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ON VIEW
EXHIBITION
Voices of Progress: Twenty Women Who Changed New Orleans
April 13-September n, 2016
Williams Gallery, 533 Royal Street
Free
A Margaret Haughery monument
1890; gelatin silver print by George Francois Mugnier, photographer 7980.137.1
Leading Ladies
Voices of Progress celebrates women who changed New Orleans for the better.
The spring exhibition Voices of Progress: Twenty Women Who Changed New Orleans honors 19th- and early 20th-century New Orleanians who pushed boundaries, spoke up, and left the community a better place for all. Some were businesspeople who used their prosperity to help other women advance in the workforce; many selflessly gave their time to orphanages, woman suffrage, preservation, or civil rights. The exhibition is part of a larger, community-wide event spearheaded by the group Nola4women, which champions the many economic and cultural contributions of women and girls. With the approach of New Orleans’s tricentennial, the organization has challenged universities, museums, and cultural institutions around the city to create exhibitions and programming celebrating the achievements of women, and The Collection is happy to participate.
The extraordinary women featured in Voices of Progress come from many different backgrounds but are united by their tenacity, altruism, and love for their city. They were products of	their	time	but also forward	thinkers: they could see a better future for New
Orleans, and they	worked hard to	achieve it.	Here’s a sneak peek at three of the women
featured in the show:
Margaret Haughery (1813-1882)
Though she is more visible in present-day New Orleans than many of her contemporaries, with a statue in her honor at the intersection of Camp and Prytania Streets, Margaret Haughery deserves a closer look. Born in Ireland in 1813, she immigrated at the age of
five to Baltimore with her parents and two of her five siblings. By age nine, she was an orphan. At 21, she married, moved to New Orleans, and had a child. Tragically, both her husband and child died within the next two years.
Haughery stayed in New Orleans and worked as a laundress. She began donating her extra wages to the Sisters of Charity, who ran the Poydras Orphan Asylum. Eventually she began working for the Sisters of Charity and saved enough money to buy two dairy cows to start a business. As her small dairy expanded, she acquired a bakery and prospered. Haughery used her newfound wealth to help finance the construction of orphanages such as St. Teresa’s Asylum, St. Elizabeth’s Asylum, and St. Vincent’s Infant Asylum. Haughery supported the orphanages for the rest of her life and even afterward: when she died in A 1882, she left her entire fortune to charity.
2 The Historic New Orleans Collection Quarterly