Peabody Access Telecommunications
After a year of researching life in Essex County, Massachusetts in the nineteenth century, I have started to decipher more details of Mary U. Ferrin’s remarkable life.
The daughter of a tavern keeper and farmer, she was thirty-five-years old when she married Jesse Ferrin in 1845 and then “deserted” him after three years. What is Jesse's story? Why was she committed to an asylum, by whom? How did she get out?
Her life was remarkable not only due to her role as “an early silent worker” - the first woman in Massachusetts to petition for the property rights of married women and an advocate of universal suffrage - but also because, in her later life, she owned property and made a will that withstood legal challenges from her family. Her legal rights were not challenged after she and six hundred other women were scammed in the Ladies Deposit scandal in 1880. Who were the women who supported her and to whom she bequeathed her wealth?
Was she part of the local anti-slavery movement and the newly formed Universalist congregation? How was she educated? Why did she step up and away from the safety of her wealthy, landed family to become an activist? How did she get so remarkable and fearless?
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