We’re the Ones Who Get It Done:
Women’s Rights History in 20th Century San Francisco

This map displays 32 historic sites relating to women’s history identified by Dalia Rubiano Yedidia for the San Francisco Planning department.* During the summer of 2019, Yedidia conducted archival research, oral history interviews, and walked around the city in which she was born, raised, to prepare a citywide historic context statement** titled We’re the Ones Who Get It Done: Women’s Rights History in 20th Century San Francisco.

Yedidia’s social history on women’s rights intentionally centers women of color, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and queer women, and women involved in liberation movements. Because of white supremacy and patriarchy, “women’s rights” is often relegated solely to the history of suffrage for white women. To counter this reductionist practice, the report and sites below represent places from movements where women organized to transform their lives and communities through civic engagement, the labor movement, supporting recently arrived young women, leading self-determination struggles, the Women’s Movement, establishing arts and cultural legacy institutions, and fighting on the frontline of the AIDS epidemic.

*This research project began as an internship project with SF Planning in Summer 2019. The SF Planning Department has not verified nor adopted this information as part of its larger preservation efforts.

**A historic context statement is typically a big report that planning departments use to identify potential “historic resources,” i.e. landmarks, and other parts of the built environment that should be preserved and protected because of their historic significance.

Women's Rights Historic Sites of 20th C. San Francisco

As you click around on the map below, think about how you interact with your own neighborhood and its history – past, present, living, dying, unknown and waiting to be learned. Consider how the power of place and the process of remembering offers opportunities to heal and seek justice. How can a city, and the communities of which it is comprised, reclaim and integrate social histories into our daily lives? Share your thoughts and commentary with info@daliayedidia.com.

By Dalia Rubiano Yedidia
Prepared for SF Planning
Engineering by Edgar Saavedra Vallejo
Works Cited
Spring 2020

black
black = Extant (exists)
black
white = Non-extant (no longer exists)