures, she published the Henry Draper Catalogue in nine volumes (1918-1924), which listed the faintest to the brightest spectra of stars from the North to South Poles and the Henry Draper Extension in two volumes (1925-1949) that included even fainter stars. The two catalogs represented a total of about 350,000 stars. She also discovered 300 long-period variable stars. She was made an honorary member of the Royal Astronomical Society in England (1914) and one of the few women elected as an honorary member of the American Philosophical Society (1925). She was honored with honorary degrees from Oxford and the University of Groningen. In 1938, she was made William Cranch Bond Astronomer at Harvard, one of the first appointments to a named chair made by Harvard. She entertained children as well as colleagues at her home at 4 Bond Street in Cambridge next to the Observatory, and sponsored egg-rolling contests at Easter for children on the hill. She was an advocate of women’s suffrage and a member of the National Women’s Party and a popular lecturer on her subject.
References: Notable American Women vol I (1950); Ogilvie, Marilyn and Joy Harvey. Biographical Dictionary of Women Scientists, (2000).

Cornelia (James) Cannon (b. 1876 in St. Paul, MN d. 1969 in Cambridge)
Writer
Brought up in Minnesota, Cornelia James married her long-term friend, the physiologist Walter B. Cannon in 1901 after his appointment to a position at Harvard. Adventurous, although not accomplished mountaineers, the couple climbed to the summit of a peak at the head of Lake McDonald on their honeymoon in what is now Glacier National Park. (This was later named Mount Cannon). With her husband, Cornelia settled in Cambridge where she raised four daughters and one son. In spite of her family responsibilities, running an academic household and raising five children, she became an important writer, contributing articles on social and economic subjects to Harper's, Atlantic Monthly, and North American Review. In 1928 she published a novel, Red Rust, that became a best-seller. In this, she described the Swedish immigrant farmers of rural Minnesota from the area in which she had been raised. In order to have privacy for her writing, she had the habit of hiding in the bathroom or in her car, as vividly described by her daughter Marion Cannon Schlesinger (see below). in a memoir, Snatched from Oblivion.
References: Marion Cannon Schlesinger, Snatched from Oblivion, Little Brown (1997);
Cambridge Public Library online site “Penwomen of Cambridge Past: Biographies of Our Literary Foremothers”: http://www.ci.cambridge.ma.us/cpl/about/penwomen.html

Cell 16
Feminist organization
The founding group of the Female Liberation group was called "Cell 16", located at 552 Mass Ave. Historically, it began with a group of women gathering at Emmanuel College for a women’s conference in 1969. The women broke up into smaller groups, one of which met afterwards informally for a year. In May 1969, the group took the name ‘Cell 16” to emphasize that they were only one cell of an organic movement and in reference its original meeting address, 16 Lexington /Ave. The group began to publish a magazine, No More Fun and Games; A Journal of Female Liberation. The Female Liberation group grew out of Cell 16. Its most important contribution was its publication of the magazine The Second Wave Magazine: A Magazine for the New Feminism in 1971 that continued until 1983 even after its parent organization was dissolved. It included news stories, poetry, fiction, graphics, and articles that expressed a wide range of feminist viewpoints In February 1974, Female Liberation disbanded as a result of conflicts between members who belonged to the Socialist Workers Party and the majority who did not.
References: Cell 16 archives, Northwestern Library, Women's Movement Archives.Files include administrative files and artwork of the magazines as well as copies of The Second Wave.

Centro Presente (Cambridge MA, 1981 to present)
Community organization
Established in 1981, Centro Presente is an immigrant-led, community-based organization in Cambridge MA. It was originally created in response to the influx of Central Americans fleeing U.S.-sponsored civil war but soon developed into an active community organization with a wider mission to develop adult education programs (ESL, literacy, and citizenship), youth leadership development (Pintamos Nuestro Mundo), and immigration legal services. It was founded by Sister Rose Marie Cummins (then attached to Saint Mary’s Catholic Church), members of the Salvadoran immigrant community, and members of the legal community in Cambridge. The current address is 54 Essex St., 2nd Floor in Cambridge but the youth program is based in East Somerville. The organization recently honored its founder and the past directors, Frank Sharry and Oscar Chacon at the twenty-fifth anniversary party.
References: Un Encuentro con Centro Presente (A discussion at Cambridge Community Television) http://cctvcambridge.org/centropresente. Centro Presente's 25th Anniversary and Holiday Fiesta http://www.massjwj.net/node/653. Centro Presente’s home page: http://www.cpresente.org

Julia (McWilliams) Child ( b. August 15, 1912 in Pasadena, California d. August 13, 2004 in Santa Barbara, California )
Celebrity chef, author, television personality
Julia Child was born in Pasadena California. She graduated from Smith College in 1934. After taking a variety of positions in advertising and journalism, she served with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. After the war, she married Paul Cushing Child who was a diplomat with the Foreign Service .The couple lived for some years in Paris while Paul was assigned to the exhibit wing of the U.S. Information Agency. During that period, Julia took classes at the famous Cordon Blue cooking school. In 1951, she opened a cooking school, L’Ecole des Trois Gourmandes, (The School of Three Gourmands) with two partners. In 1961, the three women published Mastering the Art of French Cookery, considered at the time to be the best book on the subject in English.
In 1961, Julia and her husband moved to Cambridge where she remained until a few years before her death. In 1963, she began a regular series of television programs, “The French Chef” on Boston’s WGBH, part of the Public Broadcasting Service, that catapulted her into national celebrity. She won a Peabody Award in 1965 and an Emmy in 1966 for the series, which continued for ten years In 1968, she published The French Chef Cookbook, including much of the content from her programs. In the 1970s and 1980s, she starred in further programs, “Julia and Company” and “Dinner at Julia’s.” A series of cook books also came out of this and her subsequent television series. In the 1990s, she hosted four more series with a various celebrity chefs. She founded the educational American Institute of Wine and Food in Napa, California in 1978. Among her many honors, she was awarded the Legion of Honor by the French government in 2001, the U.S. Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2003 and honorary degrees from Harvard and Smith. She moved to a Santa Barbara California retirement home in 2001, gifting her Cambridge home to Smith College and her kitchen to the Smithsonian. The papers of Julia Child (1920-1993) are in the Schlesinger Library at Radcliffe.
References: Schlesinger Library, Julia Child collection guide; Treasury of Women’s Quotations by Carolyn Warner, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1992.

Ada Louise Comstock (b. December 11, 1876 in Moorhead, MN, d. December 1973 in New Haven, CT)
Educator, college dean, college president
     Born in Moorhead, Minnesota to Solomon G. Comstock, a successful lawyer and politician, Ada Comstock was the eldest of three children. She completed her high school education at the young age of fifteen and then went on to college at the University of Minnesota. After two years, she transferred to Smith College. After graduating from Smith in 1897, Ada attended the Moorhead State Normal School for a teaching certificate and then entered Columbia University for graduate work in English, History, and Education. She returned to the University of Minnesota in 1899 to teach rhetoric and in 1907, she was appointed the University's first Dean of Women, actively improving the situation of young women at the college. In 1912, Comstock went to Smith College as professor of English and as the first Dean of the College. Comstock believed in the power of a college education in inspiring women to take on leadership roles.
     In 1917, during World War I, the presidency of Smith College became vacant and Ada Comstock directed the operation of the college for six months without the title of acting President. She was a founding member of the Association of Collegiate Alumnae, later called the American Association of University Women, which she served as president. She was one of five American voting delegates to the first conference of the International Federation of University Women in London in 1920 and at the second in Paris in 1922. Amongst her other activities, she served as president of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Vice Chairman of the American Council of Institute of Pacific Relations and sat on the National Committee for Planned Parenthood.
     In 1923, Radcliffe College offered her the position of the first full-time President of the college. Throughout most of her administration, Ada Comstock worked to keep a balance between Radcliffe's association with Harvard and its establishment as an independent women's college, since Radcliffe had no faculty of its own. Under her guidance, the college opened a nationwide admission program, built new student housing and classroom buildings and expanded its graduate program.
     In 1943, Comstock retired from her position at the age of sixty-seven, and shortly after, she married Wallace Notestein, a retired professor of history at Yale University whom she had known as a young instructor at the University of Minnesota. She continued to be active in planning and working as a trustee at Smith College, and as organizer of the graduate center at Radcliffe which is named after her. She also traveled extensively with her husband. Ada Comstock died in New Haven in December of 1973. Her personal papers are in the Smith College archive and other papers dealing with Radcliffe are held in the Radcliffe College archives in Schlesinger Library
References: Notable American Women, Modern Period; Ada Louise Comstock papers, Smith College.

Sister Rose Marie Cummins (b. in Louisville, Kentucky)
Founder of Centro Presente
Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, Sister Rose joined the Dominican order soon after graduation. Sister Rose visited Puerto Rico from 1966 to 1971 and fell in love with the island. She worked in Massachusetts from 1972 to 1999. In the mid 1970s, she worked in Framingham, MA as a bilingual counselor in the public school system. She was very active in the Sanctuary movement in the 1980s and was one of the co-founders of Centro Presente in 1981 during the period that she was attached to Saint Mary’s Catholic Church in Cambridge. She worked for six years as co-director of Centro Presente and for three years at Saint Francis House doing immigration work with homeless and low-income people from around the world. Recently, Sister Rose moved back to her home state of Kentucky where she is the director of the Dominican Earth Center in Springfield (founded in 1997), a ministry of the Dominicans of St. Catharine, Kentucky that encourages a philosophy and lifestyle of sustainable living that benefits our environment and those who inhabit it. She was presented an Earth Day award in 2006 by the Environmental Quality Commissioner of Kentucky and was celebrated in Cambridge at the twenty-fifth anniversary of Centro Presente in December 2006.
References: “Sister Rose Marie Cummins” Environmental Quality Commission Earth Day, Earth Day 2006 http://www.eqc.ky.gov/eday/eday2006/Sister+Rose+Marie+Cummins.htm
“The evolution of the Latino Community in Cambridge Massachusetts” Professor Deborah Pacini-Hernandez In collaboration with Maira Prez and Melissa Lee, Spring, 2002. Department of Anthropology, Tufts University. http://repository01.lib.tufts.edu:8080/fedora/get/tufts:MS083.001.001.00013/bdef:TuftsPDF/getPDF. Centro Presente's 25th Anniversary and Holiday Fiesta http://www.massjwj.net/node/653.
See entry for Centro Presente.

Charlotte Saunders Cushman (b.1July 23, 1816 in Boston, d. February 18, 1876 in Boston)
Actress
Charlotte Cushman is the only female actress to be enshrined in the University of Hall of Fame for Great Americans. She was the daughter of a failed businessman, Elkanah Cushman and his second wife, Mary Eliza Babbitt. Raised in Boston where her mother ran a boarding house, she trained to become an opera singer but an ill- fated attempt to extend the range of her husky contralto voice while touring in New Orleans. Advised to turn to the theater, she was offered the part of Lady Macbeth by the manager of the main theater in that city, making a successful debut at the age of twenty. She soon moved to Philadelphia and New York where she appeared regularly, developing an enthusiastic following, especially as Nancy in “Oliver Twist,” and as Lady Macbeth. She took on other Shakespearean roles, including a large number of male roles, for example playing Romeo opposite her sister Susan’s Juliet and notably as Hamlet. In 1844, she went to London where she made a sensational hit, even appearing before Queen Victoria. After a number of highly successful tours of America, she temporarily retired from the stage at the age of thirty=seven and with her accumulated wealth spent her winters in London and her summers in Rome where she lived with the sculptor Emma Stebbins, opening her house as a center for English and American writers and artists including the Brownings and Harriet Hosmer. She moved back to Boston in 1870 with Emma Stebbins and established homes in Boston and Newport, occasionally returning to the stage for special performances. She suffered from cancer and finally retired permanently from the stage in 1874. Two years later she died of pneumonia and was buried in Mt Auburn Cemetery, Cambridge.
References: American Women: 1500 Hundred Biographies, Frances E. Willard and Mary A. Livermore (eds.), Volume I, (1897); Notable American Women (1950); Encyclopedia Americana, 1995