Last month, the National Park serviced awarded a $50,000 grant to Washington DC to fund a study of women’s history and the suffrage movement in the district.
The grant is a part of a larger NPS project, the Underrepresented Community Grant Program, to nominate locations related to underrepresented historical communities to the National Register of Historic Places. To that end, the goal of the grant is to amend two existing landmark nominations to include information related to women’s suffrage and to submit two new nominations of sites related to women’s history in DC. The study will focus on the period between the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 and the DC Home Rule Act in 1973.
Jennifer Steingasser, D.C.’s Deputy Director of Development Review and Historic Preservation, placed the grant in the context of the centennial of the 19th Amendment. “On the Centennial of American women obtaining the right to vote, this study will identify the important themes related to women’s history and the Suffrage movement. As the nation’s capital, Washington, DC served as the backdrop for many historic events as women across the nation struggled for equal rights,” Steingasser said in a statement.
The non-profit organization DC Preservation League will manage the grant.
Washington DC has received two prior grants as a part of the Underrepresented Community Grant Program. The first grant funded a study of the city’s Chinese and Korean communities, and the second grant was used to produce a Historic Context Statement for Washington’s LGBTQ Resources.