The Politics of Women's History: Collecting for the Centennial of Women's Suffrage in New York State

The 2017 New York State suffrage centennial provided momentum for institutions to review and reimagine their women's history collections. Five of the many museum exhibitions timed to this anniversary—Votes for Women: Celebrating New York's Suffrage Centennial at the New York State Museum, Woman's Protest: Two Sides of the Fight for Suffrage in New York at the Cayuga Museum, Beyond Suffrage: A Century of New York Women in Politics at the Museum of the City of New York, and Hotbed and Collecting the Women's Marches at the New-York Historical Society—offer an opportunity to examine curatorial strategies that build on and share existing women's history collections, often accompanied by pointed acknowledgments of the unfinished struggles for voting rights and women's rights. As a constellation of historic sites and museums, state and federal commemorative commissions, and public and private funders join forces to bring these materials and the ideas they carry out of storage and into the exhibition gallery, this study of New York-based institutions speaks directly to commemorations being planned for the 2020 centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment and to new collecting projects in U.S. history museums more broadly.