History of the Clothesline Project

Members of the Cape Code Massachusetts Women's Agenda group started the Clothesline Project in 1990 after viewing the traveling Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall. The members discovered that during the Vietnam War, 58,000 American military personnel were killed. During that same time, 51,000 women were killed in the United States by men who supposedly loved them. The Women's Agenda group decided to create a memorial in order to bring about an awareness of the women who had been killed and the enormous amount of violence enacted against them. These activists started with thirty-one shirts on their line so that they could air out this personal and social "dirty laundry" issue. Since that first display, the Clothesline Project has grown to over 500 national and international Clothesline Projects, thereby creating a visual impact similar to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall and the AIDS quilt.