 Hello. Welcome to the National Archives Museum. We're in the Lawrence F. O'Brien Gallery, home to Rightfully Hers. I'm Karine Porter, the curator for the exhibit Rightfully Hers, American Women and the Vote, and I'm going to take you on a short tour of the exhibit today and show you some of the highlights that you can see when you visit the museum. We're in the entrance of the Rightfully Hers exhibition, which is the National Archives exhibit to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment by offering a fuller retelling of what it takes to win women the vote. The exhibit is organized into five sections around these questions. Who decides who votes? Why do women fight for the vote? How do women win the 19th Amendment? What was the 19th Amendment's impact and what voting rights struggles persist? The first section of the exhibit is Who Decides Who Votes. It's an important framing section for the exhibit because states power in deciding voting qualifications for its residents dramatically impacted women's struggle for the vote. The second section of the exhibit is Why Do Women Fight for the Vote? In this section, we hear from a few of the countless women whose lives were affected by their inability to vote. One of the women whose story is told in this section of the exhibit is Emily Barber. She was a teacher and she sent this petition into Congress saying that as a wage-earning woman, she had to pay equal tax with men but had no voice in how those taxes were spent. And she went on to also say that with acknowledged superior capabilities for teaching and governing schools, she has been obliged to teach for one-third of the wages according to a male teacher in the same school. I just want to point out this petition was sent in in 1879, 140 years ago today. You may have also noticed that the light levels are pretty low in here and that's to protect the documents so that they'll be preserved for you when you come to the museum. In this section of the exhibit, we also have this digital display to pull in even more voices from women and men who argued why women needed the vote. So now we're in the third section of the exhibit, which is How Do Women Win the 19th Amendment? And this section of the exhibit is really the focal point of rightly hers looking at the diverse strategies and suffragists who worked to ultimately win the 19th Amendment for women. Women used a variety of methods to press for their voting rights. One of them was the power to petition their government. And here we have a petition signed by dozens of women from Utah urging Congress not to take the vote from them. So we're at one of my favorite petitions in the exhibition. This one is signed by a number of African-Americans, suffragists, both men and women that were pushing for a women's suffrage amendment. Two of the signers are Frederick Douglass' children, Frederick Douglass Jr. and his daughter Rosetta Douglass Sprig. One of the other strategies women used to press for their voting rights was to organize large marches and parades to really draw attention to their cause. One of the women that we know that participated in one of those suffrage marches was Marie Botnou Baldwin. She was a Native American woman. This is her photo from her employee personnel file. She served in what is today the Bureau of Indian Affairs. One of the marches was actually held here in Washington, D.C. and this is a photo with a great perspective view of Pennsylvania Avenue showing the women as they marched. So in addition to protesting and marching, suffragists were also the first Americans to organize a picket at the White House to get the president's attention for their cause. This is a banner that was used by the National Women's Party and it's on loan for this exhibition. It's alongside some of the footage of those suffragists picking the White House as well. We also have this collection of Red Cross uniforms worn by three different women who served their country during World War I, which was an important factor in winning support for women's suffrage after the war. So now we've come to the focal point of the exhibition, which is the 19th Amendment. And these three documents in this exhibit case really tell the story of how the 19th Amendment officially became part of the Constitution. The first document is a joint resolution proposing the 19th Amendment which passed Congress on June 4th of 1919. In order for a proposed constitutional amendment to become part of the Constitution, it needs to be ratified by three-quarters of the states, which at this point in time was 36 states. And the 19th Amendment achieved that when Tennessee voted to ratify the amendment on August 18th of 1920. And then on August 26th, the Secretary of State certified that the 19th Amendment was officially part of the Constitution. Today, the Archivist of the United States has that responsibility. Throughout the gallery, we have these exhibit items called Suffragist Spotlights that tell some of the stories of diverse women who were really important in the struggle for women's voting rights. Women like Adelina Oterra Warren, a Mexican-American woman who used her bilingual skills to help fight for the vote in the state of New Mexico. So now we're in the fourth section of the exhibit, which is what was the 19th Amendment's impact. And this section of the exhibit looks at how women use their power as new voters to press for change, including some of the successes and setbacks that they faced. It also really introduces the ongoing struggle for equality and opportunity that many women continue to press for up through today. We also wanted to allow visitors to delve a little bit deeper into some of those ongoing equality struggles. So we developed this interactive game, which allows you to navigate a maze to learn about some of the other ways that women have fought for greater equality and opportunity. So now we come to the last section of the exhibit, which is what voting rights struggles persist. Although the 19th Amendment was a landmark voting rights victory for women, it did not give all women the right to vote. And this section of the exhibit looks at the myriad ways that women were denied the vote for reasons other than their sex. In this section of the exhibition, we look at a number of different stories of women's ongoing struggle for the vote and what ultimately secured them voting rights. Some of the groups of women's stories we tell are Puerto Rican women, women living in a district of Columbia, Native American women, and Asian immigrant women. And one of the main stories that we tell in this section of the exhibition is the ongoing struggle for African American women and, of course, men to vote after 1920. African Americans living in the South in particular faced ongoing discrimination and state laws that made it hard, if not impossible for them to vote. So in addition to the ongoing struggle of different groups of women for the vote, we also look at ways that other voters gain greater access to the polls, including the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18, and the National Voter Registration Act, otherwise known as Motor Voter, which made it easier for a number of voters to register and hopefully also vote. We have this t-shirt here that was given to President Clinton after he signed that act into law. At the end of the Rightfully Hers exhibit, you'll encounter the Rightfully Hers voting booth, where we invite the visitor to come in and share what ballot box issues matter the most to you, and you can see how your opinions compare to other visitors to the museum. At the end of your voting experience, you can also take a selfie, which you can share with your family and friends. So thank you for joining me on this tour. I hope you'll come to the National Archives Museum to see the Rightfully Hers exhibit in person.