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Women and Their Political Peers
Frances E. Willard (1839–1898) turned the Woman's Christian Temperance Union into a powerful force for social reform, including women's suffrage. In a painting displayed at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, the accomplished and respectable Willard, representing the "American Woman," was surrounded by exaggerated stereotypes of other disenfranchised citizens of society -- "idiots, convicts, the insane, and Indians." Henrietta Briggs-Wall, a member of the Kansas Equal Suffrage Association, commissioned the provocative painting and sold photographic postcards of it for years thereafter. |