Notice

Masks required in Abakanowicz Research Center; optional for rest of Museum MORE

Philanthropist, Organizer, Agitator

CHM curatorial intern Brigid Kennedy recounts the extraordinary life of Mary Livermore. This blog post is part of a series in which we share the stories of local women who made history in anticipation of CHM’s upcoming exhibition Democracy Limited: Chicago Women and the Vote. Mary Livermore dedicated her life to abolition, temperance, women’s suffrage, and More

A Fighter for Workers’ Rights

In this blog post, CHM curatorial intern Brigid Kennedy recounts the life of labor organizer Lucy Parsons. The details of Lucy Parsons’s early life in Texas are murky, and she herself provided different accounts of her youth and heritage. Her race was the subject of public debate, but she claimed only Mexican and Muscogee Creek More

Bertha Baur: Civic Leader, Feminist, Republican Party Powerhouse

Known today as a Democratic Party stronghold, Chicago has ties to the Grand Old Party dating to Abraham Lincoln’s times. One twentieth-century GOP stalwart was Bertha Baur, who long made her home at 1511 Astor Street in the Gold Coast. National Republican Committeewoman for Illinois from 1928 to 1952, Mrs. Baur had a groundbreaking career More

Fighting for the Right to Vote

For Women’s History Month, head into storage with CHM collection technician Jessica McPheters for a closer look at two artifacts that document twentieth-century political strife and women’s suffrage in Chicago. In the summer of 2016, the collections team began working on an inventory of the Decorative and Industrial Arts (DIA) collection at the Chicago History More

South Side Girls

                                  Marcia Chatelain. South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration. Durham, NC, Duke University Press (2015). This is a very important study of lives of black girls during the Great Migration. At its core are the girls themselves, More

The Illinois Women’s Agenda

Collections volunteer Robert Blythe details the history and contents of the Illinois Women’s Agenda records in our Research Center. The records of the Illinois Women’s Agenda (IWA) shed light on the many and varied activities that characterized second-wave feminism in America in the 1970s and 1980s. Established in December 1975, the IWA was a coalition More

Women Who Changed the World

Laurie Calkhoven. Women Who Changed the World: 50 Amazing Americans. New York: Scholastic (2015). This is a book for children that, not surprisingly these days, includes an edition on Kindle. Among the fifty women is Chicago’s Jane Addams. In his Author! Author! blog series, Museum president Gary T. Johnson highlights works that draw on our More

A Convergence of Designer Histories

Former CHM costume collection intern Michelle McVicker writes about a fascinating discovery she recently came across in the Museum’s archives. She is currently a MA candidate in Fashion Studies at Parsons School of Design. Pauline Trigère (1912–2002) was a French-born American designer. It would seem as though her future in fashion design was predetermined, as More

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