Creating Icons: How We Remember Women's Suffrage

Bella Abzug's hat, National Museum of American History

March 6, 2020 – January 2, 2022
National Museum of American History
1300 Constitution Ave., NW
Washington, DC
2nd Floor, West, Nicholas J. and Eugenia Taubman Gallery

This exhibition marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment recognizing women’s right to vote. It commemorates women’s achievements in winning suffrage and invites audiences to explore how we celebrate milestones, what we remember, what (and who) has been forgotten or silenced over time, and how those exclusions helped create the cracks and fissures in the movement that continue to impact women’s politics and activism. Items from the National American Women Suffrage Association (now the League of Women Voters) collection, donated in 1919 and 1920, are featured along with later donations of materials related to Adelaide Johnson (sculptor of Portrait Monument in the Capitol), Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party (NWP), and other suffrage and women’s activism collections.