Black women have lived in New York City since the Dutch arrived in the 17th century. But what we know about their lives and experiences comes in small snippets of information from historical records that considered their contributions secondary. When Black women do show up, we only get piecemeal clues about their lives, the institutions…

The history of women’s activism over the past 200 years is the story of countless, courageous individual women—collective action begins when just one person confronts injustice, and then another joins her, and then another. Some of these women’s names may be familiar to us, but many Black women’s stories were deliberately left out of a…

By all accounts, 2020 was an eventful and historic, yet difficult year. From the public health crisis to social unrest and increasing activism, and from commemorating the suffrage centennial to celebrating breakthroughs in women’s political participation, Women at the Center has sought to uncover silver linings of this difficult time buried not too deeply within…

There are numerous accounts and retellings of momentous civil rights demonstrations of the 1960s. Perhaps most notable is the march from Selma to Montgomery, AL, which took three attempts and federal protection for activists to reach their destination safely on March 25, 1965, and which pushed President Lyndon B. Johnson to send voting rights legislation…

One of the central goals of the New-York Historical Society’s exhibition Women March is to emphasize the diverse and abounding character of women’s activism over the past 200 years. The Center for Women’s History’s curatorial team wanted to move visitors away from a preconceived notion of “the suffrage movement,” or a movement headed by a…