JPHS and JPTC Panel: The Legacy of Pauline Agassiz Shaw

Join the Jamaica Plain Tuesday Club and the JP Historical Society to celebrate Women’s History month and honor the legacy of an amazing woman.

Pauline Agassiz Shaw (1841-1917) was a wealthy JP resident, who used her money to pay for a vast number of philanthropic efforts aimed at bettering the lives of those most at risk.
She founded the North Bennet Street School, financed the first kindergartens in America (for ten years, before convincing the Boston Public Schools to officially take on this area of education), created day nurseries and Neighborhood Houses, lobbied for prison reform and world peace and was an ardent suffragist.  She not only argued the need for all these services and reforms but she bankrolled the early ‘start-ups’ to prove their worth.
Over two thousand people attended her memorial service at Faneuil Hall in 1917 to pay tribute to a pioneering woman whose “expectation of good from the untried, social work, kindergartens, day nurseries, manual training, prevocational and industrial classes now enrich and broaden the lives of our young people,” George Greener eulogized. “Life to her was large and broad and her ideas have spread across the country … she never regarded her work as completed.”

This special panel is put together by Mary Smoyer of the JP Historical Society. Mary Smoyer has been researching Women’s History in JP for more than two decades. She created the JP Women’s Heritage Trail walking tour and does a panel on women’s history in JP every March.