In celebration of Women's History Month, stop by the top floor of the library to view our new display about three famous Framingham women!
- Margaret Knight
- Louise Parker Mayo
- Meta Warrick Fuller
Margaret Knight
Inventor
"Born in
York, Maine, Margaret E. "Mattie" Knight, nicknamed "Lady
Edison," spent her childhood in Manchester, New Hampshire, where she
received a meager education. Estranged from the usual pastimes of little girls,
she made homemade kites and sleds, which were the envy of the neighborhood. At
age twelve, while observing her brothers at work in a cloth factory, she saw a
large metal-tipped shuttle drop from the loom, endangering a worker. This
incident motivated her to devise a stop-motion device to prevent loom
accidents.
As an adult, Knight moved to
Springfield, Massachusetts, and worked for a manufacturer of paper bags. After
studying the operation, in 1867 she devised a mechanism that produced a bag
with a square bottom, which would enable users to load the bag without holding
it erect. Two years later, she took her idea to Boston and began putting the
finishing touches on the device so that it could be patented. Another inventor,
Charles F. Annan, copied her idea and applied for his own patent. Knight
contested his claims in court and won her suit in 1870.
For most of her productive years,
Knight lived in Ashland and Framingham, Massachusetts, but she also maintained
a workshop in Boston, and was associated with the Knight-Davidson Motor Company
of New York. She created a number of handy domestic gadgets, including various
machines that cut out and sewed shoes, a window sash and frame, a dress and
skirt shield, a barbecue spit, a clasp for holding robes, and a numbering
device. Late in her career, she studied rotary engines and evolved a
sleeve-valve engine, a horizontal variation on the vertical poppet valve, which
was posthumously patented in 1915. The return for her work, however, brought
her small profit; she died of pneumonia and gallstones in 1914, leaving behind
an estate valued at less than $300."
"Margaret
E. Knight." World of Invention. Gale, 2006. Biography in Context.
Web. 3 Mar. 2015.
Louise Parker Mayo
Suffragist
"'Framingham's […] Mayo "represented countless
women throughout the country who interrupted their everyday lives to be a part
of history," said Danker.
"Thousands
of American women fought the battle for the vote. Hundreds of them were jailed
and 168 received the suffrage pins. Framingham is honored to have been home to
two of them," said Franck […]”
Mayo,
the mother of five boys and two girls, left the family's Nixon Road farmhouse
in July 1917 to picket at the White House.
"My
grandfather, a tall Abraham Lincoln type, said 'Go ahead,' " said Jean
Trifero, a Nantucket resident who spent much of her childhood with her
grandparents, Louise and William. " He knew if that's what she was going
to do, she would do it."
Mayo
was among 17 women protesters arrested and sentenced to 60 days in jail. She
was pardoned and released after serving two days, but her actions earned her a
silver jail-door pin from the National Woman's Party.
"I
always have an awful lot of pride in what she accomplished," Trifero said of
the woman known to solve math problems for fun and drive "the school
barge," a horse-drawn conveyance that ferried students in the days before
buses."
By
Julia Spitz/Daily News staff, Aug 21,
2010 http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/x84262179/90-years-ago-women-gained-the-right-to-vote
 |
| Evans-Daly,
Laurie, and David C. Gordon. Framingham. Dover, NH: Arcadia Pub., 1997. |
Meta Warrick Fuller
Sculptor
"Meta Warrick Fuller was born in
Philadelphia, Pa., the youngest of three children of Emma (Jones) and William
H. Warrick. Henry Jones, her maternal grandfather, was a well-known caterer in
Philadelphia. Her father owned barber shops and her mother a hair-dressing
parlor. Meta was named after one of her mother's clients, Meta Vaux, the
daughter of Senator Richard Vaux.
Meta Warrick's early knowledge and
appreciation of art began with her father's self-instructed interest in
paintings and sculpture in the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. When she
completed high school in Philadelphia in 1894, she won a three-year scholarship
to the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art (later the Philadelphia
College of Industrial Art). Her prizewinning bas-relief frieze of thirty-seven
medieval figures, “The Procession of Arts and Crafts,” earned her a
postgraduate scholarship for an additional year of study in sculpture. At her
graduation in 1898, she won an honorable mention for modeling and a prize for a
metalwork piece, “Crucifixion of Christ in Agony.”
With the encouragement of her
teachers and friends, Meta Warrick went to Paris in October 1899 for further
study. She was not permitted because of her race to stay at the American Girls
Club, so a family friend, Henry O. Tanner, the American-born Negro painter who
had won acclaim in Paris, found her a room in a small hotel. Despite limited
financial resources, she attended the École des Beaux Arts (1899), and the
Colarossi Academy (1900-02) where she studied modeling under such notable
French artists as Injalbert, Gauqui, and Rollard. Introduced to the sculptor
Auguste Rodin, she showed him a plaster model of her “Secret Sorrow” (also
known as “Man Eating His Heart”). He praised her work and with his encouragement
she exhibited several sculptures, including “The Thief on the Cross,” “The
Impenitent Thief,” “The Wretched,” and “Man Carrying a Dead Comrade”—all
examples of the powerful combination of the romantic and the macabre that marks
her early work—
in L'Art Nouveau, an important Paris gallery.
Despite her successful years in
Paris, race prejudice denied Meta Warrick similar recognition after her return
to Philadelphia in 1902. Art dealers asserted that there was no interest in the
“domestic” works she produced in her Philadelphia studio, but they also
belittled the sculptures she had done in Paris. It was not until 1907, when she
won a gold medal for her tableaux of 150 figures illustrating the progress of
the Negro in America (a commission for the Jamestown Tercentennial Exhibition),
that she began to receive recognition.
On Feb. 3, 1909, Meta Warrick
married Dr. Solomon Carter Fuller of Boston and Framingham, Mass. A Liberian by
birth, he was a graduate of the Boston University School of Medicine. Then working
in the fields of pathology and neurology, he later became a noted psychiatrist.
They moved to a house he had had built in Framingham, which was their home for
the remainder of their lives. In 1910 a fire in a Philadelphia warehouse where
Meta Fuller's sculptures were stored destroyed practically all her work of the
past sixteen years.
Her opportunities for professional
work were somewhat limited by the birth of three sons: Solomon Carter, Jr.,
born in 1910; William Thomas, born in 1911; and Perry J., born in 1916. But in
1913, at the request of W. E. B. Du Bois, famous author and editor of The Crisis magazine, she molded a statue depicting a black
boy and girl for the fiftieth anniversary celebration in New York of the
Emancipation Proclamation. This sculpture marked the beginning of her use of
Afro-Americans as her models and the start of fifty prolific years, working at
first in a studio on the top floor of her house and after 1929 in a separate
studio building on the shore of nearby Learned Pond. In 1922 Meta Fuller showed
a life-size sculpture, “Awakening Ethiopia” (now in the Schomburg Collection of
the New York Public Library) at New York's Making of America Exposition. During
the 1930s she exhibited at local libraries, the Boston Art Club, and at churches,
where she gained increased popularity. Her later work, usually small pieces, is
more reserved than that done before 1910. It shows “greater self-consciousness
… check-reined technic,” and an “ingratiating charm” (Porter, p. 78) that
distinguish it from the more emotionally demanding work of the earlier period.
In 1950 Meta Warrick Fuller left her
studio to a former pupil in order to care for her ailing and blind husband. He
died on Jan. 16, 1953, and shortly thereafter she contracted tuberculosis which
required confinement for two years in a sanatorium. She returned to Framingham
and began to work again, completing a bust of Charlotte
Hawkins Brown in 1956 and the following year producing for the National Council
of Negro Women doll models of ten famous American Negro women. In the early
1960s she sculpted a bronze plaque of a doctor and two nurses for the
Framingham Union Hospital where her husband had practiced. This period is also
marked by one of her most notable works, “The Crucifixion,” with the head of
Christ raised, done in memory of the four Negro girls killed in the church
bombing in Birmingham, Ala., in 1963. A bronze piece, “Storytime” (depicting a
mother reading to her three children) was unveiled in the Framingham Center
Library in 1964.
Although much of her early work was
destroyed, several of her important pieces were placed in museums: “The Talking
Skull” in the Museum of Afro-American History in Boston; “The Wretched” in the
Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, a museum built by Alma
Spreckels (1881-1968) which features the work of Rodin, his students, and those
whom he inspired; her statuette of Richard B. Harrison as “De Lawd” in Green Pastures in the art gallery of Howard University; a
bas-relief of a black youth rising from a kneeling position to meet the rising
sun in the YMCA building in Atlanta, Ga.; a bronze bust of her husband in the
Boston University School of Medicine; and “The Dancing Girl” in the Cleveland
Museum of Art. In addition to her many prizes, she was a fellow of the Academy
of Fine Arts and was one of three sculptors receiving special honor in March
1961 at the “New Vistas in American Art” exhibit at Howard University. Meta
Warrick Fuller died in Framingham at the age of ninety."
Logan,
Rayford W. "Fuller, Meta Vaux Warrick, June 6, 1877-March 13, 1968.."
Notable American Women: The Modern Period. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1980. Credo Reference. Web. 5 Mar 2015.
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| "Storytime"- On display in our Children's Room! |
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