Denison House (Boston)

Several notable women worked there, including Nobel Prize winner Emily Greene Balch, labor organizer Mary Kenney O'Sullivan, and pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart.

[7] Arriving during the Panic of 1893, Dudley immediately set to work organizing the house as a relief agency that could distribute such basic necessities as milk and coal.

Under her direction, Denison House became an important neighborhood center, offering classes in nursing, English literature, crafts, cooking, and carpentry, as well as sports and a summer camp for children, and clubs for adults.

On display was "the work of Italian, Syrian, Greek and Armenian craftsmen and craftswomen, in silver, leather, linen, silk embroideries, etc., from old designs copied in part from treasure pieces in palaces, museums and private collections in Europe and America."

[9] The teenaged boys of the Denison House dramatic club performed Shakespearean plays to raise funds for renovations, and received encouraging reviews in the Boston Globe.

Mary Morton Kehew, president of the Women's Educational and Industrial Union, was treasurer of Denison House in the late 1890s,[12] and the Christian Socialist writer W. D. P. Bliss gave a speech there in 1898.

[15] In 1912 Dudley and O'Sullivan paid the bail of $500 each for Joseph Ettor and Arturo Giovannitti, leaders of the 1912 Lawrence textile strike who had been arrested on trumped-up charges.

Wealthy donors were troubled by the house's connections to organized labor, and as fundraising became increasingly difficult, both Dudley and Scudder were forced to resign their positions.

[20] The following year she represented Denison House at the conference of the National Federation of Settlements, held in Boston, where she impressed leading members as "one of the most promising social workers of her generation".

[23] Mary Kingsbury Simkhovitch, a city planner and social worker, met Helena Dudley and visited Denison House while living in Boston.