Mary Livermore Barrows

When women gained full voting rights in 1920, one phase of their struggle was at an end, but another was just beginning. No one in Melrose history exemplified that new struggle more than Mary Livermore Barrows, who lived nearly her whole life at 20 West Emerson Street.

Barrows’ maternal grandmother was the famed fighter for abolition and suffrage, Mary Livermore; her father, John Norris, was the longtime chairman of the School Committee. Barrows herself graduated from Wellesley and returned to her hometown to become a politically engaged citizen. Given her pedigree and aptitude, she no doubt would have been elected to office at a young age had she been a man.

Her chance to run came in 1926, when a group of her female supporters got her name on the ballot for Ward 4 Alderman while she was away in Maine for the summer. Barrows had good reason to be reluctant to run; in 1915, when the men of Melrose had voted in a referendum on women’s suffrage, only 41% had favored it. Nevertheless, Barrows worked with women from across Melrose to put together an impressive election machine, and won Ward 4 by nine votes. For her accomplishment, the Boston Globe ran an article that foregrounded her baking skills.

Two years later, Barrows set her sights on the state house. At that time, each state house district elected two representatives. In a field of six, Barrows managed to beat out four men and came in second, becoming one of five women elected to the state house in that year.

Joining that boys’ club would be a frustrating experience. During a hearing on temperance in 1930, Barrows made a joke about the opposition drinking during debate; the men feigned insult, and Barrows was made to apologize to the entire chamber lest she face censure. In 1935, she was forced by her colleagues to go through a mock marriage ceremony during one of their raucous all-night sessions, an especial insult since she had sponsored a bill to allow married women to keep their maiden names.

Women in Massachusetts would only be granted that right in 1973. After Barrows left office in 1938, Melrose would not return a woman to the state house until Katherine Clark’s election in 2007.