Jason Church talks with Joanne Westbrook about preserving and presenting the National Women's Party collections at the Belmont-Paul House.

"...the National Women's Party has actually been collecting since the 19-teens, when they were lobbying Congress for the right, for women's suffrage. And luckily, we had some women in the party who were very forward-thinking and knew that this was going to be an important organization and important work to commemorate for the future..."

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TRANSCRIPT:

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Jason Church: This is Jason Church, Materials Conservator at NCPTT, and today, I'm talking with Joanne Westbrook. So what is your official title and position? This is for my own knowledge, actually. How is the Park Service tied to the National Women's Party?

Joanne Westbrook: So my name is Joanne Westbrook, and I work for the National Park Service. I am one of the museum curators for the National Mall and Memorial Park. It is a rather large park, with more than 32 individual sites and reservations across the District of Columbia. So we've got a pretty big reach, and my specific responsibilities are working with Ford's Theater National Historic Site, and the Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument.

And the relationship with the Park Service and the NWP, the National Women's Party, goes back to the 1970s. So the National Women's Party have their final headquarters on Second Street, right across from what is now the Supreme Court. It wasn't there originally when they bought the house. And in the 1960s, it came under threat from development for the Hart Office Building, which is right next door now. And there was a large outcry from the Washington, DC community to protect the house, not only because of the work of the NWP and their contribution to women's suffrage and then women's rights throughout the 20th century, but also because it is one of the oldest standing buildings in Washington today.

So a lot of preservation support came out, and they were able to successfully lobby Congress to not take the main building. There were some other buildings next door that NWP owned that were demolished, unfortunately. But the main house, what used to be known as this Little Belmont House, is still standing.

In the 1970s, the National Women's Party wanted to take this a step further, to make sure they wouldn't have to have this discussion and this public outcry to help them again. And so in the 1970s, they were successful in getting the house listed both on the National Register and as a national historic landmark, and they were able to successfully lobby Congress to create a partnership agreement with Department of the Interior, through the National Park Service, who helped them maintain the grounds and the collection.

And then in 2016, President Obama issued an order to make the site a National Monument, so the National Park Service was given the house, and the National Women's Party was allowed to continue to use it as their headquarters and maintain the collections on-site. So we have been close partners for over four decades now.

Jason Church: Well, you brought it up, so let's talk about your amazing collection. There are other sites with also amazing collections, but in my mind, yours really stands out with your amount of textiles.

Joanne Westbrook: Yeah, absolutely. So the National Women's Party has actually been collecting since the 19-teens, when they were lobbying Congress for the right, for women's suffrage. And luckily, we had some women in the party who were very forward-thinking and knew that this was going to be an important organization and important work to commemorate for the future. So they began collecting a lot of two-dimensional objects, the archives, things like that. Some of them, they donated to the Library of Congress in the 1920s. And as you said, we have an incredible collection of textiles that they used in their marches, in their protests. Everything from the iconic tricolor banners that they carried on their banner poles to banners made in honor of different women, banners that were carried by different groups of professional workers, artists, women in the federal government, banners carried by state contingents who came in to lobby for women's suffrage.

So it's really incredible, and the collections also have quite a bit of other material related to the work of the NWP, so we have a lot of the printing blocks that were used to create their publications, first with the Suffragists and then with equal rights. We also have quite a bit of furniture that the NWP used, from the teens down into the 1990s, when they were still lobbying for women's rights and hosting different events and different people from Congress, all sorts of movers and shakers in the city of Washington, DC. So it's a fantastic collection.

Jason Church: So is the National Women's Party still collecting banners and protest material?

Joanne Westbrook: So the National Women's Party actually ceased their lobbying efforts in 1997 and became a 501(c)(3) organization focused really on education about their work and about the continued need for work for women's equality in the United States and around the world. So they're not collecting as heavily as they used to. However, they did collect a little bit around the Women's March back in 2017.

Jason Church: So if someone comes to visit the collection, what would they expect to see?

Joanne Westbrook: The collections that are on site normally and available for visitors to see include scrapbooks that were created by some of the founding members. There are a lot of bold materials, so some of their publications, a lot of the pamphlets they were handing out in their campaign for women's suffrage. We also have some really neat commemorative pieces that they would do as well, little ceramic figurines. We've got a makeup container branded with Logan for women's suffrage. We've got sashes of course. We also have, what I think are really cool are three pieces of textile that were stolen by one of the women who were arrested when they were being held in the workhouse. It's some really iconic, really important pieces talking about the work at the NWP and what it took to have this successful campaign for women's suffrage.

Jason Church: So we talked about these textiles, which are now 100+ years old. What is it like to store and conserve all of these variety of materials? I know a lot of them are satin. What is that like for you?

Joanne Westbrook: So I love textiles and I also hate textiles from a preservation standpoint. So I do have some conservation training early in my grad school career before I realized that I wanted to work with collections on more of a holistic level. So my lens in viewing collections is always from that preservation standpoint and textiles present very unique challenges, especially I think the textiles of the National Women's Party present even more unique challenges because many times when the women were putting together these textiles that were part of their marches and their protests, so it's costumes that they had in tableaus; there are tabards that they would wear over their clothing. They weren't making them like they would make their own clothing, like they would make textiles that they knew would be used many times and needed to have a long life.

So textiles are very fragile normally, light damages them and you can't undo it. It all adds up through the lifetime of an object. If they're dirty, the dirt can also damage them more when they're in storage. And we see that a lot with women's party textiles because as you can imagine, they were wearing these marching through the streets even when they were getting arrested. And so we find there's been a lot of wear and tear on these textiles and that ages them and makes them a little more vulnerable to the agents of decay. So part of how we deal with these challenges is we try and store them properly as much as we can.

We, with all the banners, we roll them in, you get a tube and muslin and you wrap it and make sure that it's protected from light and other pollutants as you can. For as many of them as we can, we keep them in the Park Service’s Museum Resource Center, which is a 53,000 square foot climate controlled facility out in the suburbs of Washington DC to help prolong their life. We try and keep the textiles on a rotation when they're on exhibit. So if you go to the site in one of the rooms, you can see a cap and a cape, and we rotate that out every few months to try and limit the damage that we can. And we're actually really excited. We're looking to have a collection condition survey done this fall to have some expert conservators come in and kind of look at the collections and give us an update on our priorities for the second century of stewardship.

Jason Church: So as a curator, what is your favorite object in the collection?

Joanne Westbrook: Oh my gosh, that's so hard. That's like being asked about your favorite child.

Jason Church: We won't tell the other objects what you choose.

Joanne Westbrook: I appreciate that. Oh my gosh, that's so difficult. I'm new to working with the Women's Party with their collection. Previously I had been at the Museum Resource Center working with the collections of other parks in the region. So I'm still learning about the collection. And honestly, the banners are great. The banners are iconic, but it's some of the printing blocks, and I know that sounds really weird, but it's a plate of metal. It's a wooden block. But I'm more concerned about the work of history, how these organizations did the work that they did to create a change in our country. And so for me, the printing blocks are really emblematic of that because so much of the work of the Women's Party was constantly pushing out their own publications. So not only the Suffragist and Equal Rights, but the