5/14/2025
12:00 PM - 2:15 PM EST


Location: DACOR Bacon House OR Online, 1801 F Street, NW, Washington, DC 20006

Please note this is a hybrid event - you have the option to attend in person or virtually. Registrations are required for all attendees. For in-person attendees, the event will run from 12 - 2:15 pm and will include a 2 course lunch with a glass of wine. The live stream will begin around 1:05 pm (virtual attendees will be sent a link for the event via email).

Virginia Murray Bacon, who owned the DACOR Bacon House from 1925 to 1980, was a celebrated salonniere, hosting politicians, diplomats, opera divas and European royalty at her receptions, dinners and soirees. In fact, for much of its history the House was owned and managed by women who exercised significant influence in official and social Washington from their interior drawing rooms despite limitations on their ability to hold public office or live independent lives. Our panelists will take an in-depth look at how these women made their presence—and DACOR Bacon House itself—known during a time of significant changes in women’s rights and freedoms during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In the nineteenth century, Sally Carroll (whose husband William was Clerk of the Supreme Court), was a much-beloved hostess who made 1801 F Street almost as well-known as the White House. The next owner, Mollie Fuller (wife of Chief Justice Melville Fuller), held yearly receptions for as many as 600, special dinners for newly appointed associate justices, and weekly “at homes” in the tradition of socially prominent Washington women. In the twentieth century, Ruth Hanna McCormick, who rented the House in the years 1919-1923, popularized the Sunday “buffet” dinner for lawmakers and their wives, while Virginia Bacon hosted anywhere from 10 to 150 people on a near weekly basis whenever she was in town. McCormick and Bacon also became political operatives and pursued causes in their own right apart from their husbands. All of these women excelled in the tradition that since the days of Dolley Madison has gathered together notable policymakers and power brokers in private homes to discuss major issues of the day.

The panel will include Elizabeth Warner, Archivist, DACOR Bacon House; Dr. Jasmine Noelle Yarish, Assistant Professor of Political Science, University of the District of Columbia; and Dr. Terrence Walz, Historian, DACOR Bacon House.

Elizabeth Warner is the Archivist for the DACOR Bacon House Foundation. Her latest article on Mrs. Bacon’s life appears in the Spring 2025 issue of Washington History magazine. A lawyer by training, she spent 14 years living and working overseas, mostly to promote civil rights, and currently teaches political science at New England College in addition to her work with DBHF.

Dr. Jasmine Noelle Yarish is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of the District of Columbia (UDC). A first-generation scholar raised in the Appalachian hills of central Pennsylvania, her expertise is in the intersections of race, gender, sexuality, spatiality, material culture, and democratic theory. A recent diversity scholar with the National Trust for Historic Preservation, an ELEVATE fellow with the Rutgers Center for Minority-Serving Institutions, and a Myrtilla Miner Fellow with UDC’s Center for the Advancement of Learning, her research extends the concept of abolition democracy, focusing on the political thought of 19th-century Black women and the urban archive of Philadelphia.

Dr. Terrence Walz has been Historian of the DACOR Bacon House since 2019. He is the author of two books on the history of Egypt, but since joining DACOR in 2017 he has focused on the history of the house and its inhabitants during the first one hundred years of its existence.