Mae D. Frazer, Somerville's first known female publisher

As National Women's History Month draws to a close this week, our spotlight is on Mae Durell Frazar (1852-1919) an accomplished writer, editor, world traveler, and entrepreneur who lived most of her life on or near Prospect Hill.

Frazar is chiefly known as Somerville’s first female publisher. In 1887 she created a 16-sheet paper called The Home Life, which was printed by the Somerville Journal, and "crammed with original matter, illustrated stories, prizes, premiums, music and book reviews, boys' and girls' departments, fashions, modes, correspondence, etc.," according to a story in the Journal that year. She reportedly garnered a circulation of 20,000.

Soon after she started the paper, Frazar launched a European excursion tour business in which she arranged and conducted extended tour packages for travelers. She authored tour guides emphasizing the new affordability of European travel – once a “supreme luxury” - for the average person, and she advertised and reported on her travels in newspapers across the country.

In 1905, Supreme Court Justice David Brewer delivered the commencement address at Vassar College, where he offered a possibility: “Who shall say that before the gray hair shall cover the heads of the women here tonight there may not sit in the White House a woman who will shed luster upon this country as Queen Victoria shed luster upon England?” His comments made quite a buzz in the news of the day, including the Boston Globe, which asked four women “who have engaged in professions and business” to weigh in on whether a woman would make a good President. One of them was Mae Frazar.

While acknowledging that women were at a disadvantage due to their exclusion from participating in political life, Frazar saw the strengths of women as complementary to those of men in conducting public affairs, but wrote that modern views and appropriate education would empower women to take on the Presidency. “Elizabeth made a pretty good hand at Queen, and Victoria was not so bad, so why not?”