ABSTRACT
Josephine Shaw Lowell’s family lived in West Roxbury, near Brook Farm, and counted its tenants their friends. Josephine joined the Woman’s Central Association of Relief, an auxiliary of the United States Sanitary Commission, in her first contact with philanthropic work. In November 1863 she married Colonel Charles Russell Lowell, a nephew of the poet Lowell, who had had a brilliant career at Harvard and, afterward, as a superintendent of iron works. Mrs. Lowell’s first response to such conditions was fury at what she saw as something worse than “openly advocated communism,” in that “the idle, the improvident, and even vicious man has the right to live in idleness and vice upon the proceeds of the labor of his industrious and virtuous fellow citizen.” Mrs. Lowell’s greatest characteristic was her capacity for growth. Mrs. Lowell shared controversial views of sexuality, probably derived from the idealized life she shared with her dead.
