To vote, the National Portrait gallery, National Archives and the library of congress have created special exhibits. Curators talk about the Creative Process behind the exhibits including determining goals in selecting objects. The berkshire conference of womens historians and the womens Suffrage Centennial commission hosted this event. Im martha jones, a copresident along with tie i cant miles along the berkshire conference. Im happy to be welcoming all of you to this evenings conversation, and i have to extend the special embrace to our members tuning in from all over the world today. With this event, we begin a conference weekend, the big berkes 2020, not as we planned for in baltimore at johns hopkins. Instead, were being linked together by digital sound and image. I, for one, am grateful even for this today. The year 2020 marks 100 years since the 19th amendment, Legal Protection for womens votes became part of the u. S. Ko constitution. For us as historians of womens genders and sexualities, the an university is unparallel opportunity to bring new history to politics to audiences eager to know the whole story of the road to the 19th amendment and the epic rise of american women to political power. As our guest curators tonight have so vividly laid out in their galleries, this is a story best told as part of a longer tale about the troubles that have always attended american Voting Rights. It includes moments of courage and also coward is. It is a tale with many beginnings and one that has not wholly ended. Struggles for political power run through our own times. Cultural institutions are places where we convene to makes sense of our shared human experience, and ideally we would have spent this day together enjoying the museum huddled before images and artifacts in the galleries and exchanging ideas in the conversation with these curators up close and personal. That was not possible, and our hearts ache over the missed opportunity. Still, this is attributed to the power of the library, the museum and the archive to bring us together despite distance and troubles of a global pandemic. We feel now more than ever before the urgent necessity of community. This event is, for the berkshire conference, an opportunity to make our enduring commitment to the magic of what happens when we come together as members, new attendees and friends who are meeting us for the very first time. We will convene again and will as a collective of Story Tellers write the histories of this time striving to make meaning out of this very human experience. We owe tremendous thanks to our partners anna layman and her team for the commitment to seeing through this unparalleled conversation. Special thanks to my colleague and friend senator barbara mcclou ski for fostering understanding and the belief in the power of women and their communities to lead us even through the troubled unknown. Please enjoy this remarkable conversation. Ill turn things over to kelsey malay of the commission who will moderate the discussion. Thank you. Thank you so much martha. And to the berkes for partnering with us to make this program happen. And also, huge thank you to senator mccull ski for your welcome message. We are so lucky to have you as one of the commissioners of the womens Suffrage Centennial mission. My name is kelsey. Commemoration of the centennial of womens constitutional right to vote in 2020. The commission and berkshire conference originally planned this program as an inperson event at the belmont Hall National monument which is the historical headquarters of the National Womens party in washington, d. C. And which today stands as a National Monument telling the story of the history of the Suffrage Movement. While were not able to be together in person at belmont hall right now, we are so thankful to the berkes and to our panelists for being willing to shift and working with us to make this webinar happen. Also, huge thank you to everyone in the audience right now who is joining us. And to all of you who are continuing to commemorate the Suffrage Centennial and to uplift womens history in this age of social distancing. We are also thrilled to have these tlae amazing curators with us tonight as our panelists for this discussion. Curators get an inside look at the suffrage exhibits. Now, to all our members in the audience tonight, maybe some of you have been able to see these exhibits in person, maybe you havent had the chance yet. Either way were all going to get a unique look into these exhibits tonight through this conversation. So, this year, again, 2020 marks 100 years since the 19th amendment was officially ratified into u. S. Constitution. Standing back, the right to vote shall not be denied on account of sex. So, our panelists each curated an exhibition in the Nations Capital exploring the history of womens fight for the vote in honor of this important centennial year. We have with us kate clarke lemay, corrine porter, and janice ruth from the library of congress. To get things started, im going to go to each of our panelists now and ask you to introduce yourselves a little bit further. Theres three pieces of information i would love you to share with us. First is what your role is at your institution, the title of your suffrage exhibit, and just tell us a little bit about how you first got interested in the history of the Suffrage Movement . So, im going to start us off going in order of when each exhibition opened, so kate im going to start with you. So, again, tell us about your role at the portrait gallery, the title of your exhibit, and how you first got interested in this history. Great. Well, thank you, kelsey, and thank you to my copanelists and to everyone whos tuning in. It is weird circumstance that were all zooming together, but what a great opportunity to have this conversation. Thank you. And im kate lemay and i am historian at the National Portrait gallery. My job title is historian. I trained as an art historian. I have a dual degree in art history and american stories. Votes for women are persistent. Thats tonights mission. I came to the idea and proposed it in 2015, anticipating the 2020 centennial anniversary. We plan our exhibitions years in advance, and i just wanted to make sure that votes for women had the prime spot. It was actually moved backwards to 2019 which might be you know, given the light of todays context of a pandemic, i actually think we turned out to be lucky. But its been great to see what my colleagues have done and the other federal institutions and sort of together, the three institutions almost working like a team with womens history. All right. Thank you, kate. So, next, corrine, would you also tell us about your role at the National Archives and title of your exhibit and a little bit about your background in hist y history . Sure, hello, everyone. Thank you for zooming in tonight to do this Virtual Panel and a special thank you to my copanelists kate and janice. Its been a pleasure working with them and associated with them for years now as weve worked on our respective exhibitions. This web panel and the discussion were looking forward to. So, my name is corrine porter. I am a curator at the National Archives. The exhibition i developed is called right to be heard american women and the vote. As the National Archives curator, its my job to develop positions about any facet of American History, government and culture that are records at the National Archives which are the permanent records facet of American History, government, that our records at the National Archives. Its the permanent records of the federal government. Its a huge bit of history. Obviously, a vast archive of material. Im a generalist in terms, i dont professionalize inaudible . When i learned of an opportunity to develop our womens suffrage exhibit, as a woman and as someone who has been passionate about the subject, as long as ive been passionate about history which is as long as i can remember, i was really thrilled to have an opportunity to put this together for this anniversary. Wonderful, thanks corinne. So janice, same questions to you. Tell us about your exhibit and a bit of your background. Sure. Thank you kelsey and berks for this opportunity to talk about this. My library of Congress Exhibition is titled shall not be divine denied, womens fight for the vote. First part of the title is obviously a play on the words from the amendment itself. The subtitle convey is one of the principal themes that we wanted to show in this exhibit. It dispelled the notion that women were granted or given the right to vote. Instead, it showcases the long hard struggle, the fight, the years of dedication and perseverance and courage and creativity and hope by generations of women to achieve that most fundamental right of a participatory democracy. The right to vote. My current position is as cheap, but for many years, i was a womens history specialist. In that role, i had the great privilege of building, interpreting and making accessible for Research Purposes our vast suffrage collections. I think its an opportunity to dig really deep into those occurred first with colleagues. I assembled a protest website which was a selection of photographs from the National WomensParty Records which the library holds. That led to a short book. The library was doing a series of books called women who dare. The library decided to do one focused on suffrage which gave me an opportunity to look into that. But those experiences were incredibly helpful when the assignment came to put this exhibit together. Wonderful. I want to dig a little bit deeper into what each of the exhibits is about. What stories you each decided to tell in these exhibits. Janice, im really interested in what you said about, as you were developing the title and wanted to reflect this idea that women fought for the vote, women made it happen rather than what i think previous language says that women were granted the voter given the vote. I think that is an important distinction. With that in mind, as each of you are conceptualizing your exhibits, how did you decide what story you want to tell . In particular, were there any gaps in the ways the stories were told that you want to address . Such as this idea that women fought, they were not given. To each of you, how did you land on the story you wanted to tell . Where did you start off from and where their gaps that you really felt excited about in addressing . Corinne, lets switch things up and maybe start with you if that works for you. Sure, no problem. So i think you are going to hear a lot of similarities between how janice and i really want to tackle this long fight for womens Voting Rights. Since the National Archives is the home of the original 19th amendment, that is certainly where our conversations began around how we wanted to tackle the subject. And something that we were really committed to write off of the bat was to really dig into what it really is talk to secure womens equal Voting Rights with men in the United States constitution. Because the constitution by design is the process of amending it is extremely difficult. The bar is very high. I think it is starting to shift now. A lot of more popular retellings of womens suffrage seems to focus on the activities of just a few women over just a few years. Many of them, primarily white women, primarily privileged women, so we wanted to broaden our examination of what it took to ultimately win the passage of the 19th amendment and the support of that. Looking at the multitude of strategies that activists had to employ. Also, the diversity of women votes in terms of race as well as class, to engagement in this long struggle really through proved crucial for the ultimate success in securing a constitutional amendment. That said, we also need to recognize that the 19th amendment inaudible . It did not give women all women the right to vote. Millions of women were already voters by the time the 19th amendment was ratified in other states or jurisdictions. They had extended Voting Rights. So an aspect that is often essential to the success and we wanted to acknowledge that the struggle didnt end in 1920. For many women, in particular women of color, we want to carry that narrative far beyond 1920 as much as we could. We want to look at the diversity. Women continue to be denied this, you know, essential right of citizenship and where it ultimately starts to secure Voting Rights for a Diverse Group of women beyond 1920. Great. As corinne you said, there might be some overlap in some of the thoughts that were going through your minds while planning out your exhibits. And the conversations that i have had with all of you, things like representing the diversity of the suffragists and telling the story beyond 1920 as the Journey Towards a full complete democracy continued. Imagine those are things you all were thinking about as well. Kate, im curious what were you thinking as you were laying out your storyline . Thinking about gaps you want to address, particularly the unique perspective that you were coming from and thinking about how to tell the story through portraits. Thank you. Corinne you covered a whole lot of issues there, so thank you for taking that hit for us. I obviously work at the portrait gallery and we endeavor to tell the history of the United States through biography and visual biography. So portraits. While i wanted the driving narrative to be portraits, i wasnt sure which ones. The portrait gallery has 22, a little over 22,000 objects and its collection and only a little over 5000 of those portraits are inaudible . Seven or 8 of our collection are women and its the bulk of all womens history. Weve been marginalized in so many ways, which is aggravating for people who are listening im sure. It makes our work as curators or public historians really important because we are sometimes bridging these stories to people who have never heard of them. Even if the expert knows, the regular person that comes through the portrait gallery we have 2 million visitors a year, they will not know who that person is. So we accompany every portrait with the story of 150 words. The story sound complicated. I have to scrutinize them over and over again to make sure it is getting everything right. I am not an expert on womens suffrage. I have become one through the process, but let me tell you it was sometimes very humbling a very humbling road to walk. When i started the portrait exhibition, i was looking for the portraits of the African American women, of latinos, of native americans. I want to make sure that we carried this white narrative weve been taught in high school and point out the other players. Women of color were not just sitting around to link their thumbs. They had to be doing something and they were. They just never have really been looped into the suffrage history in a way that was intersectional. How history feels and reality. Its not just a single issue of focus, suffrage, it is all of these different things. So we were attempting to look at the civil war and looking at the context of lobbying and where that came from in the 19 teens. A lot of great portraits, but then i also have the advantage of being in an institution that borrows. Janice and corinne, you both have incredible archives within your own institution, but so does the portrait gallery. Because i was working with a restricted amount of women, i had to go outside of the portrait gallery. I just scoured the nations archives and i can talk more about that later if people are interested, but it was hard to find portraits of black women. I just remember going to the New York Public Library and looking for this portrait. The thing that was presented to me was like folded in half. It was an exhibit double. It broke my heart. Shes in this book that we produced with exhibition, but she wasnt in the actual exhibition. I had to make hard decisions like that. Also, all of the men that were involved in the Suffrage Movement. We just put them out. We did not put them, because we figured they are already relatively wellknown. That was a bit of the process. And the second move to this idea of the obstacles and challenges that you all faced, just in general and finding the exhibits, finding the objects that you needed to tell the story. Thank you kate for bringing us into that conversation. Janice, if there is anything you would like to add before we go into telling the stories. Sure. I mentioned this idea of documenting the struggle. I think corinne alluded to some of the other goals that we had were similar with what the National Archives did. We wanted to stretch the traditional narrative. The story is 1848 to 1920. No, that is not right. We want to make sure that people understood coming in what were the influences that led women to gather in senegal falls in 1848. Who were those who influenced these women. What premised tracks where they familiar with . We started the narrative much earlier and then, like corinne, we extended it. She goes more into the modern period than we do, but we certainly indicate that it was a limited victory. There were women who were excluded from being able to vote in the 19th century. They were excluded on the account of citizenship, whether they were native american women or of asian descent. Women in the u. S. Territories, i think that certainly comes strong through our narrative. I wanted to expose like my colleagues the class divide and the racial tensions