History of women's rights shown through shoes in Dallas exhibit
DALLAS - They say to truly understand someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes.
A new exhibit at the Dallas Holocaust & Human Rights Museum takes that literally, displaying dozens of shoes from the past 200 years.
It's called "Walk this Way: Footwear from the Stuart Weitzman Collection of Historic Shoes."
Each pair is from Weitzman's personal history collection.
"So many women's rights movements parallel to the change in the fashion that they were able to wear," said Mary Pat Higgins, the museum's president and CEO.
"It's a different window into looking at women's history," she said. "It's so easy to tell in very short periods of time, how women's rights were evolving."
Each pair in the exhibit all have cultural significance to their decade.
"Shoes are artifacts. They tell us about the time when they were worn," she said.
The earliest shows on display are a pair of wedding shoes from the 1830s.
But as you walk through the exhibit, you'll find shoes that tell the stories of women's labor activism, suffrage, equal rights, and the sexual revolution.
Some were worn by Queen Victoria, others from the Jazz Age or signed by the Yankees team.
"Can you imagine walking a mile in the Suffrage Act shoes? And they did walk a mile!" Higgins said. "Getting the right to vote opened up all sorts of other worlds for women, and the shoes give us a peak into that."
The shoes are meant to highlight the important footsteps taken by those before us, in hopes that it inspires those who visit them to continue moving history forward.
The exhibition is on display until July 14.