Photo: Suzanne Sausville/WBZ NewsRadio
BOSTON (WBZ NewsRadio) — If you see a woman dressed in a long red velvet skirt, bodice, bonnet, and black cape walking around downtown Boston, it's probably Thankful Rice.
"I was born here in Boston in 1760, making me a very young 264 years old," Rice said Sunday. "Of course I look fabulous for my age, don’t look a day over 225."
In reality, Rice is Kara Zeiberg, a tour guide with the Freedom Trail Foundation. The foundation is honoring Women's History Month with a special Revolutionary Women Tour on Saturdays and Sundays during the month of March.
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"Women are often overlooked in our main tours," Zeiberg told WBZ NewsRadio. "We definitely include women, but this tour is specifically dedicated to women making history in Boston."
Zeiberg admits the 90-minute, mile-long walking tour starts on a rather dour note on Boston Common.
"We’re going to be talking a lot about women being persecuted, being oppressed," Zeiberg explained. "Being here on the Boston Common, one of the top things to talk about is women who were hanged for certain things, the largest of which was witchcraft."
The rest of the tour is not as bleak.
"We’re gonna go up to Beacon Hill, we’re gonna see the street where Rebecca Lee Crumpler, the first African American woman to hold a medical degree in the area, lived. We’re gonna see the statue of Anna Hutchinson and Mary Dyer," said Zeiberg. "Mary Dyer was the last woman hanged for Quakerism here on the Boston Common. Very famous, she is seen as a martyr for religious freedom."
Other women highlighted along Boston's famous red line are Abigail Adams, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Harriet Tubman, Phillis Wheatley, Susan B. Anthony, and Lucy Stone.
"Lucy Stone is very famous for being part of the women’s suffrage movement in the 1800s," said Zeiberg. "She was also a very active abolitionist in Boston. She worked for The Liberator, which is a very prominent abolitionist publication in Boston, and she had a printing press on Beacon Hill."
WBZ's Suzanne Sausville (@WBZSausville) reports.
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