Home of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop (Mother Mary Alphonsa)
17 Chestnut Street
The youngest child of Nathaniel and Sophia Peabody of Salem (see
S13) was not born in Salem but in Lenox,
Massachusetts. When Rose Hawthorne (1851-1926) was only two years
old, her family traveled to England where her father served as consul
at Liverpool. When his terms expired, the Hawthornes visited France
and Italy, returning to live in England for a year. When Rose was
nine, she returned home to a country she could not remember. She
was taught at home in Concord, Massachusetts, until her father’s
death in 1864. First sent to a boarding school in nearby Lexington,
she came to Salem to study in 1867 and lived here on Chestnut Street.
Soon after she had finished school, Rose went with her sister, Una,
her brother, Julian, and their mother, to live in Germany where
she studied art and music, met George Parsons Lathrop, and married
him in 1871. Upon returning once more to America, Rose and her husband
became very active in the literary circles of Boston and New York.
Their son, Francis Hawthorne Lathrop was born in 1876 but died of
cancer in 1881. Rose and George separated, and she began to train
as a nurse to help patients with incurable cancer who were unable
to pay for their treatment. A few years later, this descendent of
Puritans who had become a Catholic, founded an order of nuns dedicated
to the nursing work she had started. Newly named Mother Mary Alphonsa,
she also spoke regularly on the role of women, rejecting the notion
that they were merely decorative. In an unusual appearance before
the Catholic Congress of 1893 held in Chicago, she argued, “Is
she who is the mother of all perfect impulses, to be represented
anywhere forever as the adorer of vanity? Is she always anywhere
to appear laden with jewels, like a jeweler’s show-case? O
woman, the hour has struck when you are to arise and defend your
rights, your abilities for competition with men in intellectual
and professional endurance, the hour when you are to prove that
purity and generosity are for the nation as well as for the home.”68
The Dominican Sisters of Hawthorne continue Mother Mary Alphonsa’s
work today from their headquarters in Hawthorne, New York.
Notes
68. Deborah Culbertson, ed. Rose Hawthorne
Lathrop: Selected Writings (Mahwah, N.J., 1993), II: 46.
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