Mary H. Parsons House
also known as Sarah Doyle Women’s Center
A small house gifted to Brown University was razed in favor of expanding the Life Sciences Building along Meeting St
images of this Property
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Taken from Brown University’s 250 Year Anniversary retrospective; photo undated -
2001 — PPS Architectural Slides Collection -
2001 — PPS Architectural Slides Collection -
2001 — PPS Architectural Slides Collection -
Our 2024 match of where the house used to be compared to what is there now
5 images: Press to view larger or scroll sideways to see more. Contributions from Brown University and the PPS Architectural Slides Collection
About this Property
Reason for Demolition
The house was predominantly the home of Pembroke College alumna Mary Hepburn Parson, who lived there until her death in 1965.1 Pembroke College was an all-women’s college founded in 1891 operating adjacent to Brown, which was all-male at the time.2
The house was used as an alumni center in the late 60s and early 70s. Then, a Working Group on the Status of Women at Brown noticed that 185 Meeting Street was vacant. On December 5th, 1974, they proposed the creation of a new women’s center to then-President Donald Hornig, who approved their proposal in April of 1975. The new center would be named after prominent educator Sarah Elizabeth Doyle, who strongly supported and advocated for women’s education at all levels.3
Ms. Doyle helped raise $75,000 to build the first permanent building for women on the campus, named Pembroke Hall, built 1897. It would later be renamed Pembroke College in 1928.4 Doyle was also a founding member of the corporation of the Rhode Island School of Design, serving as secretary from 1877 to 1899, while she was also Girls’ Principal at Providence High School from 1878 until her retirement in 1892. She was the first woman to receive an honorary degree from Brown University in 1894 and was inducted into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame in 2005.5
The center’s importance grew into the 1980s and 90s. The Sarah Doyle Women’s Center (SDWC) started a library of women’s studies and focused on the the mental and physical well-being of women. Activism groups organized large demonstrations, such as the first Take Back the Night march in Providence and the Speakout. In 1985, a coalition of women from SDWC, the The Center for Students of Color (then the Third World Center) and other campus groups organized a protest. Hundreds marched from the Pembroke Green to Wriston Quad wearing white sashes and pink armbands to protest sexual harassment and assault on campus. They spoke about their experiences from noon to 5 p.m., attracting over a hundred spectators and participants.6
These campus protests attracted national attention in the 1990s. Frustrated by a lack of response to rape allegations, women began writing warning messages on the bathroom walls of the Rockefeller Library about certain men. This continued even as the walls were repainted again and again. The “rape wall” sparked a national discussion about administrative reactions to campus assault.7
David Brussat expressed frustration with the demolition of this demure home along Meeting Street, saying: “It is sad that the city’s feminist contingent has not risen up in anger at this atrocity, which is covered with the paw prints of a masculine insensitivity to place.”8 It is true. The hulking building that replaced the last remaining residential structure between Brown and Thayer smacks of exaggerated machismo.
Unverified controversy
On our page for the Brown Life Sciences building, originally written in 2004 close to the events of demolition, we noted some controversy. The text states that “it came to light that the house was left to the University when Ms. Doyle died with a specific request that the house remain intact as part of the campus.”
There is an inaccuracy here, since corrected. Ms. Doyle did not leave the house to the University — its occupant and owner Ms. Parsons did. We must have mixed the name of the center with the name of the house and occupant.
But the other part we could not verify through any first-party sources. No news stories or other reporting mention the stipulation of the home’s donation the University.
Current Events
In 2001, the SDWC was forced to move from its home of 26 years to its current house at the corner of Brown and Benevolent Streets. The nearby Biomedical Center was expanding for the third time, adding a new $95M Brown Life Sciences building. The SDWC continues to be an important advocate of equal rights and and a trust in the voices of women.
History
From the College Hill Historic District nomination form, Edward F. Sanderson & Keith N. Morgan, January 1976
Mary H. Parsons House, now Sarah Doyle Women’s Center, Brown University, 1926. Jackson, Robertson & Adams, architects. Regency Revival; 2-1/2 stories; flank gable; stucco; 5 bay house with round-headed door; bamboo trim on trellised porch; exterior chimney on front of L to west; porch in rear on 2nd floor; high stucco wall across front.
In the News
East Side house’s days seem numbered
by Karen A. Davis
Providence Journal | October 5, 2001 (abridged)
The Sarah Doyle Women’s Center recently moved from the Colonial Revival-style building on Meeting Street where it had been since 1975 to a new building on the Brown University campus.
The women’s center’s new home will be at 26 Benevolent St., at the corner of Brown Street.
University officials said the move was necessary to make way for a new Life Sciences Building.
Still being discussed, however, is what will happen to the 2 1/2-story building at 185 Meeting St., where the women’s center had been housed.
In all probability, the building will be demolished, since no individual or organization has been found to move it elsewhere.
The university recently ran newspaper advertisements offering to donate the building, said Marisa Quinn, director of Brown’s Community and Government Relations Office.
Donation recipients needed only to have a place to put the building and have the means to move it by the end of October or very early November.
Brown officials were willing to provide up to $250,000 to help defray some of the moving costs, Quinn said.
But by mid-September, the university had received only three inquiries for applications to take control of the building, Quinn said. None of the applications were returned by the Sept. 17 deadline. […]
The moving of the women’s center has concerned neighbors, community leaders and historical preservationists.
“The concern in the community is not so much for the [Sarah Doyle] building itself, but for the scale of the new [Life Sciences] building and complete loss of residential presence on Meeting Street,” said Catherine Horsey, director of the Providence Preservation Society. “The major concern is the scale of the building [in proportion to] the scale of the neighborhood.” […]
Horsey said Preservation Society’s architectural review committee will meet soon with university officials to review the proposal. At the committee’s request, she said, Brown officials display computer-enhanced sketches showing how the neighborhood will look once the Life Sciences Building is constructed.
Horsey said local preservation groups are able to have some input in the proposal because the Sarah Doyle House is located within a historic heritage district and because the university plans to use federal money from the National Institutes of Health to help demolish the home, if no one steps forward to save it.[…]
Described as “a nice house” by Horsey, but not one that can be saved strictly for its historic or architectural merit, the house was originally owned by Mary Hepburn Parsons.
The house designed by Frederic E. Jackson, a prominent local architect is located across the street from the old Pembroke College, which became part of Brown University in 1971. Upon her death in 1965, Parsons bequeathed her Meeting Street home to Pembroke College.
In 1966, the college housed its Alumnae Association in the building. It razed the former Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, which was located next door, to provide garden space for the alumnae facility.
In 1975, the building became home to the women’s center which was named after Sarah Elizabeth Doyle, a Providence resident who played a prominent role in persuading Brown University to admit women.
The women’s center has long been the site of discussions about women’s issues, including a recent discussion about women’s feelings after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Past discussion topics have included domestic violence and world issues.
The center has served as a meeting place for Women of Brown United, Socialist Feminist Caucus, Women’s Caucus, Women Graduate Students, Gay Women of Brown, Women in Science & Engineering and the Lesbian, Bisexual and Transwomen of Brown.
The center also maintains a library featuring feminist literature and contains an art gallery designed to highlight the work of local female artists.[…]
— DAVIS, KAREN A.. “East Side house’s days seem numbered.” Providence Journal (RI), Metro ed., sec. News, 5 Oct. 2001, pp. C-01. NewsBank: America’s News, https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/news/openurl?ctx_ver=z39.88-2004&rft_id=info%3Asid/infoweb.newsbank.com&svc_dat=NewsBank&req_dat=D4BD6B42F1AB4706B5E1244D477DEE03&rft_val_format=info%3Aofi/fmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Actx&rft_dat=document_id%3Anews/15250BA1582BD208. Accessed 27 Nov. 2024.
Read an epitaph to the former SDWC home
Good-Bye to All That
by Gigi Hansen-DiBello
Brown Alumni Magazine | June 15, 2007
My friend Margaret called me on a Monday night last October to tell me that the Sarah Doyle House had been torn down that afternoon. She and I belong to a small and very fortunate group of women who are former directors and coordinators of the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center. Like my colleagues, I not only had a relationship with the center’s constituency; I was intimately acquainted with the building itself. The news of its demolition, although no surprise, disturbed me deeply.
The women’s center had moved a year and a half before to a larger, newly renovated building in a more central location on Benevolent Street—a step up in some ways. But to me the spirit of Sarah Doyle remained solidly rooted between Thayer and Brown, at 185 Meeting Street, right across from the Pembroke campus. Once a private residence, the building had been left to the University by one Mary H. Parsons on the condition that it be used for the benefit of women. The building was first used by the University in 1966 as the home of the Pembroke Alumnae Association. By the time I arrived in 1989, it was a tall, distinguished, and quirky stucco house shadowed by the hulking biomed building behind it, a brave holdout from an earlier time.
Now I felt as if an an old friend had passed away. I remember how her narrow corridors protected the hushed conversations and poignant moments of personal discovery. The front alcove housed the staffers’ written journals, which documented thirty years of political and social change for women at Brown. I can still picture individual women sitting on the stool, hunching over the large black book of unlined pages, writing what felt like urgent correspondence to the next “staffer” who would replace her in the schedule. Directly across from the alcove was the Sarah Doyle Gallery, which was opened in the 1970s to promote female artists. I remember a protest staged outside the gallery one Commencement weekend. A graduating senior showing her work in the gallery had felt censored by the staff when we’d asked her to voluntarily take down the provocative photos she had hung there of women scantily clad in black leather. It was one example of the many tensions within a movement that has been stretched and pulled to include many voices.
Halfway up the front stairs you entered the living room, which contained many of those voices over the years. The long, narrow windows looked out onto Meeting Street, offering a snapshot of Pembroke Hall, where women were first allowed to enroll at Brown at the turn of the last century. The view made that living room the perfect place for political strategizing, for companionship, for intimate intellectual debate with such academic idols as the writer bell hooks.
Then there was the musty basement, which served as a makeshift darkroom for those members who sought to represent women through myriad lenses, and the lower-level crawl space you could reach only by ducking through a four-foot door under the stairs. The cramped space once held an exhibit of art by an undergraduate who saw in its tiny size a metaphor for the status of female artists. It was also rumored that students in the early 1980s spray-painted signs down there condemning the behavior of young mayor Buddy Cianci.
The bathrooms at the Sarah Doyle House were cavernous and provided spaces for a diaper change (I speak from experience). I once was startled to discover several tiny pink plastic fetuses atop the toilet tank and the broad porcelain sink, left by an irate right-to-lifer who wanted to make sure his visit to the house was remembered. He had, he said, a right to use our women’s center because he was advocating for the rights of unborn girls.
At the top of the stairs was the periodicals room, a small space with saggy, corduroy-covered chairs and ivy-laced windows. I remember lingering there over cutting-edge women’s journals and whimsical newspapers. Back issues were stored behind cleverly hinged shelves. My favorite rooms, though, were the director’s office and the library, which were both on the second floor. The library housed more than 2,000 books, as well as the senior theses of women’s studies concentrators who had long since graduated. The many windows of the director’s office let in a shower of natural light. It was here that my colleagues and I shared with students, male and female, many powerful and moving conversations, many moments of intellectual challenge and personal struggle.
I know that this old building shared with the larger women’s movement a complicated history, one that has included elements of racism, classism, and homophobia, and I hope that any history that’s written about the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center will be honest and complete.
But for all its faults, the center remains an important part of our history at Brown. I am comforted that many of its earlier functions and resources exist at the “new” center, which is also a lovely former residence. However, now that I’m in my forties I appreciate how an old building can connect us to history in a way that a new space, despite its strengths, simply cannot. I remain proudly faithful to the memories of the Meeting Street Sarah Doyle Women’s Center. I honor its sense of time and place, purpose and design, grace and wisdom. Allowing it to slip by in silence would make the demolition of a building a loss of so much more.
— Gigi Hansen-DiBello was director of the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center from 1989 to 1995. She is a founding faculty member of the CVS Highlander Charter School in Providence. Accessed 30 November 2024.
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Cohee, Gail. “Celebrating 40 Years: The Sarah Doyle Women’s Center.” Imagine Brown 250+, Brown University, 2015. Accessed 30 November 2024 from https://250.brown.edu/story/enduring-contributions/sdwc.html ↩
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“Pembroke College in Brown University.” Wikipedia. Accessed 30 November 2024 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pembroke_College_in_Brown_University ↩
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“Celebrating 40 Years: The Sarah Doyle Women’s Center.” ↩
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“Pembroke College in Brown University.” ↩
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“Sarah Elizabeth Doyle.” Wikipedia. Accessed 30 November 2024 from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Elizabeth_Doyle ↩
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“Celebrating 40 Years: The Sarah Doyle Women’s Center.” ↩
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Ibid. ↩
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BRUSSAT, DAVID. “COMMENTARY - Dr. Downtown sees red - Roses and raspberries for 2001.” Providence Journal (RI), All ed., sec. Editorial, 3 Jan. 2002, pp. B-07. NewsBank: America’s News, https://infoweb.newsbank.com/apps/news/openurl?ctx_ver=z39.88-2004&rft_id=info%3Asid/infoweb.newsbank.com&svc_dat=NewsBank&req_dat=D4BD6B42F1AB4706B5E1244D477DEE03&rft_val_format=info%3Aofi/fmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Actx&rft_dat=document_id%3Anews/15250B148D0D79F8. Accessed 30 Nov. 2024. ↩