The Declaration of Sentiments is missing.
Rather, the original document, the artifact, the piece of
paper (or parchment?) upon which the original Declaration was written is
currently unaccounted for.
This has been true for at least the last 100 years. But what
has me equal parts bemused and disgruntled is that nobody seemed to care too
much about that.
Until now.
We have a woman running for President. Again. (No, Hillary
Clinton is NOT the first woman to do so!) But what makes this election unique
is that Clinton has accumulated enough support to be the Democratic Party’s
official nominee. THE nominee.
Giving a speech in Brooklyn on June 7, 2016, Hillary Clinton
refers to the Declaration, and suddenly, it – and the fact that it is missing –
are headline news.
Suddenly, we’re all saddened by the “lost history,” the
pieces of women’s material history, that has simply disappeared. I mean, it’s
not like we have Susan B. Anthony’s gavel and other personal items gathering dust
in the Smithsonian Archives (oh wait, yes we do!) or the table upon which theDeclaration of Sentiments was penned, also tucked away in the underbelly of the
Smithsonian (um, actually, we have that too). As a graduate student researching
women’s history museums, I get asked all the time about whether we even have stuff to put in a women’s history
museum – I mean, we all know that only the “really important” stuff gets saved,
right?
Without meaning to, such questions point directly at the heart
of the problem when most people try to imagine a public space devoted to women’s
history. The stuff of women’s lives, the material traces of their experience,
labor and craft, have rarely been considered worthy of saving. I would even
suggest that this is largely because this stuff is women’s stuff, which also
means that it is often the stuff of everyday life: meant to be used, worn,
consumed, lived in/among.
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But women did save things, DO save things, things they considered important,
and did their best to commemorate their successes and victories in many ways,
both public and private. Smaller house museums around the country are veritable
treasure troves of women’s history at the local or organizational level; most
recently, I paid a visit to the Sewall-Belmont House in Washington, D.C. and gazed
at suffrage banners, hand-sewn flags and pennants, custom jewelry, artwork,
desks and other furnishings of women’s organization leaders, and busts and
commemorative images of many of the famous faces we associated with women’s
suffrage.
Perhaps it’s just that beyond woman suffrage, there doesn’t
seem to be much beyond the domestic implements, clothing or other artifacts of
daily life that we can collectively point to and say this represents a moment in women’s history that we should
remember. This impression is directly tied to the way that women have moved
through U.S. history with an oppressive degree of invisibility; their
accomplishments attributed to men or stolen outright, their victories claimed
by others, their public displays of commemoration torn down at the first
opportunity.
Megan Smith, U.S. Chief Technology Officer, astutely noted that: “It is not lost on me that the ongoing invisibility of women and girls is a serious issue for our country, and for the world. The invisibility of our history, heroes, stories, challenges, and success handicaps the future of all Americans, and it deeply affects our economy and our communities.” (www.whitehouse.gov, October 14, 2015)
Without a past, we are unilaterally denied a future.
Hitler knew this; that is why he worked so hard to annihilate
Jewish artifacts, sacred spaces, cemeteries, and other physical evidence of
their past.
The early colonizers on the American continents knew this;
that is why they worked so hard to erase indigenous cultures and oral traditions
by forced religious conversions, the theft and “assimilation” of children,
oppressive “education” programs, and/or outright genocide.
What is interesting to me about Hillary Clinton’s
achievement this week is how it has slid that bright spotlight of public history
back into our national past, and, sadly and absurdly, found our shared popular notions
of women’s history seriously lacking. Women’s historians and enthusiasts (like
me) are all looking at each other going, uh, well, duh! Haven’t we been saying
for decades that what we know about
women as active agents and makers of history is rarely (if ever) disseminated
widely across a national public?
You bet we have! Women’s rights advocates back in the early
1800s were saying it; suffrage leaders at the turn of the twentieth century
were saying it; civil rights, women’s rights (second, third, and fourth waves),
labor organizations, teachers, feminist, and all kinds of people have, for
long, long years, been saying it.
Hell, I’m saying it right now.
Maybe, with a female President, Americans might finally be
ready to listen.
