 Hi everyone. Welcome back to the forum webinar series. My name is Priya Chhaya. I am the associate director of content for the National Trust for Historic Preservation. In case you don't know, Preservation Leadership Forum is the professional membership program of the National Trust. This webinar series is made possible by the Campaign for Where Women Made History and members of Preservation Leadership Forum, and we sincerely thank all of you that are with us today. Today's webinar is the first in a series that we are calling Women Are Essential. This series focuses on interpreting the complexity of women's history and identity at historic places. For today's session, we will investigate the different ways of seeing women in every historic place. We hope you will come away from this webinar with an appreciation of the historic impact of women, as well as various strategies and case studies to shape a fuller and more honest American story. But before we begin, there are a few technical things for you to know. We will be taking questions from the audience at the end of the webinar. Please send the questions via the Q&A function on your control panel directly to the panelists. Don't put them in the chat. We'll only ask you to put them in the Q&A instead. You're welcome to submit your questions at any point during the webinar, but we will only be answering them at the end of the session. That being said, you are welcome and encouraged to communicate to all participants during the webinar using the chat function. We also have enabled the closed captioning function for this session, and you should be able to see it working right now. If you'd like to hide it at any point, you just have to check your settings or click the CC button on your control panel. Following the program, we will send out a recording of today's webinar directly to the email you used to register. And finally, all four webinars are archived in our forum webinar library, and we will share the link below. I also wanted to mention that in the reminder email for the webinar, you should have seen a link to hand out for the session. We'll drop the link for that in the chat during the conversations today, and also include that in the follow-up webinar, follow-up email as well. And so now I'm going to turn the program over to Chris Morris, the Senior Field Director at the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and also the Manager of the Wear Women Made History Campaign. Hi, Chris. Hi, Priya. Thank you so much, and thanks to all of you who joined us today for what I know will be an illuminating conversation that's going to change the way that you look at historic sites and cultural resources. As Priya mentioned, my name is Chris Morris, and in addition to my role as Senior Field Director here in Los Angeles, I've had the honor of managing the National Trust Campaign for Wear Women Made History for the last year or so. Next slide, please. The Campaign for Wear Women Made History is a direct manifestation of the National Trust's commitment to tell a more full and truthful American story. The trust, and in particular, my colleague Priya, along with many others, have long been committed to recognizing and elevating women's roles in our work. But over the past year, we've taken a much more focused and systemic approach to elevating the achievements of women and supporting the next generation of women preservationists. Virtually every aspect of our programmatic work, from our grant making to our historic sites, our corporate partnerships to our annual list of 11 most endangered places, our advocacy efforts, our storytelling, and our hands-on preservation experience has centered women in ways that also attempts to recognize the complexity and intersectionality of their identities. I hope you'll take some time after today's training to explore the many projects, people, places, and stories of women's achievement that are featured on our website. And of course, I hope you'll all come back and join us for the second part of this training on August 12th. Next slide, please. And now it is my pleasure to introduce our moderator for today's webinar, Dr. Heather Heich. Heather, join us on the screen. Heather is not only the author of the recent book, Doing Women's History in Public. She's an educator and a staunch advocate for women's history who has been leading the charge to reveal the essential roles that half of the population played in influencing every aspect of our society, through her work with the National Park Service and her leadership of the National Collaborative for Women's History sites. Heather has been absolutely instrumental in showing historic sites how to see, reveal, and communicate women's presence for decades. And she is the ideal person to lead us in this conversation today. So, Heather, thank you so much for helping to lead this discussion. And I'm going to pass the mic to you. Thank you. And thank you. I really appreciate it. Today, I would like to introduce my co-panelists and then make a short presentation. Dr. Emily Murphy is curator at Salem National Historical Park. In Salem, Massachusetts, she has a BA from Tink Johns College and a PhD in American Studies from Boston University. She specializes in early American decorative arts, material culture, and social history. And a book that includes a chapter of hers arrived today and is behind me on the bookshelf behind me. John Fowler, the second, is a park ranger and digital media coordinator of historic homes of National Capital Parks East in Washington, D.C. He has a great love for history and a desire to share that. He specializes in bringing the history to digital platforms by way of social media and youth engagement. And he has worked at eight national parks. Barbara Lau is the executive director of the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice, a national historic landmark in Durham, North Carolina. She has 20 years of experience as a folklorist, curator, professor, oral historian, media producer, and author. And she has done exhibits, Pauli Murray, imp crusader, dude and priest, and also to buy the sun. She also teaches various courses. So we have a wonderful group here. And I will begin by talking a little bit about some of the essential finding essential women, a place based approach for American women. As we said, the trust is committed to preserve and protect and share our full story, one more complicated and much less certain than once taught, like national park service efforts, it builds on the 2020 suffrage centennial and seeks women everywhere. These two webinars ask different questions, such as who packed this copper miners lunch bucket? Or what happened to the girl who embroidered this sample? We will share tools and examples and how to find past women and their associated history to gain greater accuracy in understanding the past so that we can tailor our history to better fit what actually happened. Knowing what previous generations of women faced and accomplished empowers and encourages us today. In largest preservation audiences and advocates and encourages justice because omissions are also wrongs. Today's webinar features three distinct houses, a seaport house that was also a commercial space, a famous man's mansion, and a formative childhood home now under restoration. We will focus how we can learn about these places and find the stories and amazing women associated with them. The August 12th webinar will share how these three more sites have revised their interpretation to tell their fuller story, Fort Snelling, Shadows on the Tesh Plantation, and the Charles Russell home with dramatically different women. So we want to share the rich variety of American women's lives and how to research, preserve, and interpret them. These women and places challenge us to see more clearly the efforts men and women made. We want to show how essential they were in our lives then and now. Dr. Emily Murphy will discuss the Narbone House and Salem, Massachusetts, which provides a counterpoint to our image of male only seaports. In maritime communities, women provided continuity even under their legal and social limitations, because men were at sea or sometimes lost to sea. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who worked in the nearby U.S. Customs House, described in his House of Seven Gables, a scent shop, C-E-N-T, a convenience store that sold thread, yeast, flour, and candy. In the Narbone House, where two single women, Mary and Sarah Narbone lived, we can easily see their scent shop as they struggled to stave off economic disaster, their poverty and persistence intertwined with the goods they sold and the things they sewed. John Fowler will discuss Frederick Douglass. In 1878, Frederick Douglass, known for his strong dedication to women's rights, bought a mansion where his first wife Anna Murray Douglass and later wife Anna Pitts Douglass lived. Douglass could not have made the major transitions from being enslaved to being a newspaper owner and editor and later a national Black leader without many women's support. His newspaper, The North Star, had a motto which proclaimed his life mission, right is of no sex, truth is of no color. Barbara Lau will present the childhood family home of the Reverend Dr. Pauli Murray. Murray's experiences there grounded her life to become the amazing lawyer, civil and women's rights activist, poet, priest, and theorist. She lived and resisted cruel complexities of race, gender, and sexuality and profoundly shaped the jurisprudence of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Both Douglass and Murray combined writing and theology with fierce dedication to American democracy, demanding rights and respects for everyone. They broke trails we use. One of the joys of being a historian is encountering remarkable people and coming to know them. We are especially fortunate when we enter their homes and their lives touch ours. Places where they live provide insights. Douglass bought an estate overlooking the nation's capital during American apartheid. Murray's crib was placed on the stairway landing of the home of her formerly enslaved grandmother and wounded Civil War veteran grandfather's home which shows her family's love and determination. The 10,000 square foot building once the home offices and warehouse of Clara Barton, the American Red Cross and its workers shows her creative frugality when she stretched Muslim cloth across Joyce to create its ceilings. Rachel Carson, early activist environmentalist had a front yard that deliberately lacked grass and was full of bird friendly shrubs. Historic places show us stories and introduce us to amazing women. Next slide please. Preservation begins with the not so simple recognition that a place has significance, that the lives of American women are important. When Elizabeth Cady Stanton's classic Greek revival house was painted a bright turquoise, its color demonstrated its insignificance. Only recently, the modest but crucial gathering place, the San Francisco home of LGBTQ pioneers, Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin, founders of the Daughters of Bilitis, the first lesbian rights organization, had its significance recognized when it became protected as a local historic landmark. The physical work of preservation includes caring for tangible resources, landscapes designed or vernacular, architecture, both buildings and structures and objects of all kinds. Preservation prolongs tangible resources existence. Research in the knowledge base supports preservation of resources and interpretation with the use written sources from diaries to account books to census records increasingly use oral history, visual sources and quantitative big data. Those of us who work with historic places have the phenomenal advantages of researching the sites themselves, daffodils marking former gardens and doorways altered to create the Narbonne House scent shop. That's also why historic preservation is so crucial. Next slide please. Next slide. Let me turn to the women's lives chart and your handouts and the next slide, which is simply one way to analyze women's lives by their different activities. While deliberately basic, it shows women's key activities and provides a framework to appreciate their work. Today, if you want a cup of coffee, pop a pod into your Keurig, add some sugar or milk and drink it. Not so long ago, having a cup of coffee required pumping water, heating it on a cantankerous wood stove after roasting and grinding coffee beans, milking the cow, etc., etc. Typewriters once required every mistake to be hand corrected. In other words, we generally under-appreciate the complexities of women's work and all their forms, whether reproduction, care work, production and consumption, or social infrastructure. For many generations, women had to spend much of their time doing the myriad tasks required for sustenance, for basic production consumption and reproduction caregiving, as well as social infrastructure. As you encounter past women, consider how much expertise, skills, effort, and time were necessary. That time requirement helps us better understand their lives, as most women had so much work. As the old saying goes, a man works from son to son, a woman's work is never done. And consider that women work while simultaneously pregnant and how often they grieve when they lost children. It's crucial to consider the many variations of women's lives. Indigenous women, the 18th century Ohio River Valley, processed smelly beaver carcasses into skins, which were then fashioned into European men's hats. One historian has suggested that the fur trade, be renamed the cloth trade, as Wabish women insisted on trading beaver skins for cloth to their taste. And we need to seek other women. We must look past elegant in-town mansions to see large out-of-town income producing cotton plantations, where most black enslaved women worked and lived. Today, we are appropriately more aware of all the differences among women by race, class, geography, etc. We also need to see our commonalities. Historically, under Anglo-American common law, married women had no legal rights to their homes, which partly explains why so many historic sites are named solely for men, because legal ownership is confused with the actual occupants. Until 1964, U.S. women had no right to serve on then male-only juries. And in many states, contraceptive information was illegal for married women until 1965. If we look, we can find women at all historic sites and many other places, because women were everywhere, if not directly present, then indirectly so. If not highly visible, then still crucial, especially true for minority women. Consider how the women and men in these historic places shape our lives. They comfort us in our adversities and challenge us to respond to still unsolved problems. Let's thank them by preserving their tangible resources and interpreting their lives now. When we confront these systemic disparities, we can shape a more truthful and inclusive American story, as Chris Morris of the National Trust says, and be able to tell the whole story. Thank you. And next, we will have Dr. Emily Murphy. Good afternoon, everybody. So can I have my first slide, please? So this is number 71 Essex Street in Salem, Massachusetts. It's a modest house sitting perpendicular to the street, and it consists of two main rooms on the first floor and two on the second, with a lean two broken up into three rooms at the back of the house and a large attic and cellar. It's kind of odd looking. It's got a sharply peeked roof on one side and a gambrel roof from the 18th century on the other. And the building was acquired by the National Park Service in 1963 because of its age. The original part of the structure was built in 1675. But today, I want to talk about a pair of remarkable women, mother and daughter, whose lives encompassed the entire 19th century in that house, and witnessed nearly a quarter of Salem's history through those windows. One of the clues to the activities in the house is this space, if you could give me my animation. Thank you. It's the last major addition to the house sometime around 1820. And most likely, it was intended as a cent shop in Nathaniel Hawthorne's phrase, as Heather mentioned. It's got a very wide shop door that opens onto Essex Street, and that would allow interactions with customers on the major busy street, separately from friends and neighbors who would come in the front door down an alleyway between the Narbonne House and its next door neighbor. I have the next slide. So the Narbonne House was already a century old when Sarah Vincent Narbonne's grandparents bought the house in 1780. So Sarah's grandmother, Mary Gardner Andrew, was left a widow in 1783. And Mary's daughter, Sarah Andrew Vincent, raised her family in the house. So Sarah Vincent Narbonne was actually born in 1795 at the height of Salem's China trade to a family that was not wealthy, but was highly socially connected. So Mary Gardner Andrew was from one of the wealthiest merchant families in Salem, and was connected by marriage to the Darby family, another very, very wealthy and influential family. In fact, her twin sister was married to Richard Darby Jr., sort of the oldest son of the Darby family. And this is reflected in the astonishing quality of ceramics found in the backyard. We did an archaeological dig in the 1970s and found over 150,000 artifacts in the backyard. And many of them, as you can see on the right hand side of the slide, are actually whole vessels, so complete bowls, teapots, coffee pots, saucers and plates. However, the declining trade in Salem and the financial panics of the early 19th century really took its toll on the family. So Sarah's mother, Sarah Andrew Vincent, died in 1811 and her father at that point took off. Sounds like he actually hadn't been around for a little while before then. But that left the 70-year-old Mary Gardner Andrew to raise the 16-year-old Sarah Narbonne and her younger siblings. Mary then dies in 1820 and Sarah stayed in the house with her uncle. And in 1823, she marries Nicholas Narbonne, who's kind of a mystery guy. He's a mariner, shows up in Salem, doesn't seem to have any relatives in Salem, and hung around pretty much just long enough to have two children with her. And then she died and then he dies at sea around 1830. And so just as a note to this, one of the greatest concentrations or the greatest concentration of archaeological material in the Narbonne house dig is actually between 1780 and about 1830. And this is the time when there's pretty much continuously small children in the house. So as I always like to say, small children plus ceramics equals very happy archaeologists in a couple of hundred years. So Sarah is trying to deal with a lot of financial difficulties in the 1820s and 30s, as well as new widowhood. By 1843, she is listed as a seamstress in the city directory. And this is one of the few occupations open to genteel women who are well connected as she is. And she's living, as you can see in this photograph, she's living in a home surrounded by antiques inherited from important families. So the fact that she actually had to go out and earn her living like this is probably a little difficult for her. So you can see more of these amazing ceramics that did survive the children in the corner cupboard behind her. And then there's a portrait of one of her 18th century ancestors on the wall behind her, as well as some really spectacular pieces of 18th century furniture. Can I have the next slide, please? So it was Sarah Narbonne's daughter, Mary, who was born in 1824, who seems to have been the really active, actively working one in the house. After Sarah inherited the house from her uncle in 1844, she seems to have stopped working for a few years, although honestly the lack of occupation listed in the 1850 census for Sarah and Mary could actually have more to do with the most likely male census taker who seems to have not listed any occupations for women in his district. And there are a few women that I saw on there that I knew had occupations, were listed in the city directories with occupations at that time. By 1860, though, Mary's listed as a dressmaker. And the variety and number of sewing items found in the archaeology, like the needles, you can see here, it's actually very, very rare for needles to survive archaeologically, because usually they're so thin and the steel that they're made of doesn't last long in most types of soil. So the fact that we found 12 needles, and some of them quite thin is actually pretty remarkable. We also found several hundred pins and I want to say 24, 25 thimbles, some of them small enough, you know, that won't even fit on my my little finger there's there for children. We also found a number of late 19th century doll heads, which indicates that she may have been making dolls for children as well. We also found we also were lucky enough to acquire her pocket diary, which is really kind of a commonplace book that she returned to, it was printed in 1845. And then she returned to this book in the 1860s or 70s to record her work. So the diary indicates that she's that that she's doing a combination of sewing garments directly for clients. But also she seems to be doing a lot of pieces of like trim she talks about ruffling for gowns or buttonholes. So she's like subcontracting it seems for other milliners and dressmakers in town. So it's really fascinating we're uncovering more and more about Sarah and Mary. Unfortunately, we don't really have any direct evidence of what what they were doing with that scent shop. We don't have a ledger or anything like that. But the more that we examine the few documents that we have, and the more that we're combining them with what we found in the archaeology and analyzing the architectural evidence in the house, the richer the understanding we're really coming to about the Narbonne house and the families that live there. So now I'd like to turn things over to John Fowler, my fellow National Park service person from Project Douglas. Thank you Emily. Good afternoon everybody. Let me begin by taking a moment to thank Dr. Hyke for extending the invitation to us to participate in this auspicious occasion. And also take a moment to thank the National Trust for Historic Preservation for the amazing work that they continue to do. As has already been stated my name is John Fowler and I'm a park ranger and the Digital Media Coordinator for the Historic Homes at National Capital Parks East. National Capital Parks East is a conglomerate of national parks located east of the river in Washington DC and into the Maryland suburbs. And one of those parks is the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site. The Frederick Douglass National Historic Site is the property where the great abolitionist, orator, statesman, diplomat, civil rights leader, women's rights activist. This is where he lived the last 17 years of his life. The home was built between 1855 and 1859 by John W. Van Hook and Douglass boarded for $6,700. Douglass turned a 14 room house into a 21 room mansion originally with 10 acres of land he purchased in additional five making it 15 acres complete with vegetable gardens, a croquet court that was his favorite sport to play, apple trees, a peach orchard pear trees, black walnut trees, magnolia trees, I mean it was a sprawling estate. At the time that the home entered the national park system in 1962 it became just the third park created to honor the contributions of an African American. It took the National Park Service 10 years to restore and rehabilitate the property before it opened to the public in February of 1972. But let me be very clear without the pioneering work, activism, preservation, and stewardship of women, in particular African American women, the Frederick Douglass National Historic Site as we know it today would simply cease to exist. As we explore the way women's history is interpreted at sites, I want to take just a moment to showcase how we interpret this history at the Douglass home. Frederick Douglass as great as he was owes much of his success to women. Next slide please. In his three autobiographies, Douglass recounts the role women played in his early development. His mother from whom he was separated, his grandmother who raised him, his slave mistresses including the one that actually taught him how to read, and finally his first wife Anna. Anna was born free while Douglass himself was born enslaved. She sold her possessions which allowed him to escape and experience freedom. They later marry and have five beautiful children and while he is away for months at a time, in some instances, a couple of years at a time, she raises their children and creates a home for their family. Douglass recounted the beginning of their marriage as a partnership. After their wedding ceremony he recounted, I shouldered one part of our baggage and Anna took up the other. He described her as his help meet. And as historian Lee Falk points out in her book, while Douglass portrayed himself as the epitome of black, masculine self-reliance, that self-reliance included the ability to support his family and the self-reliance of the family depended upon both his and Anna's work. Now when Douglass met Anna, she was working as a domestic working in the homes of people in Baltimore and when they married she later took in laundry. You can go to the next slide. When she dies in 1882 after 44 years of marriage, Douglass preserves her memory by preserving her bedroom, which you can be seen in the bottom left hand corner. He marries his second wife Helen Pitts two years later and he does so not knowing that when his mortal time on earth would come to an end on February 20th 1895, Helen would set out and devote herself to making Cedar Hill. Douglass called the property Cedar Hill. Helen makes Cedar Hill a memorial to his life and legacy. Before Helen dies in 1903, she gets Congress to charter the Frederick Douglass Memorial and Historical Association, also known as the FDMHA, to carry on her preservation work. The FDMHA together with the most important Black women's organization up to that point, the National Association of Colored Women in ACW, take on the arduous task of preserving Douglass's legacy and Cedar Hill, making it the Mount Vernon of Negro America. Leaders such as Mary B. Talbert, Nanny Helen Burroughs, Madame C.J. Walker, Sally W. Stewart, Holly Quinn Brown, and Mary McLeod Bethune, just to name a few, performed the painstaking work, the fundraising, the launching of publicity campaigns to preserve and restore the property, installing the heat in the home, preparing the restore the brick walkways, the paveways, working on the windows, working on the steps, maintaining the grounds. Even after President John F. Kennedy signed public law 87-633, establishing the Frederick Douglass home as part of the National Park System, Mrs. Gladys W. Parham, who was the last caretaker of the property hired by the FDMHA and the NACW, worked closely with the Park Service, even becoming an employee of the Park Service in 1965 until her death in 1983. Beyond the actual women themselves, there are a number of objects in the home that help to convey the message that women were essential in the life of Douglass and the property. From the portraits of suffragists Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Katie Stanton that hang on the walls to the domestic parts of the home, such as the kitchen in the laundry room, which were vital to the survival of the home and the family at this point in time in history. We note the importance of washer women and and domestics in American history, particularly African American history. Dr. Carter Woodson writes about the role of washer women and Dr. Elizabeth Clark Lewis talks about the importance of domestics in her book Living and Living Out. To the sundial that was placed on the property by the married women's club of Pittsburgh in 1922, these tangible resources help us to interpret the crucial role of women at this national historic site. Seventy percent of the objects within the home are original and it's phenomenal that these people from these two groups, the FDMHA and the NACW, made up of a majority of women, particularly the FDMHA, had the foresight to preserve these objects, reaching out to Dr. Carter Woodson and his organization, the Association for the Study of Nigger Life and History, to come to the property and organize Douglass's papers. In closing, I ask that when you think about the great Frederick Douglass, and you go to the next slide to give me, when you think about the great Frederick Douglass and you think about his vast contributions and the role of the property not only in his life but in local history. For example, black women educators in the DC public school system teaching their students about Frederick Douglass and raising funds to preserve the property. The role in local history, the role in national history, again this was meant to be Negro America's Mount Vernon. People made pilgrimages to Cedar Hill to visit the property to pay their respects to the great Frederick Douglass. When you think about all of this, remember these three key things. His wives in particular Anna were essential to his success. It was African American women who helped to preserve Cedar Hill and the objects, the artifacts on the property within the home show the importance of women. Keeping those things in mind, you are left with the fact that Frederick Douglass, this great American leader, this great American hero, the patriarch of his beloved family. Douglass was a woman made man. Thank you. We'll now have Barbara. Thank you so much, John, and I want to echo your thanks to the National Trust and also to Heather for inviting us to be here. The Polly Murray Center for History and Social Justice is in Durham, North Carolina. My name is Barbara Lau and I have the pleasure to serve as the executive director there. The center is really a fantastic example. We are a National Trust success story. It was a National Trust field officer, Karen Nicholas, that came and visited us. I think 2014 might have been the first time, helped us become a national treasure, helped raise the awareness of the center, and then with the help of the National Collaborative for Women's History sites, we became a national historic landmark in the very end of 2016. So Polly Murray takes us to the 20th century, and as Heather mentioned, Polly was an amazing, accomplished human being who was the first African American woman ordained an Episcopal priest, someone who influenced Ruth Bader Ginsburg and developed really important legal strategies for the Brown v. Board case and later for many of the cases that undergirded women's rights in the Supreme Court. In fact, Polly's legal strategies and legal theories continue to be important to the fight in the Supreme Court for LGBTQ rights today. And Polly's life gives us this amazing opportunity to look at 20th century activism. There's a historian who said that when we look back at the 20th century, all roads lead to Polly Murray. Susan Ware was her name. And we see Polly's work as a writer and a poet, Polly's work as a protester, Polly's work as a thinker, threaded through all of the major human rights activities of the 20th century. And where did that come from? How did this person really come to be? We like to argue that this person, that Polly Murray became Polly Murray because they grew up here in Durham with their grandparents. As Heather mentioned, their formerly enslaved grandmother and their Union veteran, Union Army veteran grandfather, Robert George Fitzgerald. But they also in this site really began to understand both the power of opportunity. Polly Murray's great uncle, Richard Fitzgerald, by the turn of the century became one of the richest African-American men in the state of North Carolina. And the cruel oppressive hand of, you know, the enduring legacy of racism and in Polly's case as well, sexism, limiting their opportunities. Next slide, please. So we don't have very many artifacts. In fact, the House, Polly Murray's address book, and we are pleased to say that we have somebody standing by to donate one of Polly's typewriters are really most of what we, is most of what we have. So we also turn to archaeology to begin to understand our place, to understand its place in Durham's history and as well as in Polly Murray's life. And one of the things you see in these photographs, so this photograph on the left is this Spanish war cannon that's sort of aimed back at Polly Murray's house, which you can sort of see in the distance is right next to the property of Butts, what is a city cemetery. And this relationship becomes key to understanding how well this house is going to survive. It was built in 1898, but the sloping land that used to be a wheat field that Polly Murray's grandfather Leaston and grew wheat on would bring water down the hill underneath the house. And in fact, as we learned from both our inspection of the property and archaeology, it was pretty much on purpose, right. There was really a good case to be made here of environmental racism where the water was actually directed to the rear side of the house. And in fact, as we were doing the renovation, we had to jack up the middle of the house six inches, and there were what looked like little rivers under the house. But the archaeologists led by an amazing woman, Anna Agbee Davies from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill uncovered hundreds, if not thousands of small objects in the preliminary archaeology work. And one of the things they began to see, and this is one of Dr. Agbee Davies students, Colleen, was the family's efforts to divert the water to build bricks. And in fact, bricks were very important to the Fitzgerald family. This is where Richard Fitzgerald, Paulie's great uncle, began to build his business and make his money. Much of North Carolina is very clay rich. And so building bricks or making bricks for a budding tobacco industry really fueled a lot of growth and development in Richard Fitzgerald's businesses. And so in behind the house, we find these pathways that were meant to sort of divert the water from under the house that was flowing down the hill. But what's interesting about this and about the way that tangible objects help us to understand this amazing life is that there were many, many other objects there found there as well, buttons, pieces of glass, pieces of china, a dipper that we actually took out of one of the walls of the house. And Dr. Agbee Davies is really using these to also help us to begin to question ideas about gender, assumptions that we make about what kinds of objects were used by whom. Paulie Murray was to say the least someone who resisted the boxes, resisted the identity limitations that were often placed. Paulie Murray was born in 1910 and came to live at this house in 1914. And as they grew up, they really discovered that they did not want to conform to what society was saying girls and women should be like. They did not want to feel that they could only do the things that women were able to do. They grew up in a house of incredibly strong women who were educators and community leaders. But they preferred to wear pants and have a play basketball, have a paper route, and so often wore boys clothes. So knowing this, Dr. Agbee Davies is really using this site and some of the things that have been found there to push us to question what we assume about the gendered nature of objects that come from archaeology, which is a great linkage to the stories that we want to tell about Paulie Murray's life and legacy. Next slide please. So one of the things that we try to hold on to is Paulie's determination, which really came from this family of survivors and thrivers, people who are also fighting on behalf of the rights of their communities. Paulie witnessed these great advancement during the decades of their life, and as I mentioned, also the deep racism and sexism. But drawing from their own experience, Paulie resisted those boxes and began to create new language. Paulie coined the term Jane Crow to describe the overlapping oppression of sexism and racism. We now think about that sometimes as intersectionality. Paulie Murray changed their name. They were born in Annapolene and chose in their 30s to use the more gender neutral name Paulie. Paulie's ideas about being different but really validating their own experience gave them that opportunity to create new ways of thinking, began to challenge people like Thurgood Marshall and the people who planned the 1963 march on Washington to think more broadly, to invite other ideas from other people that weren't necessarily the folks that were generally on stage. We try to focus on what Paulie Murray saw as an integrated body, mind and spirit. So that determination that's reflected in this quote, one person plus one typewriter constitutes a movement. For Paulie, words were the weapons and Paulie fought through everything from legal briefs to letters to the editor to a correspondence with Eleanor Roosevelt that was transformed into a decades long relationship and collaboration to poetry. Creativity was a really important part of that. But that determination, that belief that one person plus the typewriter constitutes a movement, that really came from Durham, from what was happening in Durham as Paulie was growing up there and from that family that influenced Paulie. But the idea of Paulie's goal of a integrated body, mind and spirit is essential to the ways that we try to continue in Paulie's legacy to challenge what people think of as the periods of history, what people think of as appropriate ways to think about women and men, to think about straight people and queer folk and to invite other people into those challenges, into that idea that maybe what we thought we knew about American history is not what we know. Maybe there are many other ways to look at that. And we do that in a number of ways through a number of kinds of programs. Today just want to share briefly one program. Paulie Murray wrote a book, a family memoir called Proud Shoes, the Story of an American Family. And for several years we've been creating what we call Proud Shoes Labyrinths, where people are invited to decorate shoes and add information. And then they're laid out into this labyrinth, which then allows folks to reflect and to think about what they're proud of, to think about what's happening for them. Just this last year on Paulie Murray's birthday, we invited these artists and community members to help us create what we thought reflected where we are right now, connected Paulie Murray's legacy and ideas to the present in this lost hope and joy labyrinth. And so throughout this day, in a very carefully sort of socially distanced way, people came and brought objects. There was actually bricks that were brought, as you can see, flowers and shoes and other objects, and then to walk in the labyrinth to think about what was going on today and how we want to show up today as activists, how we want to channel Paulie Murray in our work. Paulie Murray's a relatively unknown person, but who is becoming more and more the object of great public interest in a new Netflix series. Will Smith talks about Paulie Murray's ideas about the 14th Amendment and the powerful advocacy that Paulie Murray was so involved in. And in fact, there's a new documentary film coming out that will be on stream through Amazon this fall that helps more people to learn about that story. And as they learn about it, as they're inspired with Paulie Murray, we hope, of course, they will come and visit us in Durham as we finish the interior of the historic home and add a welcome center so that we can be as welcoming as possible in terms of new visitors and new people who want to learn more about this history. So that's it for me. I think we're going to go to some questions and answers now, but thank you so much for your kind attention. Yeah, everyone doesn't mind hopping up. Heather, do we want to start with a question for you? I've got a bunch in the Q&A, so I can also ask those if you'd like. Well, I think one question we all want to think about for the National Trust, the National Park Service, and every other site and potential site that we know of, is what should be our next steps? How do we take what we keep learning, the people we keep finding, and how do we make them more available and relevant to visitors and virtual visitors everywhere? So I would like to start with that and then let's take some of the questions in the Q&A. Does that work? Next steps, y'all. Yeah, so I'm happy to jump in there just to say that we're learning so much about the power of technology. We have a monthly book club and we're now seeing people participate in that from other countries, and so trying to think about that sweet spot of using technology without discounting the power of putting your feet on the ground in the actual place, feeling how what it's like to be in those places, I think there's a really important balance there. Thank you. I would simply say just, you know, continuing to do the research, looking for connections with other sites is one way to bring this issue to the forefront. As I mentioned, there are National Capital Parks East, there are three historic homes and the other two homes are the Mary McLeod with the Council House, National Historic Site and the Carnegie Woodson Home National Historic Site. And ironically, all three of those figures, Bethune, Woodson, Douglas, there are connections in very interesting ways. And you find that in history, a lot of these figures are connected to one another in some form of fashion. So just, you know, getting out there and doing the research to see how these people, how these figures, the stories, get these connections. I think that's a great point. You can see behind me, everyone, a whole set of books. Those are books that have come out fairly recently dealing with Frederick Douglas and with Pauli Murray as well. And that's really important. And also you have two other sites. You have the Clara Barton National Historic Site and Maggie Walker National Historic Site, who are also part of this group of people surrounding Frederick Douglas. And you're absolutely right. Connections are important. Emily, did you have something you wanted to add? Thank you, John. Yeah, I think, you know, we have a slightly different thing going on with the Narbonne House in that, you know, neither of these women were either connected to great men or were really recognized in themselves. So I think for us, it's more about sort of, you know, understanding the commonality of their lives or how typical were they of women living in, you know, particularly the Seaport communities and the era of change that their lives cover, you know, in Salem, the transition period from the mercantile shipping primarily to industrialization and immigration movement and everything that goes on with that, there's some really interesting questions. So I think one of the things that we're looking towards is we need a really good historic structure report for that house. We have them for the other sites at Salem Maritime. There was a partial one that was written in the 1950s. It includes such wonderful phrases as, we're fortunate that these genteel women lived in poverty because that preserved the house and things like that. And it really focuses, again, on the male owners of the house, but not really saying much of anything about the women who were really, you know, the ones who lived and worked in the house and ran it for those years. And that's really important that we not only deal with those who are famous and well known, but we tell the whole story, including all the different women and all the different men and how people interacted with each other. Thank you. All those are great answers. I strongly think we need more research. We need more preservation. We need more interpretation. Priya. Yeah. So I'm going to actually take some questions and combine them to get to something that we talked about in our planning calls. Two of the questions have to do with sources and how do you find more information about women? And I think it would be great for you all to talk specifically about some of the non-traditional sources that you've been using. And you touched on it in each of your presentations, but the both questions have to do with archaeology. And then what do you do when you can find someone in one census, but you can't find them in a census later? And so I think helping them understand source material for finding women would be great. I think one of the things that all these presentations really show is how it's the combination of different sources that makes the difference and at the risk of whatever. I would say that when I wrote, when I spent five years writing, doing women's history, I spent a lot of time working to identify sources and how to use them to do these things. So there are sources out there that help us write them. We've got a fresh one here. I have the same. So I can, I can take the, oh, sorry. No, no, go ahead. I can, I can take the archaeology questions. I saw that one of them was specifically about the Narbonne house. So there was no garbage pickup in Salem until 1902. So what you did with your, with your broken, with your trash was you threw it in the backyard. A lot of most houses would have had a privy, an outdoor pit toilet, basically. And, and as those, when, when those got, you know, had to be redug, you would fill the old one with your household trash. And you have not seen happy until you've seen the historical archaeologists hit a privy because everything's nicely in layers inside the privy. And I think it's one of the reasons we have an incredible number of chamber pots. Because there was somebody in the, in the early 19th century who kept dropping the chamber pots into the privy. And we're basically like, nope, I'm not going in to get that. So, so that's, and, and, and because we're an urban site and these things tended to happen in like, in like very close areas. I don't know if they've done any digs around Frederick Douglass, but you tend to have like very close areas. We have a lot of complete vessels, much more than you would have and say a farm where stuff gets spread all over. So I was going to say we're, of course, incredibly lucky because Paulie Murray was a packrat and someone who I'm learning from someone who actually helped Paulie edit their autobiography, that part of the reason they wrote that was to put in print the names of all the people that they had also met along the way that they felt had contributed to this work, but not necessarily been named. Paulie was savvy enough to make a decision prior to their death to put the materials in, you know, there are literally thousands of folders at the Schlesinger Library for the History of Women in Boston, because there wasn't necessarily a place associated for long periods of time. Paulie lived at 50 addresses during their life. And so, you know, this constant moving around makes the idea that they kept all of the, all these folders, letters, carbon copies of letters even more amazing. But I think it's not just about how much you have, but what you do with it. So we're discovering that there are so many more stories. We're now learning a little bit about Paulie's role with Eleanor Roosevelt in the crafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is not a story that's been told or written, but is in that archive somewhere, right? Like, so being able to really look at historic material and think about it in different ways and question ourselves about the assumptions we might make about it. I think we'll also bring us much more and deeper history and deeper storytelling that we can then use at historic sites. There's also a bit of humor, which is that as she moved around, and sometimes it was because her typewriters were too noisy, the FBI was tracking her. And so you have FBI files that are showing, trying to prove that she was too radical. Yeah, she luckily applied for a federal job. I know you in the Park Service completely understand this, that when you apply for a federal job of any stature, you have to actually list all the addresses you've lived at. So she did some of the work for them, but again, I think it's also digging in, right, to what you have and thinking about it in different ways. And inviting other people who maybe aren't coming at it from an academic point of view who might be kind of seeing themselves in this person to give you their impressions as well. I think that's another really interesting way to think about using historic materials. Yeah, so it's four or two, so I know we're at time, but I wanted to ask one more question before we close things out. And one of the questions that came in was asking about balance, that as we tell more stories of women at these sites, how do you balance it with the original significance that was determined before? Especially since you're all Park Service sites, how is that working in the National Parks Service for large? That's a red herring. Yeah. But I think so far, at least at our National Capital Parks East, I think we do a decent job of balancing out and leading these stories together. And I think Heather's right. It is a red herring, right? Just because you add more storytelling in doesn't mean you're taking stories out. You can tell more stories. And all it is is telling the full history of a particular place. And it doesn't mean you're taking something away by putting more in. We're actually a private nonprofit, so while we have the designation, we don't have as much confines around that. So I think we definitely put one foot in history and the other one leaps into the present and the future. Great. I think you're also talking about multiple layers in the house. For many, many years, you would go into these houses and they wouldn't talk about domestic staff at all. And I think there's been a lot of folks more recently have been asking the questions. I think shows like Downton Abbey kind of make you more aware of the fact that there would have been domestic service in some of these houses. So you also want to make sure you're telling the story of all the women in the house, not just the head of the household. Because if you don't, you're seriously distorting everything. Great. Thank you, everyone, for being here. Barbara, did you have something to add? I just want to say I think it's our responsibility to the next generation. I think that if we're going to raise women leaders and non-binary people as leaders, we need to give them as much information to stand on as possible. And so doing our job to push those, to sometimes break the rules, to sometimes bend the rules, to sometimes just confront the rules and say, wait a minute, you might have done this for a long time like this, but maybe it's not the right way. I mean, and I know that that happens on all different levels, whether you're private, state, national, and I just want to encourage all the folks in all those levels to keep up that good work. Thank you. So before we close out, I have a few additional pieces of information. First of all, keep talking. One of the features of Preservation Leadership Forum is an online community called Forum Connect. It's free and open to everyone and is available at this link below, and I'll also share the link in the follow-up email. It's a great place to keep this conversation going. Right now, topics are about section 106. They're talking about issues we're discussing today related to integrity. And so just please join us. I'm the community manager for that, so you'll see a lot of me on that space as well. Next round, thank you. Keep learning. We have a couple of different webinars coming up. We have one using state historic tax credits to create affordable housing, which is just next week. And we also have the second part of this webinar series on August 12. I will share the link to our webinar page so you can register for both of those. And then also to learn more about the National Trust Campaign, where women made history. Follow this URL as well, and I will also share that afterwards. And finally, thank you. Our website is forum.savingplaces.org. This is where you can find out information about webinars, but always feel free to email us directly at forum at savingplaces.org. And I think Chris had just the last word. Yes. No, I just thank you, Priya and Rhonda, for all of your work in helping to put this together. But I wanted to offer a special thanks to our moderator, Heather, and all of our speakers, Barbara, Emily, and John, really appreciate everything that you've brought to this conversation today. And all you have done is just underscore the point of how important this work is and how women truly are everywhere. And there are so many ways that we can find them, understand them, and share their stories to help inspire and empower the next generation. So thank you all very much. And thanks to everyone who participated today. Hope you'll all come back and bring some friends for the next round of this, when we really kind of dig into the questions of how to start telling these stories in really in different ways. And that'll be on August 12th. So thank you, everyone. Thank you so much for having us. Thank you. Keep reading.