California Museum launches free exhibit celebrating centennial of the 19th Amendment
The California Museum will launch an online exhibit called “Fight for the Right: 100 Years of Women Voting” Wednesday, Aug. 26, where virtual visitors can explore historical photographs, documents and images of items that are on loan to the museum from various collections, such as protest banners and a bicycle designed for long skirts. The free digital exhibit is one of several that Sacramento museums curated this month to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the constitutional right to vote.
Exhibition highlights will include a banner that reads, “Mr. President, how long must women wait for liberty?” which a group called the Silent Sentinels held outside Woodrow Wilson’s White House during a two-and-a-half-2 1/2-year protest that began in 1917, said California Museum executive director Amanda Meeker. There will also be a rare political lapel ribbon expressing support for an 1896 proposition that had tried and failed to win California women the right to vote earlier.
“It draws a lot of parallels between then and now,” Meeker said of the exhibit. “You can see how women did things to fight for suffrage 100 years ago, and that women today are still fighting for true equality.”
Meeker said the online exhibit will focus on the suffrage period that culminated in the passage of the 19th Amendment, but the physical exhibit in the museum follows voting rights efforts up to the present. Many women, especially women of color, remained unable to vote post-1920 because of discriminatory voting laws.
Meeker said she was not sure how long the museum would be restricted to digital operations only. Eventual in-person visitors will be able to see “Fight for the Right” as well as a new, long term exhibit on California women called “Women Inspire.”
Opportunities to learn about and celebrate the 19th Amendment continue across the city.
On August 26 the California Museum will join several other Sacramento structures in lighting up their building in purple, white and gold — the colors of the suffrage movement — as part of a national initiative called #ForwardIntoLight.
The California State Railroad Museum created a digital exhibit called “Crossing Lines: Women of the American Railroad,” available on the museum’s website. The exhibit will remain on permanent display once the museum reopens. And the Sacramento History Museum offers a creative history lesson with their YouTube rosette-making tutorials. Paper or ribbon rosettes functioned as political pins in the past and were used to show patriotism or support for various causes.
This story was originally published August 25, 2020 at 7:22 AM.