The Intersection of Gender and Early American Historic Preservation: A Case Study of Ann Pamela Cunningham and Her Mount Vernon Preservation Effort

The Intersection of Gender and Early  American Historic Preservation: A Case Study of Ann Pamela Cunningham and Her Mount Vernon Preservation Effort, Dr. Jill Teehan, Georgetown University Law Center

• Ann Pamela Cunningham saved George Washington's Mount Vernon home
• She was the chief architect of the historic preservation movement in the United States
• "She manipulated ideals of womanhood associated with the elite antebellum South to gain necessary political leverage for their cause."(3)
•  "Historic preservation pursuits gave Cunningham and America's women a channel through which to contemporaneously work within and overcome norms about women's roles"
• "Women's early historic preservation efforts resulted in important gains for women's legal and political equality with men."
• "Men and women alike viewed the effort to preserve his home as a political undertaking especially suited for women, as it required virtue, purity, caretaking and moral guardianship, traits overwhelmingly associated with womanhood at the time."
• "The focus on patriotism enabled Cunningham to characterize her public, political efforts as sufficiently feminine, since it was acceptable, even expected, that women be the preservers of culture and historic pride."
• "Cunningham's grassroots organizational approach to historic preservation was particularly well-suited for women in the antebellum period. As they were precluded from participation in more traditional, male-dominated forums of political change, namely the government, both state and federal, this bottom-up organizational approach and form for the MVLA focused efforts on a more local, community level. This organizational strategy gave women power to organize an historic preservation movement despite lack of direct access to channels of political change. It also provided a form of organizing that transcended preservation efforts, setting a platform for later, more radical women's rights organizing."
• "Cunningham's devotion to a purist vision of preservation [was] perhaps her most enduring contribution to historic preservation"
• "Cunningham derived a purist model for historic preservation from socially constructed associations between femininity and purity, as well as from ideas that women were the purist guardians of history and culture in the antebellum period."
• After his presidency, Washington resided at Mount Vernon until his death in 1799. At that point, plantation ownership passed through a series of descendants who lacked either the will or the means to maintain the property. Finally, John Augustine Washington offered it for sale in 1848. Both the state of Virginia and the federal government repeatedly declined to purchase the home and the estate. This refusal to act was, at least in part, because John Washington was intractable with respect to his $200,000 asking price, which the government was not prepared to pay, especially with the nation on the brink of civil war. (7)