"Men Make no mention of Her Heroism": Natural and Cultural Resources and Women's Past

Vivien Ellen Rose

Stanton’s ire at the exclusion of women from the historical record extended to efforts to preserve or memorialize in homes and monuments the history of great men. Refusing to donate a single penny to purchase and preserve George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate, she preferred to work to extend rights of citizenship to women and freedom to slaves. She later objected to a federal appropriation to build Grant’s Tomb, a mausoleum to house the remains of General and President Ulysses S. Grant and his wife in New York, on the grounds that the government had a more pressing responsibility to provide for the physical well-being of its citizens. “If we must keep on continually building monuments to great men,” she wrote, “they should be handsome blocks of comfortable homes for the poor.... Surely sanitary homes and schoolhouses for the living would be more appropriate monuments...” (2).

Stanton’s own Greek Revival home, from which she launched the women’s rights movement in the United States, is restored and open to the public in Seneca Falls, New York, as is the Rochester home of her life-long co-agitator, Susan B. Anthony. As Stanton hoped, the “achievements of women” are beginning to reshape narratives of U.S. history, and women’s presence in the natural and cultural landscape is beginning to be recognized in gardens, natural preserves, parks, historic homes, monuments, and markers throughout the United States. Women Remembered: A Guide to Landmarks of Women’s History in the United States (1986) and Susan B. Anthony Slept Here: A Guide to American Women’s Landmarks (1976, rep. 1994) catalog resources that extend textbooks to buildings and monuments, and make visible the importance of women’s work in every locale (3).

Many of the resources listed in these two works are markers, plaques, or statues. A few are organizational buildings, representing national groups like the Young Women’s Hebrew and Christian Associations described in Antoinette Lee’s article. Fewer still are the female equivalent of Mount Vernon and Grant’s Tomb. Of the 1,942 properties listed as National Historic Landmarks in 1990, the federal designation of national importance, less than two percent preserve women’s past. Of 375 National Park Service units, five protect the homes or offices of singular women who shaped American politics, economics, health care, and civil rights. Only approximately sixty historic sites, operated largely by private organizations like the Susan B. Anthony House, Inc., are open to visitors seeking information about women’s efforts to shape American life (4).

In part, this paucity reflects the disjuncture between requirements for national landmark designation and the realities of women’s lives. Recently discovered sites associated with women’s past may have been significantly altered in intervening years, thus failing to meet standards for physical integrity. For example, the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel in Seneca Falls, site of the 1848 First Women’s Rights Convention, is a shell of its former self. Or sites may be architecturally modest, like Mary McLeod Bethune Council House National Historic Site, the Washington, D.C., home and headquarters of this educator and director of the National Council of Negro Women. While these sites mark important people and events in women’s history, efforts to preserve them came only in the last two decades.

The National Park Service is one of many organizations that protects and preserves natural and cultural resources for the edification and enjoyment of the American public. As Heather Huyck points out in her survey of western parks, none of the national park units scattered across the United States lack women’s history. Maria Israel’s twenty years at a San Diego lighthouse, now preserved as part of Cabrillo National Monument, demonstrates the pervasive and important impact of women in all areas of life. 

National Parks also preserve landscapes. In Native American cultures, where structures are permanent or temporary according to ecological and cultural concerns, women’s work may be obscured by failure to mark natural resources used by and sustained by women. Rebecca Bales and Tara Travis give examples of natural and cultural resources relating to women in their articles about land use and “rock art.”

Women’s work in civil rights movements are also represented in historic parks in the United States. Maggie Lena Walker N.H.S. commemorates Walker’s pioneering economic development efforts in Richmond, Virginia, as the founder and president of the longest continually operating African-American bank in the United States. Yet women’s local leadership in building national movements can be overlooked. Surveying landmarks in the South East, Barbara Tagger finds few that acknowledge the female leadership of the modern civil rights movement. Jill K. Hanson illustrates the local nature of women’s leadership in her discussion of the Modjeska Simkins house in South Carolina. 

The natural and cultural resources held within the National Park Service system provided the materials for a joint project of the National Trust for Historic Preservation and the National Park Service. Beth Boland’s article explains the “Teaching with Historic Places” curriculum-based lesson plan program, and highlights lessons already available that use N.P.S. sites to enrich women’s history in the classroom. In addition, many parks have developed educational materials or lesson plans that can be used in the classroom. Three such plans follow Boland’s piece. They illuminate the lives of a free African-American slaveholding woman in early 19th century Florida, a New England mill girl, and a Scottish travel writer to Hawaii’s volcanoes, using cultural resources to demonstrate the importance of women’s work and the constraints and challenges they faced.

This issue of The Magazine of History, written by scholars and preservationists, many of them National Park Service staff, provides an overview of the uses of natural and cultural resources to study and teach “the achievements of women.” As part of a year-long observance of the sesquicentennial of the First Women’s Rights Convention, the National Park Service and the Organization of American Historians plan a conference in August, 1998, in Seneca Falls, to further examine natural and cultural resources as evidence for women’s past and as tools for teaching women’s history (see page 20). In this way, we hope to contribute to the task of making the landscape and built environment, like the historical record, reflect “the part woman performed” in the history of the United States. 

1. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More: Reminiscences, 1815-1897 (reprint Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1993), 328, 235, 302.
2. Ibid., 388.
3. Marion Tinling, Women Remembered: A Guide to Landmarks of Women’s History in the United States (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 1986); Lynn Sherr and Jurate Kazickas, Susan B. Anthony Slept Here: A Guide to American Women’s Landmarks (New York: Times Books, 1994).
4. Page Putnam Miller, ed., Reclaiming the Past: Landmarks of Women’s History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 13.

Vivien Ellen Rose, Ph.D., is historian at Women’s Rights National Historical Park, Seneca Falls, N.Y. She can be reached at the park at 136 Fall Street, Seneca Falls, N.Y., 13148, 315-568-0007, or via email at Vivien_Rose@nps.gov