National Collaborative for Women's History Sites Celebrates First Anniversary

Linda Witt

The National Collaborative for Women's History Sites (NCWHS), launched October 2001 by representatives from more than twenty historical sites and organizations linked to American women and some twenty individuals interested in women's history, is celebrating its first birthday by counting its successes, including:

• A grant from the Pew Charitable Trusts’ Heritage Investment Program to conduct a needs assessment of Delaware Valley sites, which the Collaborative hopes will provide a core sample of what a planned nationwide assessment might reveal. A separate $5,000 grant from Eastern National, a non-profit affiliated with the National Park Service, enables NCWHS to complete the incorporation process.
  
  
• An expanding data base that now includes more than 470 sites, preservation organizations, scholars and individuals, all committed to women's history projects.
  
  
• An email listserv that enables the growing membership --currently twenty-seven sites and organizations plus twenty-six historians, preservationists and others--to share everything from technical and restoration advice to marketing strategies and fund-raising ideas.
  
  
• A web site in final stages of development <http://ncwhs.oah.org/>, which will provide users with general information, photographs, and links to members' sites.
  
  
• A growing sense of optimism that the public is finally waking to the realization that women have been half of history.
  

This last success, in particular, which includes the congressionally mandated Women's Progress Commemoration Commission (Public Law 105-341, 31 October 1998) honoring the 150-year anniversary of the Seneca Falls, N.Y., 1848 Women's Rights Convention, pleased many of the founding steering committee members of NCWHS.

Committee members have worked for years, if not decades, saving endangered sites, explaining why it is possible and necessary to interpret women's history at sites more often identified with men, or lobbying Capitol Hill and small-town America to advocate "the preservation and interpretation of sites and locales that bear witness to women's participation in American life (and to make) women's contributions to history visible." Others, such as the Women's Memorial at Arlington National Cemetery and the National Women's History Project, have created new venues through which women's contributions are documented and honored.

Barbara Irvine, who founded the Alice Paul Centennial Foundation in 1985, was one of the early advocates of forming a collaborative. Although the NCWHS grew out of more than two years of meetings and monthly conference calls funded by a grant from the Northeast Regional Office of the NPS, Irvine traces its origins to an early 1994 national conference on preserving women's historic sites that the Paul Foundation convened at Bryn Mawr.

Bill Bolger, program manager for National Historic Landmarks in the National Park Service (NPS) Northeast Region and a former member of the Collaborative's steering committee, pushes the date out further to the very early 1990s and some pioneering work by historian Page Putnam Miller identifying women's history sites. "Page was a presenter at that first conference at Bryn Mawr," says Irvine. "From those earliest meetings, we realized that a collaborative was the only logical way that those of us already involved in women's sites could help identify and preserve the places associated with American women's history, as well as support and sustain the sometimes beleaguered local groups trying to rescue sites."

Another early advocate and current steering committee member, Heather Huyck, chief historian for the NPS Northeast Region and visiting lecturer at the College of William and Mary, has long maintained in both scholarly writings and public meetings that American history "just doesn't make any sense if women's contributions and lives aren't included." In 1982, Huyck advocated for women's history sites at a Southwest Institute for Research on Women conference.

Despite the group's encouraging track record, steering committee member Lori Geiger--who represents Sewall-Belmont House, home to Alice Paul's National Woman's Party--cautions, "The struggle is that everyone participating at this time has obligations to their own sites, many of which are small nonprofits working with minimal staff and minimal budget." "But," she adds, "as we have broadened our network we find there even more benefits in working together."

Huyck concurs, noting that every historic site faces the same issues. Park service sites, for instance, have the advantage of being included in an already existent national system but money, staff, and support are much harder for some of the private "stand-alone sites" to find. A good example is Philadelphia's Marian Anderson House, "which gives wonderful insight into the life of this amazing American soprano. The history revealed in one site provides new perspectives on all our lives and helps us understand what really happened to form who we are as a people."

While Bolger lauds "the growing awareness of women's history and a need to diversify and deal with groups other than the usual suspects," he cautions that the NCWHS may still face "understanding gaps"--individuals and groups who oppose making history more inclusive. He recounts urging the bipartisan Women's Progress Commission that more research on women's history was necessary, "because 'We can't know what we don't know,' and I was really taken to task for that comment by one commissioner. It made me realize that some people are so used to history as it is generally presented . . . that we have really important work ahead."

Mary Troy of the Clara Barton National Historic Site, who represented the steering committee at the final meeting of the Women's Progress Commemoration Commission, testified to the Collaborative's conviction "that by raising the nation's consciousness about women's role in American history, communities throughout the country will recognize the need to find and preserve this history in their own backyard." She thanked the Commission for the "the firm foundation you have created . . . on which the NCWHS and others will continue to build."

The challenges already tackled by NCWHS members are as varied as the sites themselves. Baltimore's Star-Spangled Banner House, for example, the home of Revolutionary War flagmaker Mary Pickersgill, had deteriorated from residence to steamship office to shoe repair shop in a blighted part of that city's inner harbor before being rescued and turned into a thriving, if small, museum. Philadelphia's 1843 Fair Hill Burial Ground, the resting place of many prominent Quaker abolitionists and suffragists, including Lucretia Mott, was so overgrown and littered that few of its inner city neighbors knew it was a cemetery; now, neighborhood children volunteer, ready for visitors' questions.

Linda Witt, primary author of Running as a Woman: Gender and Power in American Politics (New York: The Free press, 1994), is Senior Fellow at the Archive of Women in Military Service for America Memorial Foundation at Arlington National Cemetery.