A National Park for Women's Rights: The Campaign That Made It Happen

By Judy Hart

A National Park for Women's Rights chronicles a little-known story in American history: the establishment of the Women's Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, New York; the first "idea park" in the National Park system. As told by Judy Hart, its visionary founder and first superintendent, the park's story is one of struggle and perseverance, opposition and solidarity.

Hart narrates the uphill battle she fought to secure the park's location—on the site of the first women's rights convention in 1848—and to gain respect for the idea of a park dedicated to women's rights from 1978, when she first championed its creation to the triumphant moment in 1982 when the park opened its doors, and following years.

Hart's journey highlights the prejudices and resistance that she faced, like other women who have advocated for themselves, their rights, and their place in America. Going behind the scenes of the park's planning and the negotiations, conflicts, and collaborations that shaped the final vision, A National Park for Women's Rights highlights the contributions of Park Service officials, politicians, and interested citizens in Seneca Falls, despite opposition from within and beyond the Park Service.

An inspiration and rallying cry for women (and their male allies) to tell their stories and claim their place in American history, A National Park for Women's Rights also offers a model for public history activism. No matter how daunting the opposition to such acts of historical memory-making are, Hart's experiences remind citizen-activists to dream, organize, and persist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Three Hills
• Release date: Oct 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781501771675

Book preview

A National Park for Women’s Rights

The Campaign That Made It Happen

Judy Hart

Three Hills

an imprint of

Cornell University Press

Ithaca and London

This book is dedicated to

my grandfather James Solomon Hart

Inspiration is contagious.

Contents

Preface

1. Women and the National Park Service

2. A Radical Idea for a New Park

3. Our Women Have Made Us Famous

4. Crafting the Legislation

5. Congress Embraces the New Park

6. Liftoff for the Park

7. Alan Alda Opens the Park

8. Stanton House Sheds Her Disguise

9. The Sacred Laundromat

10. Wesleyan Chapel Reimagined

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

Appendix 1. Dramatis Personae

Appendix 2. Legislation Creating the Women’s Rights National Historical Park

Appendix 3. Declaration of Sentiments from the 1848 Convention

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Preface

This story began early. When my father, Gaylord Hart, returned from his World War II Navy duty in the South Pacific in 1945, he purchased a home next door to his father, James Solomon Hart, on Cleveland Avenue in Kansas City, Kansas. As a young child I loved to sit in my grandfather’s parlor. We did not talk much, but I liked to be in his presence and listen to his conversations with those who came to consult with him. Grandfather Hart would be smoking a cigar or a pipe, and my fingers would be curled on the carved wood lion’s heads on the arms of my favorite chair. In the summertime Grandfather would sit on his wraparound front porch with neighbors and friends, and I was allowed to sit there and listen.

He lived a bold life, including packing his four young children and wife and gear into a car and driving from their home in Randall, Kansas, to Yellowstone National Park in 1918 for a six-week camping adventure in Wyoming. His wife, Mamie, had to navigate their way using the infamous Automobile Blue Book version published in 1917, which included directions like Pass wooden school on left keeping straight ahead thru all intersections. My father was six years old for this adventure and mostly remembered his parents arguing about directions the whole length of the trip. When Grandfather decided to add cattle and sheep to his wheat farm in Randall, he traveled to Mexico to bring back the best stock. To stave off marauders for this dangerous trip he ordered a custom belt that held four-inch brass bullets, polished to gleam and sparkle, that completely circled his girth. He returned safely and brought his cattle and sheep with him.

Grandfather Hart moved his family to Kansas City, Kansas, where he founded several major grain companies, the final being Hart-Bartlett-Sturtevant. He was the president of the Board of Trade, where grain was bought and sold in Kansas City, in 1933. He was president of the Home State Bank of Kansas (merged in 1994 with Bank Midwest of Kansas). He was director of the state department responsible for evaluating the quality of grain being sold, and created a bucket mechanism for on-site quality testing. Grandfather traveled around the state in an outfitted railroad car to promote the use of this device to establish fair standards for valuing grain. He was elected a state representative and subsequently a state senator. He seemed not interested in amassing fame or wealth. His joy was making things happen that would improve the lives of others and helping others find ways to make their dreams happen.

On February 5, 1958, my high school history class was bused to our state capital, Topeka, from our suburban Kansas City high school. The Statehouse was enormous, beautiful, and grand. In my suburban neighborhood everything was newly built and lovely but not grand. The Kansas Statehouse was built with Kansas limestone and completed in 1903 after thirty-seven years of construction. It was my first experience of architecture that took my breath away. My class walked in and climbed many steps up to the House gallery to watch the proceedings. The House chamber was huge and impressive. In a serendipitous coincidence, members were praising my grandfather, who had recently passed away. The delegates voted to approve House Resolution #22 honoring my grandfather. From that day on I have been infused with appreciation for the law, and what could be accomplished through the power of words to improve society. I was inspired by Grandfather’s devotion to public service as a way of improving the lives of others. My copy of House Resolution #22 is still with me.

Figure 1 In a summertime scene under a tree, a dapper-looking older man in coat and tie and hat holds a toddler in a floral dress.

Figure 1. My grandfather James Solomon Hart and me. Credit: Margaret Mills Hart.

One thing Grandfather did say to me a few times: Always go to the president. He was so wise: three consecutive directors of the National Park Service in Washington—presidents of their service—stepped out beyond their agency practices and opinions with giant leaps to help make an important park happen, including during the headwinds of the Reagan/Watt administration.

This book is my memoir of my public service with the National Park Service from 1978 until 1990. I was inspired by my idea that became a dream and then a vision that became the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls and Waterloo, New York. I passionately believed that a national park honoring the history of women should be added to the National Park Service sites. As the chief ranger for legislation in the Park Service regional office in Boston, I proposed the idea for a women’s rights park in September 1978. The park idea was launched in earnest when I made the first phone call to Seneca Falls. I was on the Park Service study team that made the initial visit to Seneca Falls in December 1978. In early 1979, after the proposal was approved by the Park Service, I drafted the legislation to create the park, which Congress later enacted. I traveled many times from Boston to Washington to draw in support at Park Service headquarters and also on Capitol Hill. After Congress authorized the new Women’s Rights National Historical Park in 1980, the Park Service’s regional director in 1982 selected me as the first park superintendent, and I moved to Seneca Falls during Women’s History Week in March of that year.

It sometimes happens that an individual or a community or a member of Congress will bring a park proposal to the National Park Service. That did not happen for Seneca Falls. There was resistance in the Park Service to this new park on women’s rights, with historic structures that did not meet the standards of the Park Service. The fact that the idea came from within the agency, and slowly worked its way up to approval at the highest level, was important for the proposal. And the Park Service changed through the process, becoming more accepting of women’s history and social history.

Some have asked why I poured my heart and soul and most of twelve years of my life into creating this park. I was dedicated to creating a place that would physically represent the movement to guarantee the rights of women in the United States. The sites in Seneca Falls and Waterloo were a life dream come true for me: a place to establish a physical presence to celebrate women working together to change American society. And a place where women could give voice to their own story. The gift to me was I would be able to make it happen.

I am not a historian. This book is my memoir of the early days of creating and starting up the Women’s Rights National Historical Park and acquiring and preserving the historic structures that provide the base for sharing the story of the 1848 convention and what followed.

My earlier life seemed a coordinated plan to prepare me to take on this seemingly impossible dream. When I was in fourth grade my family left Cleveland Avenue and moved to a huge new planned suburban development crafted for limited diversity, Shawnee Mission, Kansas, in northeast Johnson County. It was a charmed and protected life of neighborhood playmates, Girl Scouts, bicycle riding, and church activities. But I wanted to experience a broader view of America for my college years and therefore limited my applications to large coeducational universities. My family and many friends went off to Kansas University in Lawrence. I wanted something like my Shawnee Mission High School but bigger and more diverse and chose to go to Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, for my undergraduate degree. I selected the school from Lovejoy’s catalog of colleges without ever visiting the campus.

Cornell University, with its twelve thousand students, including undergraduates and graduate students, was a shock to my sheltered life. In September 1959 I flew out alone to Syracuse, New York, via Chicago—my first time flying. There was a bus to Ithaca and finally a cab from the bus station downtown up to my new home, the vast Clara Dickson freshman women’s dormitory. The cab driver stopped at the rear loading dock because it was late, so I shuffled through the dark kitchen and out to the brilliantly lit huge parlor where all the girls were seated in a circle around the edge of the room.

It was my introduction to Cornell, and I could see I was in over my head. The sea of girls, many of them from Manhattan, was visibly more sophisticated than I could hope to be. My white cotton bobby socks did not measure up to their standard of knee socks that matched their eye shadow. Adjusting academically as well as personally that first year was a challenge. Walking through the Arts Quad to my Goldwin Smith class building, I wistfully looked over at the architecture building. I dreamed of transferring to the architecture school, but friends persuaded me to not take on a field considered so unwelcoming to women. It is not surprising I would later be drawn to oversee the preservation of the historic structures in Seneca Falls and Waterloo.

May 1963 was graduation from Cornell’s arts college, with a major in English and a move to Cambridge, Massachusetts, for the three-month Publishing Procedures Institute at Radcliffe College. I loved the teachers and the courses and flourished there, including falling in love with Cambridge and Boston and all of New England, and chose to spend the next twenty years there.

In September 1963 I began my first job, as a secretary with Little, Brown & Company in children’s book production. My boss let me manage the scheduling of production of all the children’s books, but it was not easy surviving on a salary of $5,000 a year. The following year I took a position as editor of two newsletters for the Boston Safe Deposit and Trust Company. Encouraged by a my mentor in management, I began to consider turning my talents into a career. My expectation growing up in a suburb of Kansas City in the 1950s was to marry quickly after, or even before, graduation from college and let that define my future. But toiling over the newsletters, I began to think that I liked working, although I wanted to work at something that made a positive difference in people’s lives. In 1966 I quit my job and for two months traveled alone through England and France. I did not get to meet Twiggy.

On my return I lobbied for months for a position with the prestigious Boston Redevelopment Authority. May 1967 was the beginning of a major shift in my life: I was hired, and my new position was to evaluate resources for families who would be forced to move out of their home because of government acquisition. I had always been devoted to fairness and became committed to implementing the new Massachusetts law that protected families forced to move by the government. I dedicated myself to treating people as equal citizens, first in the Boston Redevelopment Authority, then the Department of Community Affairs for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and finally for the Federal Highway Administration, all in their Boston offices.

My time at the Federal Highway Administration was contentious. The engineers did not want to hear that their highway projects would only be feasible if there was adequate housing for the individuals and families who would be displaced by their work. I was distressed that they seemed to care more about pushing their interstate highway through Boston and Cambridge and Somerville than about the lives of the women and children and men who would be deprived of their homes.

One day in 1973 I noticed a listing for the National Park Service in the directory of federal offices in Boston. I thought they might be nicer to work with than the engineers at the Highway Administration. And I had toiled for ten years blocking projects deemed harmful and unfair and inhumane. I wanted to begin creating projects that helped people and improved their lives.

I left the Highway Administration in 1974 for more education to help me do more to satisfy my passion for fairness. One semester of law school at Suffolk University in Boston was not inspiring. A high school friend was one of the few women enrolled at Harvard Law School, and her description of her experiences there discouraged me. Another friend told me about the master of arts in law degree program at Goddard College, and that seemed perfect.

I applied to Goddard and was accepted. Their program focused on the concepts of law, legal research, and the consequences of the application of laws. A hands-on field project was required. I was privileged to consult with a community group that wanted to block Harvard University’s proposed plant to burn trash from five hospitals and use the steam for heating or air conditioning. The group lived in a long-standing community of affordable housing called Mission Hill that overlooked the proposed incinerator. The smokestack for the incinerator, while seemingly tall, would have been blowing smelly toxic smoke right into their noses up high on their hill.

I advised the community committee for their big group meeting with the Massachusetts secretary of environmental affairs. Each person from the community raised a different objection to the Harvard environmental impact statement report. We particularly raised the regulators’ awareness when we began to talk about body parts and dirty diapers being tossed into the very long tubes that were to connect each hospital with the central incinerator—and possibly occasionally getting jammed partway down the tubes. I also brought my photographs taken at the site the day before the meeting. There were enormous black clouds of dust and dirt billowing up from the demolition site: Harvard had received a provisional permit to begin demolition and had promised the site would be watered down and no dust and dirt would be released in the air. The secretary canceled the provisional approval, and Harvard abandoned the project shortly thereafter.

My degree thesis was on the power and strength of a three-legged stool: three legs could work together to create major social change: community activists, elected officials, and government agency insiders. The so-called bureaucrats could advise the outsiders just what they needed to do for their project to be successfully launched. It was inspired by my work for the state Community Affairs Department at the time when the National Welfare Rights Organization (NWRO) had organized their national project on Cape Cod. They were demanding decent and safe housing for the low-income families on the Cape who would be displaced for higher-paying summer tenants. Our team at the Community Affairs Department would drive down several days a week to the Cape, attempting to negotiate housing leases for the families there. The NWRO group spent much time and energy demonstrating against us, even driving up to Boston once to stage a sit-in in my office. The NWRO protesters seemed unable to get past seeing us as the enemy.

On completing my degree in 1975, within six weeks I was hired by the National Park Service as the first woman in a professional position in land acquisition and relocation in the entire Park Service. I was assigned two very sensitive projects for nationally significant houses that the Park Service had recently acquired.

Val-Kill, Eleanor Roosevelt’s home in Hyde Park, New York, had been leased to tenants for several years. Their relocation was smooth, as there were many choices for their moves. The second assignment was not only more challenging but more fun. The quite elderly former owner of the Martin Van Buren mansion in Kinderhook, New York, had found no place to move to and was nervous and anxious and a bit difficult, understandably. The Park Service was agitated, as the repairs and renovation of the mansion had been funded and were under way, but the former owner seemed always underfoot. After several conversations during which he came to trust me, and my fruitless trip out to Kinderhook to review the nonexistent housing resources, he delightedly accepted my idea of moving to the charming gatehouse at the entrance to the mansion grounds. He loved overseeing the Park Service restore his former home until he passed away.

I was enthralled by the National Park Service. I was deeply committed to public service, and I had found an agency that did good things for the public and the future of the nation. The idea that important stories of our history would be told in their original buildings on their original sites and would be preserved in perpetuity, meaning forever, captivated me in my heart and soul. In perpetuity was a new phrase to me, and I heard it often. The National Park Service was created to preserve places of national significance and invite the public to enjoy and learn from these places that were protected for this and future generations—forever, in perpetuity. What mission could be more captivating, more fulfilling, more interesting? In my mind, none.

My second position with the Park Service, still in the regional office in Boston, was chief ranger for legislation. My work was ideas, proposals, and legislation to create new parks. My lifetime dream of a job! I could not have imagined a more exciting and fulfilling job for me. In this new position I had the opportunity to suggest a new kind of park—a park for women’s history.

One of the great joys for me was the friendships created as we worked together to lift this new park off the ground and acquire and preserve its historic structures.

Two young women, Ann Marshall and Ray Kinoshita Mann, had won the design competition for the Wesleyan Chapel, a centerpiece building in the new park, and we became good friends. In January 2017, we decided to return to Seneca Falls to join the Women’s March. Millions of women were expected to march in Washington, DC, in protest of the new administration of Donald Trump, and millions more were pledging to gather in cities all over the country. The Friday before the march I flew in to the Syracuse airport, and Ann and Ray picked me up in their car, having driven over from Amherst, Massachusetts, where they both lived. That Friday we went over to the park to see the Wesleyan Chapel. We were devastated. We knew that the chapel had been reimagined from their winning design, but seeing it was still a shock. I had secured commitments to build their winning design, but there had been no promise that a future superintendent would not lead efforts to demolish their vision. I tried to comfort us all by saying the park had redefined in perpetuity as twenty years.

On Saturday morning we arrived early at Declaration Park in time to hear the speeches from the long stage overlooking the park. We were amazed as the space quickly filled with marchers, and then the streets filled. It was announced that there was a mile-long backup of cars trying to get off the interstate to come down to Seneca Falls. The protest planners originally expected a few thousand, and just before the event they increased the estimate to six thousand. The official count was ten thousand, even though there were marches in three cities within an hour of Seneca Falls, including Ithaca, Syracuse, and Rochester. I was sitting on the raised walk across the back of the park. I waved when it was announced that I had suggested the park and been its first superintendent. I did not expect the cheering of the crowd. I decided that day that I would write this book describing how the park came to be. The old story mattered again.

For over thirty years I preserved the planning documents for the park and many notes I had written at the time and, most helpfully, my hour-by-hour appointment calendars for all my years in Seneca Falls. I had moved my personal boxes of records with me back and forth across the country, thinking I wanted someday to write this book. It was finally time to do it.

I have devoted much of my recent life’s time to writing this book, for several reasons. I want to highlight the ways that seemingly impossible obstacles were overcome. And I want to recognize and honor the many individuals who extended themselves to make this park come alive. And I hope this book inspires readers to make their big dreams happen, even if told they are impossible. My highest compliment was from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a hero in the development of the park. He autographed his picture with To Judy, who made it happen.

Figure 2 A map shows the five large narrow lakes in central New York (plus a couple of smaller ones) that are shaped like the fingers of a hand. Seneca Falls is at the north end of Cayuga Lake, the center of the hand.

Figure 2. Seneca Falls and the Women’s Rights National Historical Park are at the northern end of Cayuga Lake in upstate New York. Credit: Bill Nelson.

1

Women and the National Park Service

The Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, New York, commemorates the 1848 Women’s Rights Convention held in the Wesleyan Methodist Chapel in that small upstate town and the ensuing fight for women’s rights. Among other rights that they could not exercise, women in America in 1848 could not vote and could not inherit or own property, and they could attend only a very limited number of colleges. On July 13 of that year, five women met for tea in the Hunt