Exhibition Review: “From Parlor to Politics: Women and Reform in America, 1890–1925”

Peter Burris

In conjunction with the renovation of its “First Ladies: Political Role and Public Image” exhibition, the Smithsonian reorganized a lot of its exhibits on social progress into an exciting discourse on the role of women as activists in the United States. Located on the East end of the second floor of the National Museum of American History, the “From Parlor to Politics” exhibition provides the level of continuity I think a lot of today’s teenagers and college students lack. The exhibit, although a bit murky and overly cluttered, makes a great argument that neither Civil Rights, Feminism, nor the Peace Movement were hatched in the sixties for the first time. The exhibition also drives two other points home that need more background than I can furnish in a couple brief paragraphs, but that’s good—hopefully people will get frustrated with my cursory gloss and go see for themselves.

What “From Parlor to Politics” clarifies first and foremost is that social issues were never cut-and-dried, distinct abstractions which policy wonks tackled as part of a brief from a think tank. Significant correspondence made it clear the Feminists who were meeting at Seneca Falls in the middle of the nineteenth century understood that the abolition of slavery and equity for women could never be deemed separate issues altogether. People like Susan B. Anthony and Frederick Douglass corresponded and agreed to help each other in their struggles for parity. Today, people point out passages from feminists like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and say, “yeah, but look how racist they were back then!” I won’t make excuses for anyone, but rest assured they sure were a lot more progressive than the real-life analogs of Faulkner’s Swopes and Sartori families. Again, come World War I, activists like Alice Paul and Representative Jeanette Rankin (D., Montana) sought to show our country’s gung-ho hawks that our economic and moral well-being depended on avoiding war, or ending it as soon as possible and focusing on social justice at home. Things like work safety, child labor, and universal suffrage could not be separated and examined as separate issues because they were all warps and wefts in the same social tapestry of discrimination and power monopolization. Kudos to this exhibition for making that explicit.

The other thing that anthropologists are just beginning to understand clearly now, but people like Jane Addams were planning ahead with projects such as Hull House, is the role of space and architecture in fostering social justice and opportunities for the disenfranchised. The roles of race and gender in designing space where people could eat, get shelter and learn even the most fundamental of life skills strike some people as new-age flakiness today, but as the “From Parlor to Politics” exhibition clearly demonstrates, the work began well over a century and tangible institutions testified to the salubrious role that carefully and compassionately designed physical space has to play in the lives of those whom the depressions of 1873 and 1929 affected, as well as battered women or children and people of color. I walked through this exhibit, my eyes brimming with tears and a huge lump in my throat, and all I could think was, “They got it right. They understand.” That’s when a museum does its job.

Peter Burris can be reached at pburris@obscure.org.