Embracing the Parallax: Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland
February 2, 2025 – March 30, 2025

• Learn more at The Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, NY.

Embracing the Parallax: Berenice Abbott and Elizabeth McCausland will showcase twenty-two gelatin silver prints from the collection that span key points in the photographer Berenice Abbott’s career, and pair them with the writing of her lifelong romantic partner, art-critic Elizabeth McCausland. Centering photographs and text from the 1939 book Changing New York, this exhibition will unpack Abbott and McCausland’s prolific partnership and explore how it contributed to key moments in the crystallization of modernity. A part of the Heckscher’s 2025 Pride initiative, this exhibition raises questions about the politics of visibility and invisibility by examining Abbott and McCausland’s intellectual partnership and romantic relationship. Abbott and McCausland’s collaborative projects demonstrate how documentary photography can be used as a tool to foster civic responsibility by exposing the invisible social, economic, and political factors that shape our world.

This exhibition was curated by Jessica Rosen, Curatorial Assistant.

Featured on the Heckscher website is the film, “Berenice Abbott: A View of the 20th Century” by Kay Weaver and Martha Wheelock. Critics place Berenice Abbott at the head of her class; she was one of the greatest American photographers of the 20th Century. Filmed during her 91st and 92nd years, the open-hearted Abbott takes us on a guided tour of her century.

• Read the Full Story in NY Times.

The end of a presidency tends to bring a rush of last-minute monument making, and Joe Biden’s was no different. In his final week in office, he designated nearly 850,000 acres of federal land in California as two new national monuments.

Biden, headlines noted, had protected more land than any president in history — some 674 million acres. But amid all the fanfare, another piece of news out of the White House passed with little notice: the signing of legislation allowing a monument dedicated to American women to be built on the National Mall.

When completed, the Women’s Suffrage National Monument will be the first on the Mall honoring women and their history. But it could also very well be the last, given a 2003 law banning new monuments there.

The site of the suffrage memorial has yet to be determined. And there is no design yet. But that its backers won a rare exception illustrates the complexities of navigating the intricate politics surrounding the most symbolically freighted patch of civic real estate in America.

Despite support from two presidents, all six living first ladies and a bipartisan array of legislators, the project met with roadblocks and behind-the-scenes opposition. Success came only in the final hours of the 118th Congress — when failure would have meant having to start all over again.

It wasn’t quite as dramatic as the photo-finish of the 19th Amendment, which cleared the final hurdle in 1920 after a 24-year-old Tennessee state legislator had a last-minute change of heart after receiving a letter from his mother urging him to “be a good boy” and support women’s suffrage.

But Anna Laymon, the president and CEO of the Women’s Suffrage National Monument Foundation, said that even when the gavel came down in the Senate, approving placement on the Mall, she couldn’t quite believe it.

“I was told more times than I can count, including by very important people, that there is no space on the Mall for women,” she said. “I was asking for one acre, but I was told I was asking for too much over and over and over again by people with the power to say no.”

The Mall, which is overseen by the National Park Service, draws roughly 36 million visitors a year, more than Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon combined. Of the 40 commemorative works and historical sites in the core area, there are 22 dedicated to male historical figures, 10 to military history and veterans, three to foreign relations, two to private organizations (including the Boy Scouts), one to postal history, one to canals, one to horses and zero dedicated to women.

Not that women have been indifferent to memorials in Washington’s sacred civic spaces. They were instrumental in organizing support (and raising money) for the Washington Monument, the first memorial on the Mall, whose cornerstone was laid in 1848.

And in 1921, to honor the 19th Amendment, suffragists unveiled a grand marble sculpture honoring Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. It was on display in the United States Capitol for one day — and then banished to a service closet under the Rotunda for the next 75 years. (It was moved back upstairs in 1997.)

Today, Laymon said, there are only about 10 monuments to women’s suffrage across the country, including one installed in 2020 in New York’s Central Park. That statue was the first — and still the only — statue of real-life women in the park. But it also stirred fierce debate, after the original design was criticized for seeming to erase the contributions of Black women.

Laymon said the suffrage monument on the Mall will draw on the diverse perspectives of its board and scholarly advisers, as well as the public.

“It can’t be one monolithic structure,” she said. “It has to be as multifaceted as women were then and continue to be.”

Read the Complete Story>

• Learn more from Beverly Press.

On Jan. 17, then-President Joe Biden declared the Equal Rights Amendment is the law of the land.

“It is long past time to recognize the will of the American people,” Biden said. “In keeping with my oath and duty to Constitution and country, I affirm what I believe and what three-fourths of the states have ratified. The 28th Amendment is the law of the land, guaranteeing all Americans equal rights and protections under the law regardless of their sex.”

The amendment was first proposed in 1923. The ratification process began after the text, written by suffragist Alice Paul, was passed by both houses of Congress in 1972.

The law states, succinctly, that “equality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex.”

It then took decades for the amendment to reach the necessary 38 states for ratification. What happens now, however, is subject to debate. The National Archives said that the “underlying legal and procedural issues” with the amendment had not changed, which include a 1982 deadline that many consider unconstitutional. The city of West Hollywood positioned itself squarely in the center of the debate over the ERA in October, when an art installation entitled “FINAL IMPACT” calling for the publication of the amendment adorned the side of the West Hollywood Library.

“I’m glad to see the president declare that the Equal Rights Amendment is the law of the land but he did not tell the archivist of the United States to publish the ERA still leaving a lot in limbo,” West Hollywood Mayor Councilman John Erickson said. “Given the current Supreme Court makeup and new and existing legal challenges, I’m hopeful that this move by President Biden will be far more than just symbolic. We still have work to do to pass the ERA and West Hollywood will be there to help in whatever way we can.”

Longtime ERA activist Zoe Nicholson heralded the development as pivotal for the fight for the amendment.

“There are two things required in the constitution for an amendment, one, a super majority of the states have to ratify it, and secondly, that it goes into effect two years from that occurrence,” she said.

Nicholson, now 76, was on the frontlines of the Women’s Liberation movement in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1982, she fasted with six other women at the Illinois statehouse in attempt to convince the state to ratify the ERA. Nicholson was also present in Virginia in 2020, when it became the 38th state to ratify the amendment, which is the number necessary for inclusion in the Constitution. Based on that ratification, the ERA could be argued as having gone into effect on July 27, 2022 – exactly two years later.

The debated ratification deadline of June 30, 1982, is ironically, the day Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, 3rd District, was born. The deadline is argued by some to be unconstitutional, an opinion seemingly shared by Biden.

“We recall all of the trailblazing women who, since the early days of women’s suffrage, have fought like hell for what they deserve: equal rights under the law,” Horvath wrote in a statement. “Thank you, President Biden, for your decency and heart, and for doing the right thing for women across our beautiful country. I look forward to the archivist publishing the Equal Rights Amendment, affirming what our President has declared today: it is the law of the land.”

“We should be living as if it’s true simply because it’s the right thing to do, not because it’s written down in a hall, or because Congress voted XYZ,” Nicholson said. “I am grateful to Joe … I think somebody approached him where he lives, which is his heart … And I think somebody, and that person was [Sen. Kirsten] Gillibrand (D-New York), said, ‘Look, we know [that according to a recent] poll was just recently taken that 76% of America believes that equal rights for women is the correct thing to do. You’re not going to make enemies by doing this, Joe, and don’t annihilate the movement.’”

Nicholson added that people don’t understand how change happens in society, noting that while the Emancipation Proclamation was made in 1863, it took many years to be fully realized.

“What people really are confused about change actually happens in within the people, and it goes up the ladder of power, and the laws reflect what the culture has already decided to support. So it happens through the arts, through film, through poetry, through live action, through activism,” she explained.

She noted that Jan. 17 was one of the best days of her life, and it changed her status from an ERA icon and authority on the women’s suffrage movement, to an “icon of persistence.” On Jan. 27, Nicholas will offer her book, “The Hungry Heart,” which documents her fast and fight for women’s rights, free for download on her official website, zoenicholson.com.

Legal battles are expected to debate whether or not the amendment will be included in the Constitution. Still, the move was celebrated by many celebrities, public officials and feminist leaders. Former Secretary of State, Senator and First Lady Hillary Clinton referenced her famed 1995 speech from the United National Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, China.

“Women’s rights are human rights, and human rights are women’s rights,” Clinton wrote.

With deep appreciation, respect and love, we honor two founding Board Members of Wild West Women who have recently passed away.