Women’s history tour guide discusses history and COVID-19
Originally published Friday, February 26, 2021 for Sourcing and Interview Techniques class, Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies
March is National Women’s History Month and Kaitlin Calogera, the owner of A Tour of Her Own, will be leading women’s history tours in the nation’s capital.
Calogera is a 32-year-old D.C. resident and female business owner, who like many other women, has been economically impacted by COVID-19. Yet her tours the “Wild Women of Georgetown,” “Forgotten Women of Arlington National Cemetery,” and “The Suffrage Mile” continue. The same cannot be said for all of her tours.
This past year, she lost access to three of her tours when safety fences around the U.S. Capitol and the White House went up, Calogera said. On one of those tours, she would normally share that the Capitol has 100 statues and only nine are women.
“Even just names on buildings are traditionally focused on men and so I wanted to reframe that narrative and start elevating women’s stories in history, but also in modern culture,” Calogera said.
Calogera spoke with me about women’s history and the challenges facing her tour business.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Why do you think that women’s history is often not told, even in the D.C. area?
If you think about current times right now, women now through COVID and all throughout time are sort of balancing a lot of work-life balance. When you have kids and you have to take care of them and also the elderly, you know, some of the thing’s kind of get lost in history and that’s unfortunate. For a long time, women also might not have had access. This is true for a lot of marginalized communities, [who] might not have access to record their stories, whether it’s pen and paper, whether it’s oral history that gets written in a book somewhere.
Why do you think it’s relevant for people to learn about women’s history today?
If we want to see women serving in higher positions, whether that be president of the United States — we finally have a vice president, Vice President Harris — which is a huge accomplishment, but even in boardrooms, right? Like CEOs or, in the education field as deans and leaders in college campuses or in boards of education, things like that. In order to see a future like that, we have to understand that it’s already happened in the past or there have been strides to make it happen in the past.
How has your business, or your tours been impacted by COVID-19?
[What] I’ve been kind of preaching about lately is that after the pandemic or during the pandemic, there were also lots of rallies in D.C. and we saw fences go up. And all of a sudden, the White House became inaccessible to us, cause there’s been a big fence up around it. Okay? We sort of rolled with that. Then what happened? We were watching on TV, the January 6th insurrection, and all of a sudden, a fence went up around the Capitol. And so just like that, let’s see, the two of our tours on Capitol Hill were no longer accessible to us. Our first ladies tour around the White House, no longer accessible to us.
Do you think eventually you would include events from 2020 and 2021 into your tours?
I played it fairly conservative, just somewhat conservative in the first two or three years of the business. Then when January 6th happened, I definitely pivoted into taking a more bold and vocal voice about current events. And I very much intend to continue that. What my tour guides want to talk about and what they feel comfortable with is completely on them. No one is forced to talk about anything, but I think it’s important that we record and acknowledged history in the moment and begin to shape the narrative because who knows five, 10, 20 years from now, people might forget that women were busy and dropping out of the workforce. Women were — who are educators, had their whole worlds flipped upside down. Women who are majority nurses, put their lives on the line. These are the things that we need to be talking about in the moment.
