Video
Origins Gallery-Desk and Chair
Transcript
Welcome to the Belmont Paul Women's Equality National Monument I'm Ranger Susan and we're going to explore the Origins Gallery of the museum. There's a lot of information in the Origins Gallery which is the smallest room in the house. In the Origins Gallery we explore the predecessors of the National Woman's Party. Who inspired Alice Paul and the NWP through the suffrage movement and beyond? There's so much to explore in the Origins Gallery exhibits. For this video we're just going to focus on a couple of treasured items in the NWP collection. Alice and the other NWP members drew inspiration and courage from the women who came before them and they especially were inspired by women who owned a couple of items of furniture that are in the Origins Gallery. First we have this Victorian walnut cinder--cylinder roll-top desk with a felt lined tray top. The cylinder front features a recessed burled walnut veneer panel and two square wooden drawer pulls. The lower cabinet section of the desk has two doors featuring recessed burled walnut walnut veneer panels as well. In this photo the roll-top is closed although sometimes we open it so that visitors to the museum can see the interior which has a central well area flanked by a drawer below pigeonholes on each side. According to the oral history provided by Alice Paul this desk originally belonged to Susan B Anthony and was donated to Alice by Anthony's former secretary Rachel Brill Ezekiel in December 1913 just a few years after Susan B Anthony died in 1906. If people know one name in the story of the fight for women's suffrage they usually have heard of Susan B Anthony because of her tireless campaign throughout her life on the cause of votes for women. Often when Alice Paul was criticized for the NWP's confrontational tactics she would point back to Susan B Anthony to say basically that what she was doing was just a continuation of Susan B Anthony's work. Next to the Susan B Anthony desk in the Origins Gallery there is a Victorian wood chair with spool turned spindles in the Elizabethan Revival style. A rectangular cushion hangs on the chair back. The spool turned arms have an upholstered elbow rest and you might notice that the rectangular upholstered seat is much deeper than on modern chairs. It was designed to accommodate the woman's fashion of the 1850s and 1860s when this chair was made. Well-to-do women's dresses had large bustles on the back and so they couldn't sit in a chair with a normal-sized seat. So even chairs were gendered in the mid 19th century and this chair once belonged to Elizabeth Cady Stanton Susan B Anthony's dear friend and one of the founding mothers of the American women's rights movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton organized the Seneca Falls Convention in July 1848 and that was one of the first times that reform-minded people came together to talk specifically about the issue of women's rights and it was Elizabeth Cady Stanton who insisted on the most contentious demand put forth during that convention: that women should have the right to vote. Even among those radical reformers in attendance at that conference, women's suffrage seemed like a ridiculous idea. Have you ever been told that your ideas are ridiculous? In a world where women and men didn't even sit on the same chairs Elizabeth Cady Stanton imagined a world in which women's voices were heard and valued in politics and in government. This chair here was given to the NWP by Harriet Stanton Blatch, Elizabeth's daughter and herself a suffrage-- suffragist and labor activist. So before the NWP ever had a collection or ran a museum, they had these two pieces of furniture to connect them to the past. In the museum on the wall next to the desk and chair there's this picture of the members of the National Woman's Party posing outside with the Susan B Anthony desk. Alva Belmont is the one sitting in front of the desk and Alice Paul is in the foreground with more than 20 women gathered behind them. This photo gives you a sense of how the NWP connected their identity and purpose to the work of the early suffragists. What treasured items in your house connect you with the past? And then next to that picture on the wall is this photograph of Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton seated at a small table. You can see the Susan B Anthony is looking down at a book turning the pages and Elizabeth Cady Stanton is writing on a piece of paper next to her. And this photograph was taken in 1890. At this point Stanton and Anthony had published three volumes of their History of Women's Suffrage and in this picture you can see that they are portraying themselves in their later years as the elder scholars of the movement. 1890 was also the year that Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton founded the National American Woman Suffrage Association, bringing together two suffrage associations that had formed right after the Civil War. We call that organization NAWSA for short. So when Alice Paul entered the suffrage movement NAWSA was the main suffrage organization in the US and by that point Anthony and Stanton had both died so Alice Paul was joining a movement that was led by second and even third generation suffragists, many of whom had known and worked with Stanton and Anthony even though Alice Paul didn't. But even though Alice Paul had not known either of these founders she saw herself as continuing the work taking up their mission. In a display case in the Origins Gallery you'll find this trowel gold plated with a wooden handle and the inscription on it reads "In memory of the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848 presented by its sole survivor Charlotte L Peirce in Thanksgiving for progress made by women and in honor of the National Woman's Party which will carry on the struggle so bravely begun." So the NWP was demonstrating with this trowel that they had the blessing of the only woman who attended the Seneca Falls Convention who was still alive in 1920 declaring that they were the ones continuing the work of women's equality starting in 1848. In another video we're going to talk about how the NAWSA leadership might have felt about these claims of Alice Paul Underneath the photo of Susan B Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton there is another portrait of a founding suffragist. This one here Frederick Douglass. Right now if you were in the museum you'd see this portrait but maybe no real explanation would be provided about why Frederick Douglass is here. What did Alice Paul draw from the work of Frederick Douglass? Well actually this photograph is representing a part of the story that Alice Paul probably might have wished that we didn't tell. But we will in the next video so stay tuned
Description
Take a look at two treasured items in the National Woman's Party collection displayed in the Origins Gallery of the Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument. What items in your home connect you with the past?
Duration
8 minutes, 58 seconds
Credit
NPS/S. Philpott
Date Created
06/02/2020
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