The Independence Heritage Museum is pleased to host a traveling exhibit from the National Library of Medicine (NLM): Confronting Violence: Improving Women’s Lives/ Enfrentando la violencia, mejorando la vida de las mujeres.

Activists and reformers in the United States have long recognized the harm of domestic violence and sought to improve the lives of women who were victimized, but there was a time this was not so. Until the late 1970s, medicine as a whole had largely dismissed or failed to acknowledge domestic violence as a significant health issue.

Nurses took up the call for change, standing in the frontline as they pushed the larger medical community to identify victims, adequately respond to their needs, and work towards the prevention of domestic violence. With passion and persistence, they developed best practices for care based on research and their professional experience and took part in activism to put domestic violence on the map as a national public health concern.

Confronting Violence: Improving Women’s Lives/ Enfrentando la violencia, mejorando la vida de las mujeres tells their story.

The six-banner, bilingual, traveling exhibit will be at the Heritage Museum November 21st to December 30th, 2023. It includes images, manuscripts and records that tell the stories of the nurses who witnessed the effects of domestic violence and campaigned for change.

The National Library of Medicine produced this exhibition and companion website. The English only website Confronting Violence includes an education component with curriculum for grades 9-12, a university module, and a digital gallery that features a curated selection of fully digitized items from the historical collections of the NLM, which are also available in their entirety in NLM Digital Collections.