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About The Mary Eliza Project
About The Mary Eliza Project
The Mary Eliza Project is a collaborative public humanities initiative that uses historic records to illuminate diverse women’s political engagement in Boston. We focus on the historical moment of 1920, when ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment pronounced that, “The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” American women had to take deliberate individual action in order to claim this right, however.
In the summer of 1920, as the ratification of the 19th Amendment approached, Boston women began registering to vote. By October 13, the last day to register for the 1920 presidential election, over 54,000 women had lined up at city registration tables to claim their right to vote.
City clerks recorded the registrations in over 160 volumes that now live at Boston’s City Archives. In 2021, the Mary Eliza Project began as a collaboration between the City Archives and Simmons University when a team of archivists and historians, passionate about expanding access to women’s history, transcribed and annotated the handwritten voter registration records into a searchable and sortable dataset.
Our team started with the question: Who were these new women voters in 1920s Boston? When we transcribed the registers, we found a broad spectrum of new voters who have previously been left out of the narrative: women of color, immigrant women, and wage workers, who signed up to vote right alongside the affluent white leaders more often named in history books. All of these women deserve to be recognized as suffrage activists who claimed their right to a voice in government.
Dr. Laura Prieto, Alumni Chair in Public Humanities and the Gwen Ifill College in Media, Arts, and Humanities funded the research, writing, and transcription of records for Wards 6, 8, and 13. Community Preservation Act funds provided for the transcription of the remaining records which was completed in 2024. The Mary Eliza Project continues to support public programming, events, research, and writing that focuses on the transcribed voter registrations.
Who was Mary Eliza Mahoney?
Who was Mary Eliza Mahoney?
Retired nurse Mary Eliza Mahoney registered to vote in Boston’s Roxbury neighborhood on August 18, 1920, the very same day that Tennessee ratified the women’s suffrage amendment to the U.S. Constitution. At 76 years old, Mahoney had already waited a long time for the opportunity. Though she had retired before 1920, Mahoney had supported herself throughout her life. Her voter registration records her trailblazing occupation: “trained nurse.” Mahoney was not only part of the first generation of professional nurses in the United States, but the very first Black woman to graduate from a nursing program in the United States.
We chose Mary Eliza Mahoney as our project’s namesake for many reasons. She was an extraordinary individual who broke barriers, fought prejudice, and worked for social change. She was also in many ways an average person; she was a working woman who valued her privacy and left behind very few historical records of her life. As a result, significant misinformation about the basic facts of her life abounds, including in published sources. One thing that’s certain, however – plainly visible in the voter registration books – is that she seized her newly granted right to vote without hesitation.
When we try to picture what a Boston voter looked like in 1920, we should think of her.
The Mary Eliza Team
The Mary Eliza Team
The Mary Eliza Team is a group of historians, archivists, and data enthusiasts who are passionate about collaborating to illuminate the history of diverse women’s political engagement.
Email the team at: maryelizaproject@gmail.com
Current Team Members
Current Team Members
Laura Prieto (Co-Director)
Marta Crilly (Co-Director)
Anna Boyle
Coco Lynch
Laura Kitchings
Erin Wiebe
Past Team Members
Past Team Members
Daniela Gil Veras
Kaz Gebhardt
Molly Copeland
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