Our Vision
We envision a world in which historic sites are equitable, just, and inclusive of women and gender non-conforming people; that these sites are valued, visited and well-resourced.
Our Values
We know that place makes us who we are and is essential to our understanding of the past and our personal and community identities.
We value intellectual integrity, embracing expansive narratives arrived at through diverse sources (i.e. oral history, material, culture, primary documents).
We value equity and justice for all.
We value learning and continual discovery and conversation.
We value an intersectional approach to honoring the contributions of all women and gender non-conforming people who have contributed to the history of our communities.
We recognize that heterosexism, patriarchy and white supremacy shapes the world. NCWHS is actively anti-heterosexism, anti-patriarchy and anti-racist in our work.
We value the power of collaboration with other organizations to achieve shared goals.
Our Mission
The National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites advocates for historic sites that center the preservation and interpretation of the important role of women and gender non-conforming individuals as core to the American story.
Women’s Suffrage, Historic Markers, and Race:
A Statement from the Board of the National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites and the Advisory Committee of the National Votes for Women Trail
In this moment of historical reckoning about race, we, members of the Board of the National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites and the Advisory Committee of the National Votes for Women Trail, mourn the loss of Black lives—not only the recent killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Elijah McClain, but the historic loss of thousands of others who have died throughout U.S. history, martyrs to a system of white supremacy. We live now with the echoes of these tragedies and with the systemic racism that still pervades our world.
In this context, we continue our work to commemorate those who supported voting rights for women. The Nineteenth Amendment expanded voting rights to more than twenty-five million women, more people than any other event in U.S. history.
As we remember all those who struggled for the right to vote, we also recognize that racism pervaded much of the European American suffrage movement. Before and after 1920, many methods (including legal restrictions, intimidation, and murder) were used to exclude both women and men—especially African Americans, Native Americans, Latinos/x, and Asian Americans—from voting. In 2020, one hundred years after passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, one hundred and fifty years after the Fifteenth Amendment, and despite interim victories such as the Voting Rights Act of 1965, (and its extensions to end discrimination against language minorities in 1975 and people with disabilities in 1982), we continue to face challenges to the right of all adult citizens to vote.
We recognize that we all share in patterns of systemic racism. Our intent is not to ignore this racism but to open it up for public debate. To leave woman suffragists out of the story because they inherited, benefitted from, and often promoted an entrenched system of white supremacy would be to ignore the complex and pervasive intertwining of gender, race, and class–past and present.
We work to understand our past so that we can help to create a world of justice and respect for all people in the present and future.
The History of the National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites
The National Collaborative for Women’s History Sites (NCWHS) was created in October 2001 by representatives of more than twenty historical sites linked to American women and some twenty others from organizations devoted to preserving women’s history. “America’s story makes no sense with half of its participants missing,” argues Dr. Heather Huyck, a historian with the National Park Service (NPS) and a member of the founding steering committee. “Leaving women out of the story is as serious a distortion of our history as trying to tell the history of the Civil War without talking about black history.”
The launch resulted from more than two years of meetings and monthly conference calls among historians, preservationists and interested citizens, and participants from both the independent not-for-profit sector and the National Park Service.
Initially funded by a grant from the Northeast Region al Office of the NPS, the new collaborative pledges to support and promote “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 so that all women’s experience and potential are fully valued.”
Beth Newburger, director of communications for the National Trust for Historic Preservation and former executive director of the bi-partisan Congressional Women’s Progress Commemorative Commission, applauded the new collaborative. “The collaborative can pull together to share resources, experiences and technical information to further common goals. And they can do so without competing for the little grant money available for historical initiatives.”
Barbara Irvine, who founded the Alice Paul Institute in 1985 and spent more than a dozen years working to save Paulsdale, the Mt. Laurel, N.J., home of the suffragist author of the Equal Rights Amendment, indicated the group acted from a sense of the urgency. “From our earliest meetings, we realized that a collaborative was the only logical way that those of us already involved in rescuing women’s sites could help identify and preserve other places associated with American women’s history.” A member of the founding steering committee, Irvine added that the group recognized the national need “to support and sustain the sometimes beleaguered local groups trying to rescue endangered sites.”
Many of the sites represented at the three-day conference have been on the endangered list. Among them are:
Philadelphia’s 1843 Fair Hill Burial Ground, the resting place of many prominent Quaker abolitionists and suffragists, including Lucretia Mott, was so overgrown with weeds and littered with car parts and trash that few of its inner city neighbors knew it was a cemetery. The Star-Spangled Banner House in Baltimore, home of Revolutionary War flagmaker Mary Pickersgill, had deteriorated from a bank to steamship office to shoe repair shop in a blighted part of that city’s inner harbor. The Frontier Nursing Service, which brought modern midwifery to the poor of Kentucky hills in the early 1900s, saved its original Craftsman-style building—and still partially supports its medical services in rural areas—by becoming a bed and breakfast. The Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, N.Y., a cluster of early suffragists’ homes and the Wesleyan Chapel where they met in 1848 to proclaim women’s rights in the “Declaration of Sentiments.”
“In some places, sites are linked with men, but women were there and their stories need to be told,” notes Dr. Huyck, Northeast Regional chief historian. “There is no site that doesn’t have women’s history. If we are to understand who we are and where we’ve come from, we need to know the whole story.”