Home of Kate Tannatt Woods
166 North Street, “Maple Rest”
Founder and president of the Thought and Work Club (see S23)
and active organizer in Salem, Kate Tannatt Woods (1836-1910) was
a prolific writer of prose and verse from the age of ten —
inspired, perhaps, by her editor father. Many of Kate’s stories
appeared in the important literary magazines of her day, and she
also worked as a journalist for the Boston Globe and Boston Herald,
and as an editor for Harper’s Bizarre and the Ladies Home Journal.
Her husband was severely wounded during the Civil War, and Kate’s
writing supported the family. In his book Poets of Essex County,
Sidney Perley described her editorial work as “clear, terse
and vigorous.”107 Kate was
an active member of the Moral Education Association in Boston, and
in 1875, she organized a meeting at Old Town Hall in Salem to address
the growing problem of lawlessness among young women in the city.
This meeting paved the way for the formation of the Salem Moral
Education Association, later, the Woman’s Friend Society, an
organization that operated an employment bureau, a reading room,
and a residential facility for young women (see S14).
Kate was an original organizer of the General Federation of Women’s
Clubs, a founder of the Massachusetts State Federation of Women’s
Clubs, and vice president of the Women’s National Press Association.
Notes
107. Perley, Poets of Essex County,
192.
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