Papers of Frances Pass Addelson, 1922, 1971-1987

Frances Pass Addelson was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1909, and lived in Roxbury and Cambridge, Massachusetts. She was the second of three children of Jacob and Esther Cohen Pass; Joseph was the oldest child, Ruth the youngest. In 1918 her father died and her mother tried to support the family as a seamstress at Jordan Marsh department store. She was too ill to work, however, and eventually entered a private sanatorium in Brighton. Joseph and Frances were taken to the Home for Destitute Jewish Children, an orphanage in Dorchester, Massachusetts, run by Associated Jewish Philanthropies, while Ruth went to live with an aunt. Addelson attended Oliver W. Holmes School and Dorchester High School for Girls before graduating from Radcliffe College, where she studied social work and psychology, in 1930. She married Arthur Addelson in 1940; they had one son, William. In 1954 she earned an M.S. in social work from Simmons College. She was a social worker at Massachusetts Correctional Institute--Framingham and at Beth Israel Hospital in Boston, Massachusetts, where she was affiliated with the hospital's ob-gyn clinic, and was a proponent of a woman's right to choose abortion. In the early 1970s, when Addelson was a senior social worker at the clinic, the hospital was one of the few accredited hospitals in the Boston area performing abortions. Later in life she was an active member of Harvard Institute of Living in Retirement, where she established the Shakespeare Players in 2001; the group was renamed the Frances Addelson Shakespeare Players a few years later. She died in Florida, where she lived with her sister Ruth, in 2014.