Women's History Month Exhibitions
In honor of Women’s History Month and in recognition of the centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which ended the exclusion of voters on the basis of sex, the State Museum is proud to display three installations.
Suffrage Wagon
In 1913, this wagon was covered in suffrage banners and hand-painted signs. Suffragists equated their cause with that of our nation’s founders, and this wagon helped drive home that point. Claiming it was built in 1776 and belonged to patriots, suffrage activists used the wagon as both a prop and a speaker’s platform.
2020 Quilt Project
The 2020 Quilt Project is a collaborative textile art project initiated by the National Susan B. Anthony Museum & House in Rochester, New York. Created to mark the centennial of passage of the 19th Amendment in 2020, the quilt celebrates achievements women have made in fighting for equal rights and also addresses “unfinished business,” or rights yet to be won.
New York State granted women the right to vote in 1917, which helped shift the national conversation toward passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, ending the exclusion of voters on the basis of sex. New York-based suffragists played an important role in the national fight for women’s suffrage.
Images of the more than 300 individual squares and information about the artists can be found at www.susanbanthonyhouse.org/2020quiltproject.
Woman Suffrage Movement Monument Maquette
This is the first version of a model for a statue that is scheduled to be unveiled in New York City’s Central Park on August 26, 2020.
In 2013, longtime women’s rights activists Pam Elam and Coline Jenkins formed the Statue Fund to create the first statue in Central Park that both honors and depicts real women. Sculptor Meredith Bergmann’s design was chosen out of 91 entries.
When the model was presented in 2018, the design prompted a discussion about the exclusion of contributions of women of color in the suffrage movement. Bergmann created a new design that represents three major leaders in 19th-century women’s rights movement: Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony.
More information can be found at the Statue Fund’s webpage, www.monumentalwomen.org