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Equi even threatened to horse whip Taylor in the middle of the street if payment was not made. The women went to Taylor’s office and demanded payment. When the end of the school year came, Holcomb had still not received her final salary of $100. Betsy Bell Holcomb had taught at the local private academy run by a shady character named O.D. Early on, it was clear that had both a fiery temper and a strong sense of justice. Betsy supplemented their income by teaching in town. The women lived as a couple and attempted to make a go of it as farmers. Without hesitating, Marie joined Betsy in The Dalles, Oregon in September 1882.Īt first, life was good on The Dalles, which was a town at the end of the Oregon Trail. But that is exactly what she did and before long, she wrote to Marie, urging her to come out West and join her.
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It must have shocked Betsy Bell Holcomb’s family when she dropped out of Wellesley before graduating and moving to Oregon to homestead a piece of land.
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But after a stint at Northfield Seminary for Girls (now Northfield Mount Hermon School) to prepare for college, Marie was forced to return to New Bedford as she could not afford the tuition. Betsy was a Wellesley College student who took Marie on as a project and was determined to see her get a chance to attend Wellesley, too. Betsy Bell Holcomb was a high school friend from a well-off New Bedford family, who had been impressed with Marie’s intelligence and charm. She also saw how unsafe it was, as the factory air was so thick with floating cotton fibers that workers sometimes vomited cotton balls at the end of their shifts.īut Marie’s capacity for friendship was about to save her. But like other working class girls, Marie was soon forced to drop out of high school to work in the textile mills where she experienced firsthand the dehumanizing drudgery of the work. Austin may have been the first person outside of her family to sense Marie’s dynamic combination of energy, restless intelligence, and charisma. She was a good student at New Bedford High School, forming her first significant female attachment with a teacher, Mary E. Equi now takes her place in the pantheon of LGBTQ heroes.Īs a child, Marie suffered from tuberculosis which got so bad, she was sent to family friends in Florida to recover. How did it happen and why has such a great American story not been told? Fortunately, public historian Michael Helquist’s recent book Marie Equi: Radical Politics and Outlaw Passions rescues her from oblivion. Marie Equi went on to become a homesteader in the Far West, a medical doctor, out lesbian, labor activist, suffragist, and one of the most significant reformers of her era.
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Under these circumstances, Marie looked forward to a harsh life in the textile mills and a mundane home life living with her parents and/or siblings. Her teachers thought her intelligent but unruly and she had never shown the slightest interest in the opposite sex. There were two routes to a decent life for most immigrant girls then: marriage or education Marie was not a promising candidate for either. Born in 1872 to immigrant parents in New Bedford, a Yankee city on the decline, Marie’s future was limited at best. Marie Equi wasn’t supposed to amount to much. Article originally published in Boston Spirit Magazine, Dec.