2021 Highlights

2021 ended with several highlights worth noting. Some big projects that lingered from the 2020 Suffrage anniversary were completed, and simply carrying on in the face of a pandemic and other challenges certainly counts as a highlight. Here are just a few things that I’m glad to remember from this past year:

Three historic markers on the Votes for Women Trail were finally installed and dedicated in 2021: in Oak Park – Grace Wilbur Trout; in Chicago – Ida B. Wells and the Alpha Suffrage; and in Evanston – Catharine Waugh McCulloch. Thanks goes to all the community volunteers and the League of Women Voters of Illinois for their dedication to marking significant sites of women’s suffrage activism in Illinois. There are a total of four historic markers in the state with more than 50 additional Illinois sites listed on the Votes for Women Trail.

Me at the McCulloch marker dedication.

The marker for Catharine Waugh McCulloch in Evanston.

The installation and dedication of a new mural in downtown Chicago featuring the images of ten Illinois suffragists. On the Wings of Change, created by artist Diosa (Jasmina Cazacu), is located on the south wall of 33 Ida B. Wells Drive building on the Columbia College Chicago campus. It is the first large-scale public history tribute in the city of Chicago to celebrate local suffragists who participated in the decades-long fight for women’s full inclusion in our democracy.  It features ten of the movement’s leaders from the Chicago area and a representation of the future of female leadership. The ten women featured are: Jane Addams, Myra Bradwell, Mary Livermore, Catharine Waugh McCulloch, Agnes Nestor, Grace Wilbur Trout, Mary Fitzbutler Waring, Ida B. Wells, Frances Willard, and Fannie Barrier Williams. More about the mural can be found on the WAC website.

On the Wings of Change by artist Diosa (Jasmine Cazacu)

Finally, I’m especially proud of a full year of public history work at the Frances Willard House – including online programs, digital exhibits, regular newsletters, and even one onsite event and the resumption of onsite tours! With a small but creative and productive staff, the Willard House and WCTU Archives had one of the best years ever – and lots more of our history was revealed. You can see much of that by visiting the website – franceswillardhouse.org

Women’s History Month 2021

March 2021 has arrived. It is hard to look back over the past year and review how much has changed. But Women’s History Month is here again and it is time to remember once again the important role that women have played in our history.

In Evanston, there are several ways you can connect and honor women in the past and present this month. You can find more about all that’s going on at the two places I work – the Frances Willard House and the Evanston Women’s History Project. Below are brief summaries – I hope to see you at one or all of these programs!

March 7 – 2-3:30 pm – Celebrate International Women’s Day with a film showing of Nevertheless –

https://evanstonwomen.org/event/celebrate-international-womens-day-with-nevertheless/

March 23 – 7 pm – Women’s History Month lecture -Juliette Kinzie Before the Fire

https://evanstonwomen.org/event/the-world-of-juliette-kinzie-chicago-before-the-fire/

March 28 – 4 pm – Ida B. the Queen – a Conversation with Michelle Duster – more info will be posted at franceswillardhouse.org.

You can also visit the Evanston History Center to see the exhibit Evanston Women and the Fight for the Vote which will be up through May of 2021. And you can explore lots more women’s history at both of the websites listed above.

Happy Women’s History Month 2021!

An August Filled with Suffrage

After many years of anticipation, the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment has arrived! It has not arrived the way we planned it, with events scattered over the past few months. The pandemic did away with that. But it has arrived and it will be a busy month.

Visit the Evanston Women’s History Project website, the Frances Willard House Museum website, and the Suffrage 2020 Illinois website to learn more of the story and to connect to events going on in Evanston and some of what’s going on throughout the state and nationally. I am a participant in several of the programs planned – so join me if you can.

Here’s some thoughts I have after several years of working on the history of the suffrage movement –

1. 1. The story of suffragists as strategic, political actors and thinkers has not been given enough attention. Suffragists really used their minds to craft compelling arguments and strategies to gain support for their cause. They were up against thousands of years of thinking about women that limited their lives and defined a restricted role for women. It took perseverance and intellectual rigor to confront and confound that – and it still does.
   2. The role of Midwestern women, especially women in Illinois, has not been fully understood or appreciated. The more research I and others have done about Illinois in the suffrage movement, the more I have come to appreciate how important it was (mostly due to the influence of Chicago) in the national movement.
   3. Thankfully, the role of African American women in the movement has been given its due in the lead up to the anniversary. This is quite a change from several years ago when the story was of their exclusion from the movement, with the implication that there wasn’t much story to tell. On the contrary, African American women were essential actors in the suffrage movement, and their exclusion did not prevent them from working for voting rights, for themselves and others.
   4. Finally, this anniversary makes me value my own citizenship rights even more. The fight for the right to vote, and to be considered true citizens of the U.S., had all the characteristics of a long drawn out war – ebbs and flows, changes in strategy and tactics, and mistakes and pitfalls. It is exhausting and inspiring at the same time.

I hope you take part in the commemorations – and value and use your citizenship rights!

Working from “Home”

The Willard House front hall – dark and quiet in this pandemic spring.

Visit the Frances Willard House Museum blog to read my reflections on what it is like to be working from “home” at a historic house museum in these challenging times.

For a women’s history site there are many ways these reflections can run – and not all of them have I reached any conclusion on. They include:

• that women have always worked from home – that home has been through human history a primary workplace for women
• interpreting that work is not of primary concern at most historic house museums
• the Willard House is different because it was also used by Willard as her primary workplace – and as the workplace for dozens of her WCTU co-workers
•  the Willard House was also her retreat – it was her mother’s house and for her this meant that it was truly what her nickname implied – “Rest Cottage”
• a 19th Century historic house can connect us with a time when the reality of the fragility of life was much more present than it is today
• this reality and understanding can inform and illuminate our lives today

Truth Telling

A year ago, the Frances Willard House Museum, where I serve as Director, launched Truth Telling: Frances Willard and Ida B. Wells. This online exhibit tells the story of the conflict that occurred between these two important women leaders in the 1890s and provides documentary resources and background information to shed light on the conflict. Please visit the website for more about what happened and why it is so important for us to tell this story.

Earlier this year, the National Council on Public History announced its annual awards and the Truth Telling website was given an Honorable Mention in the Outstanding Public History Project category. Everyone at the Willard House Museum and WCTU Archives was extremely proud to receive this honor and to be recognized for the hard work and leadership it took to take this project on.

Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, the conference was cancelled and the award ceremony was held online. To view the video of our portion of the ceremony, click on the YouTube video below –

Women’s Suffrage in Evanston and Illinois

Over the past year I’ve been immersed in the women’s suffrage movement in Evanston and Illinois  in preparation for the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment in August of 2020. I’ve spent a lot of time researching primary sources, reading secondary sources, analyzing and discovering, and then synthesizing my thoughts. All of this work comes to fruition soon with the opening of a new exhibit at the Evanston History Center and a series of talks I’m giving about the suffrage movement in Illinois and Evanston.

It is exciting to explore how a movement actually functioned on the ground and in the minds of the activists who were central to its work. It looks different from this perspective – from the local up rather than the national down. The strategies of Evanston and Illinois women in the movement were critical to its eventual success – and their work was both tactical and intellectual as they worked to dismantle stereotypes and prejudices – while seeking to find the best way to gain supporters for their cause. I’m fascinated by how they worked both sides – working to change gender (and racial) biases while not alienating those who believed them. Changing minds is hard work.

If you want to know more about what I’ve discovered – visit the Evanston History Center on March 8th (for the exhibit open house – 1- 4 p.m.) or in the following months to see Evanston Women and the Fight for the Vote. If you’d like to schedule me to speak I still have some dates open in May and following months – March and April are pretty much booked up. Sharing this mostly unknown story has been a real pleasure as well. (Here’s a link to an upcoming talk at the Indiana Historical Society on Temperance and Suffrage.)

You can also find out more at two website I’ve been working on – the Evanston Women’s History Project website at evanstonwomen.org – and the Illinois Suffrage website at suffrage2020illinois.org. The Evanston website has information about a great series of events that are happening throughout town in 2020 to commemorate the anniversary – as well as information about the local story. The Illinois website links to the larger planning for the anniversary in the state – including other regional organizations and the project to map and mark women’s suffrage sites – and lots of great information about the unique and important history of the movement in Illinois. In case you didn’t know – Illinois was the first state to ratify the 19th amendment and there’s a reason why!

As you can see, it has been a busy but rewarding year ~ Onward!

All Amendments All the Time

It has been a busy few months but I’m happy to report that two big projects I’ve been working on are in their final stages and ready to be launched this coming week. Both are part of 100th anniversary commemorations of two important amendments to the U.S. Constitution – the 18th (Prohibition – 2019) and the 19th (Women’s Suffrage – 2020). And both are very connected to Evanston history.

The first is Dry Evanston: the Untold Story – a new exhibit at the Evanston History Center.  This exhibit tells the story of alcohol in Evanston from its founding in the 1850s to the present – and really uncovers the hidden story of how this small community became the epicenter for the temperance and prohibition movements, modeling and influencing national trends and opinions in dramatic and surprising ways. I’m the curator of the exhibit and have enjoyed researching and telling a story I thought I knew but found I didn’t (or at least not the whole story)! The exhibit will be open through January 2020 – which is the 100th anniversary of Prohibition going into effect.

 

The second is a new website I’ve been working on to tell the whole story of the women’s suffrage movement in Illinois. Suffrage2020Illinois is meant to serve has a hub of information about the movement in the state but also will have links to programs, events and other information as we move toward the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment in August of 2020. Of course Evanston was also a center for work on women’s rights and suffrage – so this anniversary will be honored locally as well.

For now, the main purpose of the website is to highlight the fact that on June 10, 1919 Illinois was the first state to ratify the 19th amendment. More about this historic moment can be found on the website.

As I like to say (along with many others) – women’s history is everywhere! And that certainly continues to be the case for me. Stay tuned for much more!

Women’s History Month 2019!

It’s that time of year when all things turn to women’s history – at least that’s what happens in my world!

This year there are several things going on connected to the Evanston Women’s History Project at the Evanston History Center – a breakfast celebration of International Women’s Day will happen on Friday, March 8th and on March 19th we will show the wonderful new film about one of my favorite women in Evanston history – Lorraine Morton. I was lucky enough to know Mayor Morton and she was a great supporter of the EWHP. She is very much missed! You can find out more about these events (and see my tribute to Morton) on the EWHP website.

On Thursday March 14th the launch of Truth Telling: Frances Willard and Ida B. Wells, a community history project, will take place. Truth Telling is a project of the Frances Willard House Museum and Archives where I serve as Director of the museum. The project includes a digital exhibit of original archival sources, community conversations, and public programs.

The conflict between Willard and Wells took place in the 1890s and was primarily over Willard’s lack of support for Wells’ anti-lynching campaign. You can find brief information about the conflict and this project on the Willard House website – and then after March 14th you can view the online exhibit for much more. It has been a difficult story to tell for so many reasons, but necessary and illuminating in these times.

Finally, I will actually be in India doing women’s history work for a few weeks in March – and will report back on that at a later date. My explorations of the work of American women in India (particularly members of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of India) continue! Stay tuned!

Reflections on 2018 AASLH Conference – Life as a Small Museum Director

This past September I was pleased to attend the American Association for State and Local History Conference as the recipient of a Small Museums scholarship. I wrote an article about the experience and it was recently published on the AASLH blog.

Follow the link below to see the full article.

https://aaslh.org/reflections-on-2018/

International Women’s History

I recently had the pleasure of spending three days in Vancouver, Canada at the International Federation for Research in Women’s History conference. It was an amazing gathering of women’s historians (not all female!) from around the globe. I talked with historians from Japan, Italy, New Zealand, Australia, the Netherlands, Germany, United Kingdom, France, and the U.S. and Canada. It was such a treat to hear of their work, share my work, and be with so many people with a common interest and cause – telling and preserving the stories of women’s lives.

My presentation at the conference was on my research into the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in India. Using resources from the collection I processed at the Frances Willard archives, for this conference I gave a brief presentation on the work of the India WCTU from 1900 through World War II. These years were pivotal in India, as the nationalist movement grew and an indigenous woman’s movement also took shape. The WCTU had been at work in India since the late 1880s, but its work was primarily done by American and British women. Though they were always looking to grow in the indigenous population (which was true in all places the World WCTU worked), it was in the early 20th century that this growth really took shape. Slowly leadership roles were transferred to Indian and Anglo-Indian women, and by 1934, the WCTU of India was led by Satyavati Chitamber, the wife of the Methodist Bishop of India and an activist involved in the new woman’s movement.

I have loved doing this research, some conducted here, some in India. It is a fascinating story of how an American woman’s organization imagined its work on a global scale and applied what it learned to advance women’s rights and causes world-wide. The World WCTU was truly the place to be for women in the late 19th and early 20th century – and as I like to say in these scholarly settings – if you are not talking about it and you are doing women’s history during this time period, you are missing a central part of the story. Through the work of other scholars and increasing access to the Willard and WCTU archives here in Evanston, I believe that this story will be more widely known.

In all we do as women’s historians, that is really the goal – to tell these hidden stories, to bring their work out of the shadows and into the light, so that it is known and understood for what it truly was (good and bad). How fun to see this work on an international scale. Thank you to the International Federation for inviting me and hosting a great conference. I look forward to the next one in Poland!