6
Liftoff for the Park
On December 28, 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed the legislation enacted by Congress to create the Women’s Rights National Historical Park. That date was three months into the federal fiscal year, and the Park Service budget had been approved months before. No funds had been allocated for this new park. The incoming Reagan administration granted a startup budget for the first year, 1981, of only $5,000. The regional director had submitted a request for $400,000. I was devastated by the news, and the enthusiastic supporters in Seneca Falls were aghast and disheartened, and some felt betrayed. To reassure the community supporters that the National Park Service cared about the park, I suggested a new role for me. The regional office created an unofficial title for a nonexistent job: I was named the “park coordinator.” Officially, I remained the salaried chief ranger for legislation in the Boston office, and this new assignment would fall under “other duties as assigned” in my official job description. The $5,000 paid for my travel to Seneca Falls once a month, maintaining a sense of momentum with our supporters during that first year, 1981.
My number one priority that year as park coordinator was meeting monthly with the Stanton Foundation. Our ladies’ agreement for the Park Service to purchase the Stanton house from the foundation once they completed its agreed purchase from Ralph Peters dissolved when Secretary James Watt announced a prohibition against purchasing any property. The foundation was unwilling to donate the house to the Park Service. They had struggled to raise the funds to purchase the home and wanted to be reimbursed. Also, they knew that owning the home would give substance and visibility to their fledgling organization. Over long and challenging discussions, one by one the directors became willing to turn the house over to the Park Service after hearing my message: there was a new and mighty threat to this park that was still only a piece of paper with the important signature of former President Jimmy Carter, and it might not survive as a national park if the Park Service couldn’t gain a foothold by owning property. Finally, the board of the foundation agreed that their most important priority was getting the national park onto stable footing, and so they consented to donate the house to the National Park Service. Surprisingly, Secretary Watt had banned the purchase of property but not donation.
But then, to complicate things even more, the Stanton house’s owner Ralph Peters announced that he would not go through with the sale of the house to the Stanton Foundation because he did not want it donated to the Park Service and be managed by the new administration. Peters believed the newly elected Reagan administration would never restore the home and open it to the public. Audie Malone, the real estate broker who had sold the home to Peters three years earlier, telephoned Peters regularly for months explaining the process and reassuring him that regardless of the occupant of the White House, the Stanton house would get good care from the National Park Service. Peters refused to budge.
I was eager to try new approaches. I had met Sheldon Fisher, the owner of a museum of antique farm equipment in a barn on his family property in nearby Victor, New York. Sheldon had become friends with Peters. As nerves became increasingly frayed by Peters’s resistance and his perhaps justified fears of Secretary Watt, Sheldon Fisher invited me to stay at his family home on one of my monthly trips. After supper, Sheldon brought a huge crystal into the living room. It was the size of a small pig and had a perfect natural point at one end. Sheldon directed the point of the crystal at Seattle and guided us in visualizing Ralph Peters becoming willing to sell the Stanton home to the Stanton Foundation. I was hopeful. This area of New York had been named the “burned-over district” in reference to the waves of religious enthusiasm, communal living developments, and spiritualism that were intense in the years preceding the 1848 convention. And I had learned that some who dug the many water wells to serve the homes and farms not on town water still used their dowsing sticks to locate a water source. We were all hopeful but disappointed that Ralph Peters still did not change his position after our session.
During this time of strife and discussion, Peters’s ex-wife decided that she wanted to move to Seneca Falls from Seattle to live in the Stanton home and open it to the public. She planned to sell souvenirs inside the home to pay for the restoration, inspired by the example of Sheldon Fisher, who welcomed schoolchildren to tour his barn holding his collection of antique tools and equipment. Peters’s ex-wife allowed Park Service preservation experts to enter the house to assess the required repairs; they judged the needs for deferred maintenance alone, apart from longer-term preservation, to be considerable. The analysis by historic architect Blaine Cliver of the National Park Service Preservation Center in Boston foreclosed any discussion regarding selling souvenirs to pay for the restoration and maintenance of the home.
Throughout 1981, Ralph Peters was still refusing to sell the house because of the new president and secretary of the interior. Something was needed to break through the impasse, and that something turned out to be Russ Dickenson. Director of the National Park Service at the time, Russ was a distinguished gentleman, always engaging, often smiling, tall and elegant with gleaming silver hair; he looked exactly like the director of the National Park Service should, I thought. The annual meeting of all the regional directors with Dickenson was scheduled for several months later in Seattle, where Ralph Peters lived. As the time for the meeting approached, I petitioned my acting regional director to ask Dickenson to meet with Peters while he was in Seattle. A meeting was set for December 4. I requested to also attend and was approved to fly out to Seattle for the meeting.
I knew Ralph Peters had steam to release. I had been talking with him regularly. I flew into Seattle two days early so that I could sit down with him before the meeting with the director. We met at my hotel, taking two large stuffed chairs facing each other in the middle of the lobby. Peters repeatedly banged his fists up and down on the chair arms and shouted with no restraint and at great length about how much he hated President Reagan and James Watt. I kept looking out the corners of my eyes to see if anybody was calling the police on us. Or if perhaps there was a cheering squad in the background. Peters finally calmed down somewhat, and I was able to explain that the director of the Park Service had the authority, and the ability, to make certain the house was restored and opened to the public. The next day Peters and I met with Director Dickenson and the acting regional director in the impressive regional offices of the National Park Service. Peters was calmer but still agitated and vehement. He would only sell the home to the Stanton Foundation so they could donate it to the Park Service if Dickenson gave his personal word that the home would be restored as quickly as possible and then opened to the public. Dickenson unhesitatingly gave his personal word and commitment, and at last Peters said yes. An enormous sigh of relief wafted from Seattle to Seneca Falls to Boston. Finally, on January 6, 1982, Ralph Peters sold the house to the Stanton Foundation. On June 29, 1982, the Stanton Foundation donated the home to the National Park Service.
During that first year with its tiny budget, I worked with Holly Bundock in public affairs in our Boston office to create temporary exhibits. Holly and I drafted basic interpretive information and had it professionally typeset and mounted on foam core boards in Boston, and I drove the pieces out to Seneca Falls. Village architects Bert Fortner and Phil Prigmore acquired twelve flat-panel doors, which I intended to stain purple. The historic suffrage colors were purple and gold and white, but the doors came out pink. The doors were then laid out on the floor of Bert and Phil’s very large office so that I could glue the interpretive pictures and text onto them. Then Bert and Phil hinged the doors together to create three connected units of four panels that could stand on their own. The result was practically instantaneous exhibits for a few hundred dollars, with thanks to the skills and ingenuity of Bert and Phil and Holly. That was the first physical presence of a national park in Seneca Falls.
Bert and Phil’s spacious office had once been the parking garage for the village refuse truck. The June weather was gorgeous, and we opened up the big overhead doors at the sidewalk so that everybody walking by could check out the progress on the pink doors: gawking was welcomed. One woman came back again and again to check out our work. We celebrated the opening of the first exhibits for the new park in the National Women’s Hall of Fame museum with a wine and cheese reception. One exhibit remained in the Hall of Fame, and the others went on display at Eisenhower College and the Holiday Inn in Waterloo.
To maintain a sense of momentum, there was also an event in the new Elizabeth Cady Stanton Park across the street from the laundromat. I announced that the United States Congress had enacted the legislation to create the new Women’s Rights National Historical Park. A small crowd of friends attended, including Mayor Robert Freeland. Though the press corps might have outnumbered the guests, they did their job well, spreading the news of the new park.
My favorite childhood games helped me figure out how to make something out of nothing. As a child I would make a pretend house by leaning cards against each other and challenge myself to make the house of cards ever bigger and taller. I frequently thought of this metaphor as I pulled together the pieces of the park. If I could make it appear more substantial, I would do so.
On January 24, 1982, Herb Cables was officially appointed the new regional director for the National Park Service in Boston. Formerly the superintendent of Gateway National Recreation Area in New York City, Cables was the first-ever African American regional director in the National Park Service. He enthusiastically supported the new park on women’s history. He moved some funding out of each of his parks and assembled $60,000 in order to support the Women’s Rights Park for the 1982 budget from January 1 to October 1, the end of the federal fiscal year. That provided for appointing a superintendent, a leader who would move to Seneca Falls to begin development of the park.
I believed James Watt’s new policies might lead to the total loss of the newly authorized park unless someone was living in Seneca Falls and actively developing the park. The National Park Service as yet owned no historic properties, or anything else, in Seneca Falls, and there were no staff there. There was no office or visitor center, and the centerpiece of the new park was a privately owned, active laundromat. It was a hard decision to leave my much-loved home and friends and life of twenty years in the Boston area. I feared that no one else would take on the gamble of a major failure of the park because of actions, or inactions, by the new Watt administration.
Several months earlier I went out for lunch one beautiful spring day and was sitting in the amphitheater in front of Boston City Hall. The amphitheater was a large half circle of concrete steps, which that day were serving as seating for a concert. I was with a Park Service confidante, and we were discussing our futures—she was about to get married, and I was getting restless. I said to her, “I want to be doing something that makes a difference,” and that sealed my fate.
I became willing to be selected superintendent and move to Seneca Falls. I applied for the post because I wanted my park dream to become real.
I was an obvious choice, as I had suggested the park, written the legislation, promoted it, and traveled out to Seneca Falls for a week at least a dozen times in 1981, helping to inspire the enthusiastic support team of partners who would be needed to lift the park off the ground. Herb Cables wanted the park to succeed, and he told me he had faith in me. He picked winning horses, he said, and he put his money on the horses he picked to win. When I decided I was willing to be the first superintendent, Herb canceled the competition for the position. He simply transferred me to the new job, which he could do since the new job matched my existing grade level and my classification in the ranger series. No promotion; I would still be a GS-12. Herb and I flew out to Seneca Falls that January for the official announcement and press conference on my own appointment.
Less than two months later, on March 11, I was driving my little Mazda from Boston to Seneca Falls, heading into a freezing rainstorm. I had driven across the Massachusetts Turnpike without drama and was on the New York State Thruway just past Albany, with hours to go, when the occasional drop of slop appeared on my windshield. Soon I heard the intermittent crackle of sleet on glass. My Mazda was loaded with my belongings for my initial move to Seneca Falls. I was terrified. I knew my car was close to useless on snow or ice, much less in freezing rain. I was not willing to pull off the road. I had hoped to get to Seneca Falls before the storm began, and I wanted at least to arrive before dark and cold set in. I had made a commitment to those I worked with in Seneca Falls that I would move during Women’s History Week, which had just been designated in 1981 by a joint congressional resolution. My mantra kept me driving as I repeated to myself over and over that I was OK in the moment and I just might be OK in the next moment also.
But it wasn’t just ice I feared. I was moving to an unknown future, and I was afraid I was moving for no good reason. In 1982 the park was just words on special vellum paper with a few important signatures, including former president Jimmy Carter’s, and many shared dreams with the community.
I had not put my home in Somerville up for sale; part of me longed to stay there, but the bigger part of me kept driving into the ice storm. I made a commitment to myself and to the park on that long drive that I would quickly create something in Seneca Falls that could not be erased by the new administration. I did not know what it would be, but it would be dazzling. That work had to be done in person and not on the phone from Boston. The freezing rain began in earnest just as I arrived at my Thruway exit. I was able to get off the Thruway and onto State Route 414 and dramatically reduce my speed heading south to Seneca Falls. I missed any solid ice and avoided hurtling off the road. I arrived safely, to stay that first night at the home of Stanton Foundation president Corinne Guntzel. I collapsed in a deep sleep early in the evening. The stress of the hours-long drive through threatening weather, plus the stress of packing up to move the week before, had exhausted me.
The next morning, I settled into my temporary office in the WSFW Radio building with great gratitude. George Souhan, the owner of the radio station and an early park supporter, had generously loaned me his office: it was well lit, heated, in town, on a paved street, and had the company of the radio station staff at hand. And I had a telephone. The office had huge windows overlooking Fall Street and was just across from the Wesleyan Chapel, at this time still the Seneca Falls Laundromat. It was the perfect location and a generous gift to me. The office of Doug Auer, the WSFW station manager, was just a few feet away. Doug was also a Cornell graduate, and we shared many conversations about starting up the park. Doug had been active in politics since his college years and was a master of strategy. The reporters came and went and were always interesting to talk with. Nearby the ticker tape clicked away almost constantly, bringing in the national news via the wire services. It would be years before the internet broadcast the news.
My new office was an enormous help. During my frequent visits in 1981, I had generally lodged and worked out of the Holiday Inn in Waterloo. There were two phone booths in the lobby there, and I would make calls from one of them and give my return number as the booth next to it so I could take the maximum number of phone calls. This was of course decades before mobile phones.
Terry Savage had kindly lent me the Park Service credit card for a shopping trip at the office supply store he used in Boston. I had left with scissors, a stapler, and staple remover—all in red—plus paper and pens and a steel ruler. The special handoff was an electric typewriter, the premium Selectric with two tapes: one black ink and the other white correction tape. No more retyping an entire letter for one typo—the machine would precisely type over the miscreant letter with whiteout. It was the biggest breakthrough in decades, it seemed to me, as a typist with limited skills. The Selectric also had a steel font ball that could be easily changed for a different font. It was the Cadillac of typewriters at the time. No computer, and no cell phone, yet. I brought with me one of my big black desk phones from my home in Somerville. Communication was simple: a telephone call, or a typed letter to be mailed, as there was no Federal Express delivery authorized by the Park Service and no fax, yet. No email, of course. They were all in the future. I did have several journals of notes from phone calls and meetings on the park from before my move. I also had a collection of phone numbers from my years working on the park proposal.
I left the office early that first Friday, and Corinne helped me unload my car and settle into my new temporary residence: a hunting cabin twenty minutes south of Seneca Falls. It was one large room furnished with a bed, a couple of chairs, and a table. The kitchenette was in one corner, and there was a small bathroom. The cabin was in the center of a property of hundreds of acres, at the end of a very long double-rut dirt track that began behind an enormous locked metal farm gate. And I could not install a phone. But the place was loaned to me at no cost, which was a godsend, as I was still paying the mortgage on my triple-decker home just north of Boston. Having no commitment, no contract, reassured me that I could still go back home. Everything I had moved with would fit right back into my car. I wanted to start up this new park, but it was a comfort that I could still return to my home in Somerville if the first few weeks turned disastrous for the park, or me.
Since I had decided to move to Seneca Falls, I was going to make a park happen in 1982, that first year. I decided there would be a grand opening ceremony, and it would be a big one, which I believed would fend off the threats of the new administration. There was at that time nothing to open but the idea of the park. Still, an opening ceremony would begin to make real my dream of a park. There was nothing for a visitor to see but the exterior of the Elizabeth Cady Stanton home and the Seneca Falls Laundromat. A park visitor could not even get out of the rain or use a Park Service restroom. And my new office in the radio station could hold only five visitors.
As a beginning step for visitors, the park needed a visitor center. The park needed a structure to provide shelter from the weather, and it needed public bathrooms. Most important, the visitor center would be the gathering place for visitors to learn the history celebrated here. Many years later, while reminiscing about this crucial step, Coline Jenkins, the great-great-granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and a supporter and activist for the park, said that a visitor center was where pilgrims would gather from all over the world to meet and interact with each other. In March 1982 we wanted to attract pilgrims but had no gathering place for them. The park was still just an idea.
I wanted a presence in downtown Seneca Falls befitting the significance of the new park. Some of the early occasional visitors found it wonderfully ironic and sometimes humorous that the most important structure for the 1848 convention had devolved into a laundromat. Others were offended and angry that the structure had not been honored with preservation and maintenance. A visitor center would show that the Park Service cared about the visitor experience, especially since it would be years before the Stanton house was preserved and opened to the public. We were prevented from even purchasing the Wesleyan Chapel by the new administration of Secretary Watt.
In those days the General Services Administration of the federal government, known as the GSA, signed major federal leases. And, ever so fortunately for the fledgling park, the GSA also paid the rent for the leases it signed, through a Park Service allocation that did not come out of the park budget. Before moving to Seneca Falls, I had written to the GSA, asking that it send someone to visit the park and secure rental space there for a visitor center and offices. In March, shortly after I moved to Seneca Falls, I visited the New York City offices of the GSA and explained that I really, really needed them to quickly visit Seneca Falls and find a space to rent for the visitor center and offices for staff. There were few commercial vacancies in Seneca Falls in 1982, and I was unaware of any suitable space to suggest to them. Two GSA staff did come to Seneca Falls promptly and reviewed all the commercial spaces available to rent. They reported back that afternoon with satisfaction and pride that they had found a home for the park: a used-car showroom a few miles down a highway south of town. The used-car operation was using only half of its building, and the GSA deemed the other half perfect for the park offices and a visitor center. Unfamiliar with the region, the GSA did not consider that few if any visitors would arrive in town on that road.
The GSA staffers had done their best within their guidelines for safety and on a short deadline, but I saw only dismal failure. Discouraged by the GSA visit, I met with George Souhan in his favorite office in the historic Seneca Knitting Mill, which he also owned. The knitting mill was directly across the canal from the Wesleyan Chapel and was a grand, very large, very handsome three-story building of large, dressed stones. Souhan knew Seneca Falls, and he had great ideas. The GSA-recommended site report angered him. With perhaps a dose of “I’ll show them,” he announced, “I will do it myself.”
George Souhan and his wife, Sue, had been leaders of the community for decades and were among the most enthusiastic individuals in the village when it came to the new national park. A man of great imagination and a larger-than-life “make it happen” character, George knew that a furniture store on Fall Street was going out of business. He bought the building from the retiring owner and hired an architect. The furniture store building was adjacent to the historic Gould Hotel to the east and two doors from the Wesleyan Chapel to the west. The location was perfect. The building was perfection also: the ground floor front windows stretched side to side and floor to ceiling, as did the front windows on the second floor.
GSA officials traveled back to Seneca Falls to meet with George in the now empty furniture store. Neither George nor I understood beforehand what would be involved with GSA standards, and we shortly discovered they were way beyond the usual in Seneca Falls. It was an understatement that the existing furniture store building did not meet GSA standards. The biggest issue was just one stairway to the second floor, as typical in the other buildings on Fall Street. GSA required two stairways, and one had to be protected with firewalls on all sides. The gap was so great that GSA refused to sign any agreement or even have any verbal understanding before planning and design and construction were finished. George had to complete the building and then invite the GSA to return, hoping that they would agree to sign a lease and pay him rent. If the GSA did not approve the work, the park had no funds to pay for the rent. It seemed to make George that much more dedicated to succeeding.
Both floors of the furniture store were wide-open spaces. I requested a welcome-ranger counter close to the front door of the first floor and two new accessible restrooms, plus back wall windows that could open for fresh air in addition to the new HVAC system. George’s architect designed and built a simple but beautiful layout for the welcome counter and adjacent restrooms, leaving most of the first floor open for exhibits. The second floor included one office/meeting room, a large open space for staff, and a small supply room. Among other surprises, the GSA had required a kind of carpet not available anywhere in the region; local purveyors said no one in the area had ever tried to meet the GSA standards for fire resistance.
On hearing the story of Souhan’s dedication to the new park, Sue Sauvageau, an artist recruited to teach at Eisenhower College, said that George “is on his way to sainthood.” Even Sue, a resident of Fall Street and close observer of events in Seneca Falls, had not been aware of the extent of George’s gamble with the new visitor center. Most fortunately, the GSA returned to Seneca Falls and signed a lease agreement with George for our beautiful new visitor center.
In the midst of the chaos of planning the park opening, we put together a celebration for the first official visitor to the new park on May 7: our leader and hero for the legislation, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan. George Souhan was a friend of the senator and encouraged his early visit. I selected a turquoise siding shingle that had been removed from the Stanton house; it was “old” and authentically from the Stanton house but not of the historic period. Pat Haines, who had been the first to join the new park’s staff, mounted it on burgundy velvet and encased it in an elaborately carved wood frame sprayed gold. It was finished with a small brass plate saying it was from the Women’s Rights National Historical Park. Senator Moynihan walked with George Souhan from the Gould Hotel around the corner to look at the Wesleyan Chapel, then back to the hotel, accompanied by two Seneca Falls police officers and the Seneca Falls press corps. I was to later learn that it was routine and necessary for such important public figures, certainly including a famous senator, to have police protection when out and about.
The local organizations that had supported the legislation and early work expected that the park would open in 1982 during Convention Days weekend, the annual community celebration of the 1848 convention. Convention Days was only months away in July. Construction for the new visitor center would be completed just in time for the celebration.
Now it seemed to me even more important to have a major opening event, and that meant hiring additional staff. I interviewed and hired college students to be rangers for just a few weeks for the first summer: Janice Friebaum from Eisenhower College, Connie Hasto from SUNY Oswego, Ann Ritter from SUNY Geneseo, and Deborah Wolfe from Cornell University. I also hired for the summer two professors of women’s history: Nancy Hewitt, who taught at Rutgers University in New Jersey, and Judith Wellman, who was researching her book The Road to Seneca Falls and teaching women’s history at SUNY Oswego. Pat Haines initiated organizing a women’s history conference. It was an impressive brain bank of women who had the knowledge to create the programs for that summer. Herb Cables also transferred his former assistant from Gateway Park to the park in Seneca Falls for the first summer.
The new staff would gather for meetings in my one-room office in the radio station; they could all fit, as long as they were standing. To sit down, they had to choose a step on the stairway down to the basement. Doug Auer was most accommodating to the enlarged staff, but we did begin to call our space Rabbit Heaven. There were only about six weeks to plan, design, and produce the exhibits for the walls of our visitor center still under construction. The four new rangers and two new historians and Pat Haines could hardly do their work sitting on the dark steps to the darker basement of the radio station. I scrambled to find a place to work and in desperation settled on the historic Cline barn. It was adorable at first sight, with red siding and white trim, but it had no electricity and no bathroom. It was just off Fall Street at the other end of town, three blocks away. I wanted the office to stay on Fall Street and be accessible to the park partners and to the community. I signed an agreement with the Cline barn owner without GSA input, because the park was paying for the six-week contract. There was also zero possibility that the GSA would agree to a lease that met only two of their standards: the barn did have both a roof and walls. The barn’s owner agreed to install electricity, lights, and a bathroom with running water. But the authority of the GSA was sorely missed when none of that ever happened and we had to move in anyway on June 7, 1982, with just weeks to get ready for the grand opening.
Our electricity in the barn was supplied by fat and very long orange extension cords strung through the open beams, and our lights were bare bulbs hanging down from the orange cords by more orange cords. Pots were scattered around to collect the water coming through holes in the roof when it rained. We never did get a bathroom; we had to walk to the local hospital a block away. It got to be a long walk and required strategic planning to work around the meetings and phone calls and visitors. There was of course no heat, and we wore coats during much of June. Then we nearly died of the heat when in July there was no air conditioning. And the flies, oh the flies! It was a barn, after all, and the flies did not choose to move out when we moved in.
We did, however, enjoy having newish desks and chairs, which the GSA donated to us when some other agency had to close its office in Boston. Thanks to the regional office staff, the office furniture was shipped out to Seneca Falls on the truck that brought my personal furniture to my new home. In the middle of all the turmoil, I had purchased a restored circa 1850 Greek Revival farmhouse about fifteen minutes south of Seneca Falls.
There were highlights during our time in the gloomy Cline barn. Professor Judy Wellman held brown-bag lunchtime talks for the community. For one talk, Judy was wearing a fur-trimmed parka as she spoke. We needed chairs for the guests at her talks. A local store carried bright red folding chairs that matched our office equipment: the red stapler and staple remover brought from Boston and the newly installed red office phones. All four of the rangers were dispatched to pick up the chairs. On returning they marched up to my desk, stood in line, and saluted me. Each was wearing a simulated pearl necklace purchased at the nearby department store. They had observed that I wore my real pearl necklace every single day; I had shared with them that I had received a beautiful string of pearls as a Christmas present while visiting Toronto in 1980 when I heard that the legislation had been signed by President Carter. I wore them to remind myself to listen, to react gently to criticism, and to be gracious and grateful. And when stressed, I would play with the pearls.
It was critically important to finish the exhibits that would be hung in the new visitor center. They had to be simple and creatively cost-effective, as there was no funding for them. For the 1981 interim exhibits Holly Bundock and I had written a few paragraphs and picked out some historic photographs, had them printed and reproduced professionally and mounted on foam core boards, which were simply glued to the infamous pink doors. For the first visitor center, we replicated this process with the superb assistance of Syracuse Blueprint. Three of the new boards were life size and just glued to the long side wall with accompanying interpretive panels. Numerous smaller prints were glued onto the reused pink doors. I drove to Ithaca and found unfinished wood letters twelve inches high. I bought the letters to spell out “Women’s Rights National Historical Park,” and we sprayed them shiny gold and glued them to the wall over the ranger welcome counter. They looked quite elegant and professional.
There was contention over my decision to limit the chronology of the exhibits, and interpretation, in the new visitor center to end in 1920 when the right to vote was finally achieved. There were some women who were offended that I did not include the 1977 Women’s Conference in Houston. But that was an easy decision: the park mission in the legislation was to interpret the history of women’s rights, and the Park Service used fifty years to define “history,” so the recent gathering in Houston was out of the question. In a 2019 interview, Coline Jenkins said that her mother, Rhoda Jenkins, remained adamant that the park’s interpretation should have included the introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment in Seneca Falls in 1923. I did not believe the battle for women’s rights ended with attaining the vote in 1920. But I did believe that including the introduction of the Equal Rights Amendment would have led to demands to interpret the contemporary and controversial campaign for the ERA—the modern activism that I had so repeatedly and emphatically been warned to avoid. I remained quite concerned about an administration attack on the park and could not think of a quicker way to call an attack down on us. My priority was getting the park up and running and strong enough to withstand whatever political winds were to follow.