BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Natl Museum of American History -- Exhibit: Creating Icons: How We Remember Women's Suffrage

DC -- Natl Museum of American History -- Exhibit: Creating Icons: How We Remember Women's Suffrage:

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Description of Pictures: Creating Icons: How We Remember Women's Suffrage
March 6, 2020 – May 2, 2021
This exhibition marks the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment recognizing women’s right to vote. It commemorates women’s achievements in winning suffrage and invites audiences to explore how we celebrate milestones, what we remember, what (and who) has been forgotten or silenced over time, and how those exclusions helped create the cracks and fissures in the movement that continue to impact women’s politics and activism. Items from the National American Women Suffrage Association (now the League of Women Voters) collection, donated in 1919 and 1920, are featured along with later donations of materials related to Adelaide Johnson (sculptor of Portrait Monument in the Capitol), Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party (NWP), and other suffrage and women’s activism collections.

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Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.

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Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. ICONS_200307_012.JPG: The Museum gratefully acknowledges the generous donors whose support made this exhibition possible: Robert and Lynne Uhler Ted and Marian Craver Mrs. Kathleen Manatt and Michele A. Manatt Sandy, Cindy, Hayden, Thea, Sabrina and William Sigal Smithsonian Women's Committee Diane Spry Straker Ambassador Nicholas F. Taubman and Mrs. Eugenia L. Taubman Ms. Kathleen Kennedy Townsend
2. ICONS_200307_022.JPG: Creating Icons: How We Remember Woman Suffrage Woman Suffrage. Many Americans learned the saga of Susan B. Anthony leading a close-knit sisterhood in a decades-long crusade for votes for women that ended in the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920. This story of their victory inspired generations of women to fight for rights -- and still does. But this isn't the full story. Women of all classes and races across the United States worked for suffrage and women's rights. Most of them are missing from the popular tale we learn in school with its focus on iconic leaders. Understanding how a history that left out so many people was constructed and recognizing their proper place in it creates a truer memory of the suffrage struggle and explains why diversity in membership, leadership, and goals has aroused controversy in modern American women's movements.
3. ICONS_200307_030.JPG: Moments 1800-1919 The Woman Suffrage Movement
4. ICONS_200307_041.JPG: Did the Nineteenth Amendment give women the right to vote? Yes and no. After nearly one hundred years of advocacy and sacrifice, ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment meant that women could no longer be excluded from the polls because of their sex, but it did not guarantee them ballots. Now citizenship laws, state voter laws designed to enforce segregation, and cultural prejudices meant that African American, Latina, Native American, Asian American, immigrant, and poor white women faced the same voting discrimination as their male counterparts. The Nineteenth Amendment was another step in women's continuing struggle for civil rights. It was a hard-won but not perfect victory. Women from all states could cast ballots in the 1920 presidential election, women were mentioned for the first time in the Constitution, and Americans recognized that they could challenge discrimination based on sex and win.
5. ICONS_200307_045.JPG: "The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex." -- The Nineteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
6. ICONS_200307_047.JPG: Votes for All Women? Not all women felt welcome in the suffrage movement led by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Carrie Chapman Catt. Stanton and Anthony were active abolitionists but opposed the Fifteenth Amendment if it would enfranchise only African American men and not women. After its ratification in 1870, they were committed to obtaining a woman suffrage amendment. This determination led them and their successors to focus their organizations on voting rights instead of more expansive women's rights. It also led them to collaborate with people who did not believe that voting rights should extend to men and women of all races. Their speeches and writing of this time invoked race, class, education, and nativism as arguments for woman suffrage.
7. ICONS_200307_050.JPG: "We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul." -- Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, 1866
8. ICONS_200307_053.JPG: "If the South really wants White Supremacy, it will urge the enfranchisement of women." -- Carrie Chapman Catt, 1917
9. ICONS_200307_055.JPG: "A wise selfishness would teach us to make the wrongs of all mankind our own, for the race[s] are so bound together that we must rise or fall as one." -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1868
10. ICONS_200307_059.JPG: The Rhetoric of Suffrage
11. ICONS_200307_060.JPG: "The speediest way to educate the people is to give them the ballot…" -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton, 1868
12. ICONS_200307_063.JPG: "The old anti-slavery school say women must stand back and wait until the negroes shall be recognized. But we say, if you will not give the whole loaf of suffrage to the entire people, give it to the most intelligent first." -- Susan B. Anthony, 1869
13. ICONS_200307_066.JPG: "Let us try to get nearer together and to understand each other's ideas on the race question and solve it together." -- Carrie Chapman Catt, 1903
14. ICONS_200307_069.JPG: "[W]hen the ballot is put into the hands of the American woman, the world is going to get a correct estimate of the Negro woman. It will find her a tower of strength of which poets have never sung, orators have never spoken, and scholars have never written." -- Nannie Helen Burroughs, 1915
15. ICONS_200307_071.JPG: Suffrage Won, But Damage Done The words and calls for exclusion had consequences. African American women in particular felt betrayed and vulnerable. After 1920, white former suffragists' refusal to assist African American women being denied the vote bred distrust that still lingers. Were racist tactics reflections of the personal beliefs of leading white suffragists? Or did they justify these strategies as a means of gaining support to enfranchise a majority, but not all, of American women? These questions do not matter in the end. The arguments and actions they embraced are remembered alongside the victory they won. The memories of the suffrage movement can be both inspirational and disappointing as battles over diversity continue to mark the struggles for women's rights.
16. ICONS_200307_090.JPG: Who is an Icon? Together we create icons by choosing the women whose lives and contributions we admire and remember. Who do you think is an icon?
17. ICONS_200307_093.JPG: Portrait Monument by Adelaide Johnson, 1920 The National Woman's Party (NWP) commissioned sculptor Adelaide Johnson to create a statue based on her busts of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott. It was briefly displayed in the U.S. Capitol Rotunda in 1921; it was then out of sight in the Capitol crypt, until 1997, when it was moved back to the rotunda. Portrait Monument, the 1920 statue of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott, features an unfinished shaft of marble. The artist said it represents women's rights left to win. The empty surface also calls to mind the women not depicted who should be honored. African American activist C. Delores Tucker urged Congress to alter Portrait Monument to include the women's contemporary Sojourner Truth. Congress decided instead to commission a new statue of the African American abolitionist and women's rights activist. Together we create icons by choosing the women whose lives and contributions we admire and remember. Who do you think is an icon?
18. ICONS_200307_096.JPG: Sojourner Truth by Artis Lane, 2009 Sojourner Truth was a captivating speaker for abolition and women's rights. In 1850 she spoke at the first national women's rights convention where women demanded full equality with men. Truth also demanded equality with white women. Her bust is displayed in Emancipation Hall in the Capitol Visitor Center. It is the first statue in the Capitol of an African American woman.
19. ICONS_200307_114.JPG: Illuminated certificate, around 1909 British suffrage leader Emmeline Pankhurst gave this illuminated certificate to the American suffrage leader after Paul was imprisoned in Britain and went on a hunger strike.
20. ICONS_200307_120.JPG: Silver loving cup honoring Stone, her husband and partner Henry Blackwell, and Woman's Journal
21. ICONS_200307_123.JPG: Silver loving cup, 1914 presented to Paul by NAWSA, shortly before they parted ways
22. ICONS_200307_125.JPG: Alice Paul In 1912 Alice Paul returned from England and energized the American suffrage movement with confrontational techniques, including hunger strikes, learned from British suffragettes. Establishing the Congressional Union within NAWSA, she alternately inspired and irritated its leaders. In 1917 Paul formed the National Woman's Party (NWP). The two organizations became bitter rivals. A fearless tactician, Paul led NWP picketing of the White House (incurring imprisonment) and pressuring President Woodrow Wilson and Congress to support woman suffrage. Paul authored the Equal Rights Amendment in 1923.
23. ICONS_200307_129.JPG: Lucy Stone Abolitionist and popular feminist lecturer Lucy Stone led the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). For years it was larger and more successful than Stanton and Anthony's National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). Stone also founded and published the Woman's Journal, the leading periodical of the suffrage movement. In 1890 Stone merged AWSA with Stanton and Anthony's National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) to create NAWSA. Ill health prevented Stone from playing an active role in the new organization and Anthony minimized her contributions in The History of Woman Suffrage.
24. ICONS_200307_134.JPG: Creating a Legend The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) traced the origins of the suffrage movement to a meeting between Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in 1840. Excluded from an abolition meeting attended by their husbands, the new friends discussed the legal and cultural restrictions on women. Their talk led to the 1848 Declaration of Sentiments, drafted largely by Stanton, which included a demand for enfranchisement.
25. ICONS_200307_139.JPG: Bust of Susan B. Anthony by Adelaide Johnson, 1890s Bust of Lucretia Mott by Adelaide Johnson, 1890s Bust of Elizabeth Cady Stanton by Adelaide Johnson, 1890s Beginning with a commission from NAWSA, sculptor Adelaide Johnson created multiple marble busts of the women she called "the trinity." Johnson believed that the Quaker abolitionist Mott represented spiritual leadership, the prolific writer Stanton intellectual leadership, and organizer and agitator Anthony "vital" leadership of the suffrage movement.
26. ICONS_200307_143.JPG: Completing the Story In the 1970s curators began expanding the museum's suffrage collections to include the women whose contributions were marginalized, left out, or unknown in the National Woman Suffrage Association's (NAWSA) story of suffrage. They were aided by families and organizations happy to have their own heroines take their rightful places among the better-known icons. Curators' search for stories and objects, especially from women of color, is ongoing.
27. ICONS_200307_145.JPG: Bible and convention badge Nannie Helen Burroughs was an officer of the Women's Convention, Auxiliary to the National Baptist Convention, for over forty years.
28. ICONS_200307_148.JPG: Bible and convention badge Nannie Helen Burroughs was an officer of the Women's Convention, Auxiliary to the National Baptist Convention, for over forty years.
29. ICONS_200307_150.JPG: Nannie Helen Burroughs Nannie Helen Burroughs made a name for herself at the age of twenty-one with her speech "How Sisters are Hindered from Helping" at the 1900 meeting of the National Baptist Convention. She became a prolific speaker and writer on political and social issues affecting African American women. Burroughs believed that voting rights were part of African American women's fight for full equality. A believer in individual and community empowerment, in 1909 she founded the National Training School for Women and Girls. The Washington, D.C., school provided academic and vocational training for African American girls.
30. ICONS_200307_154.JPG: Shawl, around 1867 The family story of Queen Victoria presenting this shawl to Walker is not documented, but its persistence illustrates the family's belief that Walker's contributions were admired and should be remembered.
31. ICONS_200307_158.JPG: Dr. Mary Edwards Walker A Medal of Honor recipient for her Civil War service as a physician, Mary Walker was a prominent member of both the National Woman Suffrage Association and the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA). In her 1873 book, Walker reasoned against a woman suffrage amendment. She contended that, as citizens, women already had the vote -- Congress just needed to recognize that right. This, along with supporting divorce and wearing men's style suits, damaged Walker's relationship with Anthony. She is conspicuously absent from The History of Woman Suffrage.
32. ICONS_200307_165.JPG: Susan B. Anthony on the Occasion of her 80th Birthday by Sarah J. Eddy, 1900
33. ICONS_200307_170.JPG: Suffrage at the Smithsonian Institution
34. ICONS_200307_177.JPG: National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) display, around 1925 The Declaration of Sentiments, a demand for women's rights (including the vote), was debated and approved at the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention. Susan B. Anthony did not attend. Early exhibit labels misidentify the table Elizabeth Cady Stanton used when drafting the Declaration as "Miss Anthony's table." The error was corrected in later displays.
35. ICONS_200307_180.JPG: Authoring an Official Narrative The exhibit curated by NAWSA closely followed the story of the movement recorded by Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Matilda Joslyn Gage, and Ida Husten Harper in the six-volume The History of Woman Suffrage published between 1881 and 1922. The authors solicited accounts of the movement from women across the country, then compiled and edited them to emphasize Stanton's, Anthony's, and NAWSA's leadership of a coordinated campaign for voting rights.
36. ICONS_200307_183.JPG: This room is dedicated to Susan B. Anthony In memory of her work for woman suffrage "I know but woman and her disfranchised."
37. ICONS_200307_186.JPG: "There can be no question of the historical importance of the movement initiated by Miss Anthony and now carried out to a successful ending." -- William Henry Holmes, Head Curator, Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution, 1919
38. ICONS_200307_189.JPG: The Patron Saint of Suffrage? In her lifetime, Susan B. Anthony was one of the most recognizable leaders of the suffrage movement. Work as a woman's rights organizer, speaker, agitator, lobbyist, and mentor made her famous, reviled, or admired by different audiences. Her books chronicling the suffrage movement and a commissioned biography fostered the image of Anthony as singularly devoted to woman suffrage. After her death, that image and her memory were invoked to bolster her successors' claims to leadership of the movement.
39. ICONS_200307_198.JPG: Displaying History The National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) was determined that their organization, not the publicity-grabbing militants of the rival National Woman's Party (NWP), would be remembered as leading the long fight for women's votes. The suffrage story they told in their display of historical souvenirs had a deliberate beginning and end. It started in 1848 with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Declaration of Sentiments and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and recent NAWSA presidents Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw. The narrowly focused display would define the Smithsonian's narrative of woman suffrage for decades.
40. ICONS_200307_202.JPG: Certified copy of the congressional joint resolution for the Nineteenth Amendment, June 1919
41. ICONS_200307_213.JPG: Gold watch and chain, around 1838 Susan B. Anthony purchased with money from her first paycheck
42. ICONS_200307_219.JPG: Cup and saucer, around 1838 purchased by Susan B. Anthony with her first paycheck as a gift for her mother
43. ICONS_200307_222.JPG: Displaying History NAWSA was determined that their organization, not the publicity-grabbing militants of the rival National Woman's Party (NWP), would be remembered as leading the long fight for women's votes. The suffrage story they told in their display of historical souvenirs had a deliberate beginning and end. It started in 1848 with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and the Declaration of Sentiments and ended with the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment and recent NAWSA presidents Carrie Chapman Catt and Anna Howard Shaw. The narrowly focused display would define the Smithsonian's narrative of woman suffrage for decades.
44. ICONS_200307_226.JPG: Gold pen, 1919 Pen used to sign the congressional joint amendment for the Nineteenth Amendment. Flag pin, 1900 given to Susan B. Anthony on her 80th birthday by the women of Wyoming
45. ICONS_200307_231.JPG: Silver loving cup, 1900 given to Susan B. Anthony on her 80th birthday by the Colorado Equal Suffrage Association
46. ICONS_200307_233.JPG: Wooden pen, 1920 Pen used by Secretary of State Bainbridge Colby to sign the certificate of ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment on August 26, 1920.
47. ICONS_200307_237.JPG: Susan B. Anthony's silk shawl It was said that one of the signs of spring in Washington, D.C., was the sight of Anthony's signature red shawl in the halls of the Capitol as she lobbied for the vote.
48. ICONS_200307_248.JPG: Medal for Distinguished Service, 1918 given to Anna Howard Shaw as Chair of the Woman's Committee of the Council of National Defense
49. ICONS_200307_251.JPG: Gavel, 1916 presented to Carrie Chapman Catt by NAWSA members
50. ICONS_200307_253.JPG: The Successors Over twenty years NAWSA made an additional four donations to the Smithsonian Institution, including artifacts from the organization's final presidents, Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt.
51. ICONS_200307_258.JPG: Anna Howard Shaw and Carrie Chapman Catt at a New York suffrage parade, 1917
52. ICONS_200307_261.JPG: Silver teakettle, 1893 presented to Susan B. Anthony by the Political Equality Club of Rochester, New York
53. ICONS_200307_277.JPG: Movements 1920-1969
54. ICONS_200307_285.JPG: American Women on the Move The official poster for the conference was designed by Dottie Erwin. It featured abstract images of women, reflecting the diversity of participants.
55. ICONS_200307_287.JPG: Passing the Torch Approximately two thousand runners relayed the torch and Maya Angelou's poem 2,610 miles from the site of the 1848 Seneca Falls Convention in New York to Houston. They symbolically passed the torch from the suffragists to a new generation of women's rights activists.
56. ICONS_200307_294.JPG: Jailed for Freedom pendant, 1970s Jailed for Freedom pin, 1919, and commemorative copies This original pin was awarded to Lucille Calmes Remembering the Militants The leaders of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA) would have been appalled, but the story of Alice Paul and her White House pickets struck a chord with the new generation of activists. Conference attendees could buy reproductions of the "Jailed for Freedom" prison door pins awarded to women imprisoned for participating in suffrage demonstrations from 1917 to 1919.
57. ICONS_200307_302.JPG: Bella Abzug at the National Women's Conference, 1977
58. ICONS_200307_310.JPG: Sylvia Ortiz, Peggy Kokernot, and Michele Cearcy, who ran the last leg into Houston, were featured on the cover of the convention's final report, The Spirit of Houston.
59. ICONS_200307_312.JPG: Bella Abzug's hat Hats were Bella Abzug's trademark. She wore this one during the conference.
60. ICONS_200307_319.JPG: The National Women's Conference, 1977 Fifty-seven years after winning the vote, over two thousand delegates gathered in Houston, Texas, in November 1977. The federally funded conference was the most purposely diverse and demographically representative group ever assembled in the United States. Each state sent delegates to debate proposals promoting equal rights and ending discrimination toward women that they would send to the president and Congress for action. While the white participants held diverse, sometimes opposing views, for many, it was the first time they met and talked at length with women of color with life experiences different from their own. They expected disagreements between liberal and conservative delegates, but many did not anticipate the issues of poverty, education, employment, and safety that were priorities for feminists of color.
61. ICONS_200307_327.JPG: Susan B. Anthony's gavel, 1888 Gavel, 1970s This reproduction of Susan B. Anthony's gavel was broken by Bella Abzug during the conference. The Authority of Memory and Creating New Icons Congresswoman Bella Abzug sponsored the congressional legislation funding the conference and served as its presiding officer and public face. She forcefully linked the goals of the conference to earlier women's rights conventions by using, and accidentally breaking, a reproduction of Susan B. Anthony's ivory and rosewood gavel during the meetings.
62. ICONS_200307_337.JPG: Maya Angelou read her work, signed by the runners who carried it, at the conference's opening ceremony in Houston.
63. ICONS_200307_339.JPG: Scroll Maya Angelou read her work, signed by the runners who carried it, at the conference's opening ceremony in Houston.
64. ICONS_200307_350.JPG: To Form a More Perfect Union African American poet Maya Angelou linked women's rights activism past and present with her poem "To Form a More Perfect Union." It acknowledged history's "positive achievement to inspire us and the negative omissions to teach us." The poem committed participants to honor the famous and unsung, recognize the challenges that others face, and seek justice for all women.
65. ICONS_200307_353.JPG: Pictured left to right: Rita Elway, Carmela Lacayo, Gloria Scott, Ethel Allen, Mariko Tse, Coretta Scott King, Angela Cabrera, and Maxine Waters after presenting the plank
66. ICONS_200307_360.JPG: Buttons from the 1977 National Women's Conference, including one worn by lesbians seeking to reclaim the term "dyke" form being used as a slur
67. ICONS_200307_367.JPG: Coming Together The National Women's Conference was the first chance for members to meet across state delegations. Women of color worked in special evening caucuses to ensure that their concerns, including poverty, Native American tribal rights, language barriers, involuntary sterilization, and immigration, would be heard. They produced a stronger version of the brief "minority plank" proposed by the conference leadership and demanded attention to the double burden of racial and gender discrimination. It passed with strong support.
68. ICONS_200307_371.JPG: National Plan of Action pamphlet
69. ICONS_200307_374.JPG: Honoring Alice Paul Alice Paul, the militant suffrage leader and original author of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), died four months before the conference. ERA marches honored her memory. ERA march sash, 1978
70. ICONS_200307_376.JPG: A Plan of Action Following heated debates, delegates adopted a plan including proposals addressing violence against women and children, business and employment, child care, credit, disability rights, education, women in office, the Equal Rights Amendment, health care, homemakers, insurance, international affairs, women in the criminal justice system, aging, reproductive freedom, rural women, sexual orientation/gender identity, welfare, and women in the arts.
71. ICONS_200307_385.JPG: Charm bracelet, 1972 Alice Paul tracked the progress of the ERA with charms engraved with the date a state voted for ratification.
72. ICONS_200307_389.JPG: Delegates celebrate the vote supporting the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA)
73. ICONS_200307_403.JPG: Who Was Left Out of the Story? Women hoped that suffrage would lead to equality and reform. For many, issues of race, class, citizenship, freedom, and womanhood were intertwined with the quest for voting rights. Gaining the ballot was one part of an ongoing struggle for opportunity, security, and civil rights for their communities. Some, especially Asian immigrants and Native Americans, were barred from citizenship and would not benefit immediately from women's enfranchisement. They nevertheless campaigned for suffrage, believing that they would eventually cast ballots as free and equal citizens of the United States.
74. ICONS_200307_406.JPG: Dr. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee, 1916 Dr. S. K. Chan, 1912
75. ICONS_200307_408.JPG: In the early 1900s Chinese immigrants could not become naturalized citizens. First-generation immigrants still advocated for suffrage for their American-born children. Dr. S. K. Chan, president of the Chinese American Equal Suffrage Society in Portland, Oregon, gave a pro-suffrage speech in Chinese in 1912, emphasizing that her birth country of China had already enfranchised women. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee rode at the head of the New York suffrage parade that same year and was a member of the Women's Political Equality Union.
76. ICONS_200307_411.JPG: Maria de Guadalupe Evangelina Lopez de Lowther, 1907 (crop from Portrait of the Los Angeles High School Faculty) Adelina (Nina) Otero-Warren, around 1910–1920
77. ICONS_200307_415.JPG: Latina suffragists in the West ran bilingual campaigns for the vote. In 1917 Nina Otero-Warren was recruited by Alice Paul to head the New Mexico chapter of the Congressional Union (later the National Woman's Party). To extend their reach, Otero-Warren ensured that their materials were printed in Spanish as well as English. Maria de G. E. Lopez, head of her local College Equal Suffrage League, gave lectures in Spanish to ensure that the message of the suffrage movement reached the Latina community in Los Angeles. Gaining the vote offered Latinas the opportunity to affect change in civil and labor laws that directly impacted their communities.
78. ICONS_200307_419.JPG: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, 1898 Ida B. Wells-Barnett, around 1893
79. ICONS_200307_423.JPG: African American women had been advocating for abolition and women's rights since the 1830s. After the Civil War they battled segregation and racism within the movement. For them the fight for equal rights was not solely defined by either gender or race. Author and speaker Frances Ellen Watkins Harper explained that white women must factor African American women's "double burden" of sex and race into claims for women's rights and suffrage. Journalist and anti-lynching activist Ida B. Wells cofounded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago in 1913 and famously refused to march in a segregated section of a suffrage parade that same year in Washington, D.C.
80. ICONS_200307_426.JPG: Emma Kaʻilikapuolono Metcalf Beckley Nakuina, around 1904 Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin (M�tis/Turtle Mountain Ojibwe), around 1911 Baldwin chose to wear Native dress for her Bureau of Indian Affairs personnel file photograph.
81. ICONS_200307_430.JPG: For Native American women, working for suffrage was also a way to protect their culture and tribal sovereignty. Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin championed Native American rights and invoked Native women's power within their communities, asserting that many had always had the right to vote. In 1913 she marched with fellow lawyers in the Washington, D.C., suffrage parade. Native Hawaiian women like Emma Kaʻilikapuolono Metcalf Beckley Nakuina supported suffrage as a way to gain back political power after American annexation. They succeeded in persuading mainland suffragists to lobby Congress to empower the Hawaiʻi Territorial Legislature to vote on woman suffrage, but the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified before they could do so.
82. ICONS_200307_433.JPG: Rose Schneiderman, around 1907–1918 Mary Elizabeth Lease, between 1890 and 1899
83. ICONS_200307_437.JPG: Working women believed that votes would enable them to control and improve working conditions. They brought the confrontational tactics and public displays from labor actions to the suffrage movement. Class was as much an issue as gender. For some it blended with their own progressive, or radical, politics. In the 1890s Mary Elizabeth Lease spoke for woman suffrage through the Women's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), the Knights of Labor, and the Populist Party to promote woman suffrage in Kansas. In the early 1900s Rose Schneiderman, a young immigrant factory worker, became a strike leader and union organizer with New York's garment workers. She worked closely with elite New York suffragists while championing the specific priorities of working-class women.
84. ICONS_200307_443.JPG: 100 Years, 100 Women In 1920, when the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, there were no women serving in the United States Congress. In 1916 Jeannette Rankin of Montana became the first woman elected to the House of Representatives. She was the ranking Republican member of the House's newly formed Woman Suffrage Committee and two years later opened the floor debate on the amendment. In 1918 she ran and lost a race for the Senate. One hundred years later, 131 of the 541 senators, representatives, and delegates are women and a woman presides as Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.
85. ICONS_200307_446.JPG: "I may be the first woman member of Congress, but I won't be the last." -- Jeannette Rankin, 1916
86. ICONS_200307_450.JPG: Gavel, 2007 This wooden gavel, a symbol of power and authority, was presented to Nancy Pelosi in 2007 when she became Speaker of the House.
87. ICONS_200307_453.JPG: Nancy Pelosi with Speaker's gavel, 2007 When Nancy Pelosi was elected to congress in 1987, she was one of twenty-five women -- two in the Senate and twenty-three in the House. Pelosi was the first woman to serve as a House party whip and minority leader. In 2007 she was the first woman elected Speaker of the United States House of Representatives.
88. ICONS_200307_458.JPG: Mementos from the Moment We are working to display one button, sticker, or other representative item for every woman who will be in congress when the Nineteenth Amendment has its hundredth anniversary on August 26, 2020.
89. ICONS_200307_464.JPG: Susan Collins was the Republican Senator who voted against impeaching the child president because she thought he must have learned his lesson. If they're not traitors to democracy, they must be idiots.
90. ICONS_200307_490.JPG: Movements 1970-2020
91. ICONS_200307_504.JPG: The Women's March, 2017 On January 21, 2017, the day after the presidential inauguration, women came out to demonstrate. Angered by the language of the 2016 presidential campaign and worried about a political culture that was misogynistic and attacked equality for people of color, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community, hundreds of thousands of women took to the streets in the nation's capital. Millions more joined in sister marches across the country and around the world. They hoped to revitalize the women's movement and send the message that women would continue to fight for social justice. Women of color who felt marginalized since the suffrage movement took this opportunity to remake feminist activism in their own images.
92. ICONS_200307_513.JPG: Crowds of marchers on Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, D.C., January 21, 2017
93. ICONS_200307_515.JPG: Sign, 2017 This sign from the 2017 Women's March depicts Inez Milholland, a lawyer and suffrage speaker who rode as the herald in the 1913 parade.
94. ICONS_200307_518.JPG: Sash A marcher wore this sash to honor her suffragist grandmother -- "Still Marching / 1848-1917." Still Marching Some women linked their protest in 2017 with the suffragists who had picketed the White House in 1917 and marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in 1913.
95. ICONS_200307_520.JPG: Woman suffrage parade down Pennsylvania Avenue, March 3, 1913 History Repeats Itself This was not the first time that women used a presidential inauguration to draw attention to their cause. In 1913, the day before Woodrow Wilson's inauguration, suffragists held a parade that clogged the streets of the capital. Marchers returned in 2018 and 2019.
96. ICONS_200307_527.JPG: Organizing the March Calls for a march came from multiple sources, and conflicts quickly emerged over who should organize the march and how to ensure diversity among organizers, participants, and speakers. Ultimately, one of the largest protests in the nation's history was cofounded by a diverse group of women seeking to honor the legacy of suffragists, feminists, and other civil rights activists while striving for a more decentralized and inclusive movement. Three years later, both the march and the tensions continue.
97. ICONS_200307_537.JPG: Rally sign, 2017 Rally signs were distributed to participants by the Women's March organization. The sign is reminiscent of the 1977 poster, but the figures are less abstract, acknowledging women's differences.
98. ICONS_200307_545.JPG: Marchers fill Independence Avenue, Washington, D.C., January 21, 2017
99. ICONS_200307_547.JPG: Pussy hat, 2017 These knitted and crocheted hats were worn by marchers. Creating New Symbols In many shades of pink, pussy hats were intended as a humorous way to turn a vulgar term used by Donald Trump that had surfaced during his 2016 presidential campaign into a symbol of protest and empowerment. There was a backlash against the lighthearted hats when some marchers felt the symbolism excluded transgender women and women of color.
100. ICONS_200307_551.JPG: Many Messages Humorous, angry, or heartfelt, marchers expressed their emotions and concerns with handmade signs. Women's space and safety; the environment and science; abortion rights; the ERA; health care; immigration; LGBTQ+ rights; kindness; racial and economic justice; motherhood; encouragement of girls; and citizenship were just some of the issues colorfully depicted on signboard. Curators collected some of the signs marchers discarded in front of the museum after the Women's March in Washington, D.C.
101. ICONS_200307_554.JPG: We the People Artist Shepard Fairey meant his posters of African American, Latina, and Muslim women to show unity and strength in diversity. Through the "We The People" project, Fairey made his now iconic images available online for participants to download, print, and carry in the marches. Protect Each Other Are Greater Than Fear Defend Dignity
102. ICONS_200307_562.JPG: Women's march participants, January 21, 2017
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2020 photos: Well, that was a year, wasn't it? The COVID-19 pandemic cut off most events here in DC after March 11. The child president's handling of the pandemic was a series of disastrous missteps and lies, encouraging his minions to not wear masks and dramatically increasing infections and deaths here.The BLM protests started in June, made all the worse by the child president's inability to have any empathy for anyone other than himself. Then of course he tried to steal the election in November. What a year! Equipment this year: I continued to use my Fuji XS-1 cameras but, depending on the event, I also used a Nikon D7000. The farthest distance I traveled after that was about 40 miles. I only visited sites in four states -- Maryland, Virginia, West Virginia and DC. That was the least amount of travel I had done since 1995. Number of photos taken this year: about 246,000, the fewest number of photos I had taken in any year since 2007.
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