Women's History in the Pacific West

Duration:

47.2 seconds

Teaser trailer for the "Home and Homelands" virtual exhibition, coming May 15

Exhibition Coming May 15

What makes a home? Who has a right to call a place a home?

The women in our lives are often the ones who create a sense of home and belonging for us. The familiar smell of your favorite family dinner. The ring of “hello” in the language of your birth. The sound of your grandma or auntie sharing stories around a fire. Maybe they aren’t your mother by blood but greeted you with open arms into your chosen family. Perhaps home feels more restricting than comforting. Maybe they had to fight to carve a place of belonging for you. Home might be the sound of many feet marching in unison at a rally. Building a home is personal. Building a home is political. Home is where we take a stand.

This May, join us in exploring this history in “Home and Homelands,” a virtual exhibition about women of the Pacific West and how they made, claimed, and fought for their homes. The exhibition holds multiple truths together -- connection and segregation, beauty and violence, the personal and political -- in order to see the whole of a basic human endeavor: making a home. Drawn from the museum collections and resources of over thirty national parks in the west, these objects and places tell the stories of extraordinary women.


This project was made possible through the National Park Service in part by a grant from the National Park Foundation. The exhibition is the result of a collaboration between the NPS Pacific West Regional Office, park sites throughout the region, National Park Foundation staff, Tribal nations, descendant communities, and subject matter experts. Thank you for your time and expertise.

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The Struggle for Suffrage and Citizenship

In 1920, the 19th Amendment made it unconstitutional to deny voting on the basis of sex, but millions of women in the West and Pacific remained disenfranchised alongside the men of their communities because they were not fully recognized as American citizens.