‘A Tour of Her Own’ highlights women’s history, rights and wrongs, in DC

Looking to learn more about women’s history here in the nation’s capital? There is a D.C.-based tour company that covers everything from the Revolutionary War to Julia Child and also “women’s rights, but also women’s wrongs.”

“A Tour of Her Own” was founded in 2018 as the first tour company in Washington to focus exclusively on women’s history.

“I like to think of our team as Jills of all trades — we do a little bit of it all,” Rebecca Grawl, the vice president of education for A Tour of Her Own, told WTOP.

They offer everything from budget-friendly two-hour walking tours that focus on a specific neighborhood, such as Downtown, Georgetown and Arlington National Cemetery, to an extended bus tour where they educate women on leadership lessons learned from important women in history.

Grawl told WTOP that a major reason why A Tour of Her Own was created was because, as tour guides, she and founder Kaitlin Calogera often showed the average visitor the typical sites and memorials on the National Mall that honor important figures in American history, but “women’s history isn’t so obvious.”

“Even though women have been here from the beginning, even though women have shaped not just our nation, but certainly our wonderful city, they don’t always have the statuary and the memorials and the famous buildings,” Grawl said. “But if you peel back that layer just a little bit, you start to realize that there’s women’s history on every corner of Washington.”

Grawl gives private tours of Arlington National Cemetery and discusses one of the many influential and famous first ladies, Jacqueline Kennedy.

“We always talk about Jackie Kennedy, not just because she’s buried there with her husband, but because she shaped so much of her husband’s legacy after his death,” Grawl said.

She was “very thoughtful and considerate in the way in which his grave site and memorial were designed, down to the location of the eternal flame and I really like to talk about her role as sort of the widow leading a grieving nation during such a difficult time.”

A female sculptor for Lincoln

Also buried at the cemetery is Vinnie Ream, a female sculptor who sculpted President Abraham Lincoln when she was a teenager. Congress later commissioned Ream to create the statue of Lincoln that’s at the U.S. Capitol building today. She even designed her own grave marker.

Grawl said that a popular neighborhood to tour is Georgetown, which is filled with a rich feminine history.

“I love walking the streets of Georgetown, because you can talk about some wild women. There are women who lived in Georgetown who were working as spies during World War II with the Office of Strategic Services (a precursor to the CIA),” Grawl said.

One such young member of the OSS was celebrity chef Julia Child, who appropriately lived on Olive Street in a “butter yellow” house in her early adulthood.

“She worked directly under ‘Wild Bill’ Donovan, who was the founder of the Office of Strategic Services, where she worked in analysis and research,” Grawl said. “Donovan understood that (the U.S. couldn’t) have a foreign intelligence agency if they didn’t tap into the resource of women during war.”

Women’s contributions to war efforts are a common topic on A Tour of Her Own tours, from Martha Washington knitting socks for Continental soldiers to the Treasury girls who began working for the department during the Civil War.

“It was quite scandalous that these, in many cases, young, beautiful women were working at the Treasury Building, and sometimes not always treated very respectfully while they were on their job,” Grawl said.

Courtesy A Tour of Her Own

Courtesy Architect of the Capitol

Courtesy Architect of the Capitol

WTOP/Luke Lukert

WTOP/Luke Lukert

WTOP/Luke Lukert

Women in the gunpowder trade

Another Civil War site that highlights a more tragic side of women’s history is at Fort McNair, the former site of the Washington Arsenal where young Irish immigrant women worked making gunpowder. On June 17, 1864, an explosion killed 21 women there.

“A memorial was dedicated at Congressional Cemetery, and President Lincoln himself attended that ceremony to really honor these young women who gave their lives to do very hard, back-breaking, hot labor, dangerous labor for the war effort,” Grawl said.

Another highlight of the tour is discussing the women’s suffrage movement and the historic 1913 parade in the District organized by the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

“That was headed up by a young woman named Alice Paul, who had returned from London and was really inspired by what was considered the more militant or radical actions of the British suffragettes,” Grawl said. “She wanted a public demonstration, so within just a matter of weeks, she organized the first political protest to take place on Pennsylvania Avenue.”

She said while we may now be used to seeing near-daily protests in the nation’s capital, in the early 20th century, “nothing like this had happened before, and it really did push the movement into a new era of more demonstrations, more protests, more action.”

Grawl told WTOP that their tours are not just for women but for anyone who wants to learn more about women’s history and the D.C. area.

“The story of Washington is a story of women who’ve helped build and shape and create this wonderful city that we call home,” Grawl said.

Tours can be booked on their website. Grawl said they can easily be customized for different groups.

She and Calogera have also co-authored a book about their tours, “111 Places in Women’s History in Washington That You Must Not Miss.”

“What I love about the guide is you can flip through it alphabetically. You can go to the back and look at the map, pick your neighborhood and find out what little sites of women’s history might be right there in your own backyard,” Grawl said.

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