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(Above, race car driver Erica Santos, originally from Franklin)
Franklin women certainly appear regularly across the pages of the town history and that of the region. Indeed, King Philip, the Wompanoag leader for whom New England’s most destructive war was named, turned out to have had at least one equal in authority, barely recognized historically until the recent scholarship of Lisa Brooks. A woman named Wetamoo, possessed diplomatic skill and guile and was recognized by contemporaries among both European settlers and the indigenous people as a figure to be reckoned with.
Within the years of the town’s formal existence, a wide range of women have achieved prominence. Some examples include:
> Lydia Ray Pierce and Annie Ray Thayer, daughters of the town’s most prominent industrialist, who were famous for acts of philanthropy small and large.
> Palma (DeBaggis) Johnson, who turned a classroom of elementary students into successful lobbyists for a state insect: the lady bug
> Lorraine Metcalf
> Barbara Smith, a local historian of encyclopedic knowledge and fierce determination.
> Alice Wiggin, a beloved English teacher
> Frances Eddy King, an influential teacher to whom the very first Oskey yearbook was dedicated
>May Alden Ward, a leading author and lecturer at the turn of the 20th
century.
> Cora Daniels, novelist
> Ann Bowen Dodd who grew up in New York but had strong family ties to Franklin. She wrote travel guides and the first science fiction novel by a woman, The Republic of the Future. Set in the 21st century, it envisioned presciently that government would take over most aspects of life, including raising children and that everyone would be forced to become equal in all ways. It was claimed that Edward Bellamy’s more famous, Looking Backward, a paean to socialism, was penned in response to her work.
Most recently, we have:
> Paula C. Lodi, US Army Brigadier General; younger sister of US Army General Maria Barrett
> Erica Santos, a prominent US racecar driver
> Jen O’Malley-Dillon, currently deputy chief of staff in the Biden White House.
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Thanks to our Norfolk County Register of Deeds, we can add some prominent names from the county.
Norfolk County Register of Deeds, William P. O’Donnell, appeared on a segment broadcast by Quincy Access Television commemorating Women’s History Month and recognizing a number of distinguished women, both past and present, with ties to Norfolk County.
“There are numerous prominent woman with ties to Norfolk County”, noted the Register, “ranging from first lady Abigail Adams, the wife and mother of two presidents, who was born in Weymouth and buried in Quincy, to lesser known but important figures such as Katherine Lee Bates, a nineteenth century Wellesley resident, who, inspired by the beauty she observed from the top of Pike’s Peak, wrote the lyrics to “America the Beautiful”.
Some of the other women mentioned by Register O’Donnell in the segment include historic figures like Deborah Sampson from Sharon, who fought and was wounded in the American Revolutionary War, Helen Keller and Anne Sullivan, both once residents of Wrentham, whose story has been chronicled in books and in the 1962 movie, “The Miracle Worker”, Harriet Hemenway from Canton, who co-founded the Massachusetts Audubon Society in 1896, Dr. Helen Cleary, the first woman to be elected to the Town of Norfolk’s Board of Selectmen and the actress Lee Remick from Quincy, an Academy Award nominee in 1962.
Norfolk County is also birthplace of a number of contemporary women such as the astronaut, Sunita Williams, a 1983 graduate of Needham High School, who has performed the most spacewalks by a woman, National Public Radio’s Audie Cornish, Mindy Kaling, the writer and actress best known for the television series “The Office” and of course, Needham’s own Aly Raisman, the winner of several Olympic medals in women’s gymnastics and the recipient of the Arthur Ashe Courage Award.
