Helena Dudley (1858-1932)

Social worker, labor activist, pacifist

In a career that paralleled that of her famous colleague Jane Addams in Chicago, Helena Dudley directed the Denison Settlement House, a leading women’s class-bridging organization in Boston and Boston’s only settlement house run by and for women. She was a key member of a close-knit circle of progressive women who led the College Settlement Association, Wellesley College, the women’s labor movement, and the women’s peace movement in the U.S. She supported women’s suffrage, but surprisingly was not active in the suffrage movement.

After a forced retirement from Denison House on account of her controversial involvement with the Bread and Roses Strike in Lawrence, Massachusetts in 1912, Helena Dudley moved to Waltham where her close friend and patron Cornelia Warren built a house for her at 157 Beaver Street on Warren’s Cedar Hill Estate.

College settlements like Dudley’s Denison House in Boston and Addams’ Hull House in Chicago were phenomena of the Progressive Era where middle-class residents would settle in immigrant neighborhoods “in helpful ministration among ‘the submerged tenth,’” sharing their living room with their neighbors. (Scudder, 160) Denison House was founded in 1892 and established its headquarters on Tyler Street in Boston’s South End thanks to Cornelia Warren, “the first person with any money to welcome the scheme” and one of its most generous and long-standing financial supporters. (Scudder, 109-11) It was located in what Dudley described as the “most cosmopolitan district of Boston,” populated by Syrians, Armenians, Italians, Greeks, Chinese, French and Eastern European Jews. (Dudley, 1910, Williams and MacLean, 259) It was also a short walk away from Boston’s Central Labor Union headquarters in the Wells Memorial building, which was headed and funded by Warren’s neighbor, Robert Treat Paine.

After a year in a small settlement house in Philadelphia, Helena Dudley arrived in Boston in the middle of the great depression of 1893 to replace Emily Green Balch as the permanent head worker of Denison House. She responded to the depression by distributing relief in the form of milk and coal and by joining forces with the Wells Memorial Institute to provide jobs for over 300 unemployed women as seamstresses. This early collaboration with Wells Memorial was so transformative that she announced clear new goals in her 1893 annual report: “Our leading interests at Denison House will be two fold: university extension and the organization of labor.” (Williams and Maclean, 260)

Helena Dudley and other Denison House residents Wellesley professor Vida Scudder and labor leader Mary Kenney O’Sullivan would attend weekly Central Labor Union meetings at the Wells Memorial dominated by men. The three would go on to lead the women’s labor movement in Boston, offering Denison house as a meeting space for women’s organized labor. They helped found and organize the national Women’s Trade Union League in 1903.

Conversely, male leaders of the Wells Memorial—president Robert Treat Paine and director Edmund Billings—supported and learned from the Denison House experiment. Billings sat on its board. Paine attended monthly social science club meetings at Denison House where he discovered new ways of thinking about philanthropy. Paine once asked a national crowd, “Is not Miss Dudley right when she asserts that the working classes ‘cannot be helped fundamentally or primarily by charity or philanthropy, but by co-operation with them in directions which they themselves think will aid them’?” (Paine, 9) Scudder would describe this ideological shift in more modern terms. “Pity for individuals yielded to indignation against the system…. The poor were no longer sinners but victims.” (Scudder, 148).

Leaders of Denison House looked forward to “a time when there should be no barriers between workers of any kind and the so-called ‘leisure class.’” Denison House provided classes, sports, plays, clubs, exhibits, clinics, and much-needed daycare from the three headquarter buildings and gymnasium purchased by Cornelia Warren to serve the South End neighborhood. Its Folk Handcrafts Council was a source of income for 105 Italians, 36 Syrians, 4 Greeks, 2 Armenians, and 21 others. (Boris, 134; JCD, p. 7)

Denison House was unusual among America’s early social service organizations in that it celebrated cultural diversity, striving to preserve cultural traditions from native countries, rather than attempting to “Americanize” immigrants. The Wellesley College professors who were active there fostered this perspective and immersed their students in cultural pluralism through field trips to the settlement and its neighborhood. Emily Green Balch, professor of economics and sociology at Wellesley, conducted the first inquiry into the lives of Slovakian immigrants both in their native European environments and in the United States. English professor Vida Scudder founded the Circolo Italo-Americano. History professor Katharine Coman brought her students to South End tenement houses, labor union meetings, factories and sweatshops. Other intellectuals like Jane Addams and Catherine Breshkovsky, “the little grandmother of the Russian Revolution,” would stay at Denison House during their visits to Boston.

Dudley made close personal connections with workers and intellectuals and became increasingly radical in her political beliefs. In the Bread and Roses strike in 1912, Dudley, Scudder and O’Sullivan sided with the 10,000 strikers led by the Industrial Workers of the World and posted bail for Joe Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti, non-violent resisters who were jailed under unfounded accusations of inciting a riot and murder. When the more conservative American Federation of Labor and Women’s Trade Union League would not come to the aid of the Lawrence workers, O’Sullivan resigned in protest. Dudley and Scudder were forced by the newly elected male board of Denison House to resign so as not to compromise its ability to fundraise.

After this break from Denison House, Waltham’s Cornelia Warren did not abandon her long-time friend Helena Dudley but instead took her in. She built a house for Dudley and her assistant Effie Macintosh on her family estate on Beaver Street in Waltham known as Cedar Hill. Dudley and Macintosh spent at least five years in Waltham in “the Gray House” which became “a great resort for Denison House people.” (JCD) Another resident recalled “how we all loved to go out for a week or for a night. Halfway up the stairs was a window that looked directly into the pine trees…covered with snow.” (JCD) Anne Withington, head of the women’s branch of the South End House in Boston and another founding member of the WTUL, spent months at the Gray House at Cedar Hill with Helena Dudley. “They stood by many a strike together [and] belonged to the League for Peace and Freedom.” (JCD; Boris, 135)

Cedar Hill in Waltham became a popular venue for country fairs and folk festivals to benefit Denison House during Dudley’s time there, especially in 1916 and 1917. Cornelia Warren built a rustic theatre in 1916 especially to showcase festival performers such as Pe-ahm-e-squeet (Floating Cloud) who shared stories, dance, and songs of her native Ojibway Tribe and elderly Mrs. Ruffo who performed an ancient Italian folk dance called “The Dance of the Loom.” At these country fairs, or fetes champetres, Denison House sold “gifts of the nations,” such as lace and embroidery from Syria, Greece, Ireland and Italy. (Boston Globe, May 18, 1916 and June 4, 1917)

Other festival attractions at Warren’s Waltham estate were the reproduction Hampton Court maze and the “sanitary dairying and clean milk” operations and “model herd of cows” that were “sure to bring to Waltham all the amateur farmers in the eastern part of the state.” (Boston Herald, May 28, 1916) Appropriately, fundraising at one fair was directed toward “gardening on city land for many people in the neighborhood” of Denison House and getting people out of the city for hiking and other “wholesome activities.” (Boston Globe, May 29, 1917)

The year 1921 brought the death of two of Helena Dudley’s closest friends and colleagues: Euphemia Mackintosh and Cornelia Warren. Dudley moved away from their shared home in Waltham to spend her final years in nearby Wellesley, living with Vida Scudder.

The close relationship between Cedar Hill and Denison House continued even after Warren’s death, Dudley’s departure, and Warren’s gift of the property to the Girl Scouts. Denison House resident, and soon to be famous aviator, Amelia Earhart distributed leaflets from her plane over Boston for the Cedar Hill Carnival for Denison House in 1927. (Boston Globe, May 25, 1927) Earlier that year, Helena Dudley and Vida Scudder spoke at a memorial service for Cornelia Warren hosted by the Girl Scouts at their new camp in Waltham. Every scout in the state was asked to contribute what she could to a “sun dial…in the old rose garden, of which Miss Warren was especially fond, to ‘mark the sunny hours at Cedar Hill.’” (Boston Herald, Mar 20, 1927)

Helena Dudley passed away in Geneva, Switzerland, on a trip to an international peace conference with Vida Scudder in 1932.  As a permanent memorial, her friends created the Helena Dudley Foundation which was headed by Robert Treat Paine’s daughter and Cornelia Warren’s neighbor on Beaver Street in Waltham: Ethel Paine Moors.

Education: Bryn Mawr College, 1889
Waltham residence: 157 Beaver St. (ca. 1912-1921)

Banner photo: Denison House pamphlet, 1940s? City of Boston Archives and Records Management.

References:

“A Heart That Held the World: An Appraisal of the Life of Helena Stuart Dudley and a Memorial to her Work,” Boston: Helena Dudley Foundation, 1939.

Blackwell, Alice Stone. The Little Grandmother of the Russian Revolution: Reminiscences and Letters of Catherine Breshkovsky. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1919.

Boris, Eileen. Art and Labor: Ruskin, Morris and the Craftsman Ideal in America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986.

Capitanio, Heather Marie. “Denison House: Women’s Use of Space in the Boston Settlement.” University of Massachusetts Boston. Graduate Master’s Thesis, 2010.  

J.C.D. “Denison House and Afterwards: A Memorial to Helena Stuart Dudley,” 1933.

Davis, Allan F. Spearheads for Reform: The Social Settlements and the Progressive Movement, 1890-1914. New York: Oxford University Press, 1970.

Davis, Alan F. “Helena Dudley,” in James, Edward T., et al. Notable American Women, 1607-1950: A Biographical Dictionary, vol. 2.

Denison House Records. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute. Includes annual reports of the headworker, Helena Dudley, 1893-1912.

Deutsch, Sarah. Women and the City: Gender, Space and Power in Boston, 1870-1940. Oxford University Press, 2000.

Dudley, Helena. “Relief Work Carried on in the Wells Memorial Institute,” American Academy of Political Affairs and Social Science. Annals, Nov 1894.

Green, Martin. The Mount Vernon Street Warrens: A Boston Story, 1860-1910. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989.

Meyer, Marilee Boyd. Inspiring Reform: Boston’s Arts and Crafts Movement. Wellesley, Mass.: Davis Museum and Cultural Center, 1997.

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Denison House Lace Sample Book, ca. 1915. https://collections.mfa.org/objects/315413

Nutter, Kathleen Banks. The Necessity of Organization: Mary Kenney O’Sullivan and Trade Unionism for Women, 1892-1912. Routledge, 2000.

Nutter, Kathleen Banks. “Helena Stuart Dudley,” in American National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2020. https://www.anb.org/view/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.001.0001/anb-9780198606697-e-1500912

Paine, Robert Treat, “President’s Address” in the Official Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the National Conference of Social Welfare, 1895.

Prescott, Dorothy M. Cornelia Warren and the Story of Cedar Hill, 1958.

Randall, Mercedes M. Improper Bostonian: Emily Greene Balch, 1964.

Ross, Patricia M. and Diane M. White. Cedar Hill Memories: The Warren Family and Girl Scouts in Waltham, Massachusetts. Boston, Mass.: Patriot’s Trail Girl Scouts Council, 1996.

Scudder, Vida Dutton. On Journey. New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc, Publishers, 1937.

Streiff, Meg. “Boston’s Settlement Housing: Social Reform in an Industrial City,” Louisiana State University, Doctoral Dissertation, 2005.

Williams, Joyce E. and Vicky M. MacLean. Settlement Sociology in the Progressive Years: Faith, Science and Reform. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015.

Women’s Who’s Who of America, 1915.

Woods, Robert A. The City Wilderness: A Settlement Study, Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin & Co., 1898.

Stonehurst Curator Ann Clifford wrote this biographical sketch in conjunction with “Anxious to Vote: Students, Workers and the Fight for Women’s Suffrage,” a curriculum and public education project developed in partnership by Stonehurst the Robert Treat Paine Estate and Waltham Public Schools in commemoration of the national suffrage centennial in 2020. STONEHURST is a National Historic Landmark owned by the City of Waltham. The once-private estate of generous social justice advocates whose ancestors helped establish the democratic foundations of this country is now appropriately owned by the people.

The Friends of Stonehurst received support for this program through “The Vote: A Statewide Conversation about Voting Rights,” a special initiative of Mass Humanities that includes organizations around the state.

This program is funded in part by Mass Humanities, which receives support from the Massachusetts Cultural Council and is an affiliate of the National Endowment for the Humanities.