A Quaker at a time when Quakers were banned from Massachusetts, Dyer eventually hanged for her insistence on religious liberty in the English colony. The statue by Sylvia Shaw Judson went up in 1959 at a descendant's bequest. It's diagonally across from the Boston Common where Dyer met her end in 1660.

Anne Hutchinson had the temerity to insist in the early 17th century that women's souls were on equal spiritual footing with men's. For that, she was banished from Boston for heresy. The statue that Cyrus E. Dallin sculpted is near the State House and dates from 1922.

Unveiled in 2003, the sculptures that Meredith Bergmann designed commemorate first lady Abigail Adams, noted for her early advocacy of women's rights (when such things seemed absurd); Phillis Wheatley, the fist published African-American female poet; and Lucy Stone, an abolitionist and suffragist. Each lived for a time in the Boston area.