Hard to tell from this old picture, but this is a biplane, and it flew across Staten Island in May 1913 for 15 minutes, carrying a trailblazing suffragist Rosalie Gardiner Jones, who dropped these leaflets encouraging women to fight for the right to vote.

"There was a lot of different things that women had to do to kind of raise awareness for the cause of trying to gain support for women's voting rights. It wasn’t, not all the avenues that men had were available to them so they became really creative about how they got their message out," said Janice Monger, Staten Island Museum.

Searching for a way to honor her work and mark the 100th anniversary of the 19th amendment, which granted women voting rights, the Staten Island Museum built a biplane, just like the one Jones flew over Staten Island.

These women are building it themselves, with the help of Staten Island Maker Space, a nonprofit organization that provides entrepreneurs, inventors and craftspeople access to equipment and tools.

"We build on the fly, right? So we'll tack this all together and then we can drop these pieces in," said Scott Van Campen, Staten Island makerspace.

The ladies have learned how to weld how to bend metal, and how to sand, grind and even build tools.

Their biplane won't actually fly, but it will sit outside the Staten Island museum as part of an exhibit kicking off Women's History Month in March.

The women have been working on the project every Wednesday for the last several weeks.

They say not only has it heightened their respect of the suffrage movement, but it's also empowered them as women.

"We do crazy things for what we're passionate about sometimes. And it's something like they got in a plane and dropped leaflets and we're trying to spread the message by actually building a plane. So it’s like kind of a cool parallel that we didn't think we were gonna tie together and we did," said Amanda Granberg, Staten Island Museum.

"I never thought of welding prior to this, it wasn't something, like, I was sort of scared of the saw, scared of the electricity, and I think I am inspired by the suffragists to get out of my comfort zone, to do something I wouldn't have done before, to make a statement," said Gabriella Leone, archivist at the Staten Island Museum.

The exhibit opens March 7 and will run through December.