Essex County Chronicles
This coming Sunday, Nov. 15, the Woman's Friend Society of Salem will host an open house to celebrate the recent addition of its headquarters at 12 Hawthorne Blvd. to the National Register of Historic Places. Tours of the house and garden are planned along with light refreshments and some brief comments from city officials.
The association of the Joseph Fenno house (completed 1812) and Woman's Friend Society dates to 1884 when John Bertram, the organizer of Salem Hospital and a home for aged men, lent the eastern half of the building to the Society with the understanding it would be given to them outright in five years if the group had proven itself to be on a solid foundation.
Bertram died in the interim, but his equally philanthropic daughter, Jennie Emmerton, for whom the building was later named, carried out her father's wishes in 1884. Thirteen years later, the Woman's Friend Society acquired the rest of the house with donated funds.
The Woman's Friend Society, previously known as the Moral Education Society of Salem and the Working Women's Bureau, came into being in 1875-1876, a period of tremendous growth in the social service network in Salem. Mrs. George Putnam provided the leadership that helped the organization not only survive its first few years, but put in on a firm foundation. But it was the noted author and editor, Kate Tannat Woods, who was responsible for its existence.
A member of the Moral Education Society of Boston and a Salem resident, Woods addressed a group of concerned citizens at Old Town Hall in 1875 on the topic of the need to elevate women through educational and other activities. Her assessment of the city's female population, echoed at a later meeting called by the city marshall (now known as the police chief), William Hill, was not a very positive one. The vulgarity, disrespect and sometimes lawless behavior characteristic of the "lower" class of girls, she said, was infecting even the daughters of the community's better families. It was obvious to Woods, Hill and many others that intervention was needed to right the ship.
At the conclusion of that meeting a group of Salem women organized a committee to address the issues Hill had raised.
One of the new group's first steps was to open a reading room in a tenement donated for that purpose at the corner of Essex and Daniels streets. This new educational resource would be just the first of many projects undertaken by the organization in the first quarter-century of its existence.
But it was not without controversy within the committee: Some members were not convinced that it was a good idea to allow problem girls to mingle with the better class of young women who naturally gravitated to the new facility. After much debate it was decided to proceed in the hopes that those of stronger moral persuasion would have more of an influence on their less well-behaved counterparts than the latter would on them.
It was clear to the members of the committee that idleness was truly the devil's workshop, and they began channeling some of the organization's funds and energies into creating work opportunities. These included serving as a clearinghouse for homemade clothing and providing training for young women in cooking, homemaking, and other "industrial arts."
John Bertram's generosity provided the society with the space it needed to operate existing programs and to add others. Soon the Woman's Friend Society was renting out rooms to working girls, providing meals to other women in transition, and running a kindergarten program. The latter was successful enough that it was taken over by the Salem Public Schools in 1894.
Another early success began with a bequest from Esther Mack, who shared the Society's concerns about the plight of young women.
In the early 1890s the organization's Hawthorne Boulevard headquarters would become the home of the new Mack Industrial School, and soon hundreds of young women were registering to take courses in cooking, dressmaking and sewing being offered there. The school was so popular that it was eventually moved to a building of its own. The school later occupied a mansion on Pickman Street and was in operation until the late 1920s.
The most successful program developed by the Society in its first quarter-century was the District Nurse office. In 1897 a Ms. Seldes was hired to provide home nursing services to shut-ins. The program filled a definite need in the community, and grew by leaps and bounds. It was later renamed the Visiting Nurse Association of Salem Inc. and spun off from the Woman's Friend Society in 1976.
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Jim McAllister of Salem writes a weekly column on the region's history. Contact him at jim@nii.net.
