Florence Luscomb

Florence Hope Luscomb (February 6, 1887 – October 13, 1985) was an American architect and women's suffrage activist in Massachusetts. She was one of the first ten women graduated from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her degrees were in architecture. Her father was an unsuccessful artist. Her mother was a dedicated suffragist and women's rights activist. When Florence was one and a half years old, her parents separated and she moved with her mother to Boston, while her older brother, Otis Kerro Luscomb, lived with their father. As a child in Boston, she went with her mother to women's suffrage events, at one point seeing Susan B. Anthony speak. She became an ardent suffragist, initially by selling a pro-suffrage newspaper on the street.

Education and early career

Luscomb was among the first ten women to earn a degree in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. During this time, Luscomb helped organize various events for the suffrage movement and, during a public debate on adding a suffrage amendment to the state constitution, gave more than 200 speeches in 14 weeks.

She had lived in various cooperative houses after her mother's death, including a Cambridge cooperative house at 64 Wendell Street. Luscomb lived there until 1980, when she moved into an elder-care facility in Watertown, Massachusetts, where she died October 13, 1985, at age 98. As well, two quotations from each of those women (including Luscomb) are etched on their individual marble panel, and the wall behind all the panels has wallpaper designed with six government documents repeated over and over, with each document being related to a cause of one or more of the women.

Quotation “There is no end to what you can accomplish if (or when) you don’t care who gets the credit.”