What Did Susan B Anthony Want to Prove
When I inquire my higher students to name a suffragist, most of them name Susan B. Anthony. Over a century afterwards her death, many even recognize her picture. In 1979, she became the showtime woman whose portrait appeared on a circulating coin in the United States. A contempo written report by the National Women's History Museum reveals that many states crave students to learn about her. Soon, the starting time statue of historical women in Central Park will feature Anthony and fellow reformers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth.
How did Anthony's face go so visible? Anthony was one of many women'southward rights activists, simply she was one of the few who defended her time to distributing portraits of reformers like herself. Anthony spent significant endeavor and money to mold the public epitome of the women'due south rights movement.
Anthony borrowed visual strategies from the antislavery reformers, especially from Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. Douglass and Truth sold their portraits to provide a model of blackness leadership that countered racist and sexist cartoons. Similarly, Anthony wanted to claiming cartoons that mocked female person reformers. She distributed portraits to ascertain the leaders of the movement and emphasize that women—especially well-off white women—could be public leaders, perhaps even president. Anthony'southward portraits established a model for female leadership and defined which suffragists we most often remember today.
In early America, the public encountered very few printed portraits of women. Women were supposed to prefer the privacy of their homes to public life. While their painted portraits oftentimes hung in the homes of wealthy families, engravers rarely copied them to sell to the public. Portraits of George Washington sold, but few women were well-known so their portraits were less desirable.
Additionally, cartoons mocked women who participated in politics. During the American Revolution, artist Philip Dawe satirized women who boycotted tea. This print from 1775, called "A Society of Patriotic Ladies, at Edenton, in Due north Carolina," depicts women ignoring a kid to focus on their protest. These women are not idealized beauties. I drinks booze from a punch bowl. On the right, a blackness adult female—probably an enslaved person—looks similar she hopes to sign besides. The cartoon demonstrates that women in politics threatened gender norms also as an economy based on slavery and white supremacy. Printed in London and distributed to the colonies, buyers purchased expensive mezzotints like this one at print shops and from other merchants. They could have posted it in their home or in a gathering place similar a tavern.
In 1851, most a century later, some other print called "Bloomerism in Practice" features a similar critique. The picture was published 3 years afterward the Seneca Falls Convention, among a wave of similar cartoons that illustrated a backlash confronting women's rights activism. In the center of the room, a woman smokes while her married man hunches over to mend clothes. A child cries out for attention, just the mother ignores the child. In the background, a white woman wearing bloomers carries a imprint that says "no more basement & kitchen." Adjacent to her, a black woman's banner declares "no more massa & missus." The critique is clear: if women gain rights, society—including gender norms, slavery, class hierarchy, and white supremacy—will be disrupted.
Throughout the 19th century, prints like these were very popular. Americans hung them on their walls, encountered them in cheap newspapers, and discussed them with friends. Reformers similar Anthony wanted to show that these stereotypes of women in politics were wrong, but activists could do little about these pictures. They had weak organizations, very piddling money, and no control over the popular press.
Fortunately, Anthony could look to her reformer colleagues: Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth. They distributed pictures on their own to raise money. Douglass was one of the most photographed 19th-century Americans. He was born in 1818 and escaped slavery at the age of xx. Soon, he began distributing his portrait, starting with his autobiography. In 1861, the prominent lecturer told audiences in Boston and Syracuse that images could advance racial equality. He said: "the film plays an important office in our politics and often explodes political shams more than finer, than whatsoever other bureau."[1] Although cartoons mocked blackness people as inferior, Douglass believed that portraits like his—of a refined, elegant black homo—challenged stereotypes.
Sojourner Truth must have agreed with Douglass'south strategy. Born in New York in the belatedly 1790s, she also grew up enslaved. She escaped slavery in 1826, a year before the state ended slavery. Truth lectured confronting slavery, in support of civil rights, and to promote women's rights.
In the 1860s, Truth started selling a new, popular blazon of portrait: a carte de visite photograph. These photographs were like in size to baseball cards, cheap, and everyone wanted them. Americans bought them, exchanged them with friends, and assembled them in photo albums. Truth chose like poses and article of clothing each time she sat for her portrait. In this one, she sits in a parlor-like setting with flowers on a table and an open up book. Then in her late 60s, Truth looks straight at the viewer. She wears evidently, Quaker clothing, a white caput wrap, and glasses.
Truth's portraits challenged racist cartoons, but they also needed to counter sexist ones. She appears respectable. Truth is not interested in frivolous fashions or the controversial bloomer pants. Her right hand grips the tail of her yarn as though she is knitting. Knitting implied that she embraced feminine domestic tasks, but the public portrait revealed that her habitation was non her sole focus. Poor women and women of color almost ever worked to support their families. Truth sold these portraits to make a living.
Anthony thought the portraits of Douglass and Truth were constructive. In 1865, she spoke to the Women's Loyal National League, an arrangement that Anthony founded to abolish slavery and support the United States during the Civil State of war. She showed Truth's portrait to the audience to raise money to support newly freed peoples. She recorded that it was successful.
Anthony sold portraits of herself and her favored female leaders through her paper, The Revolution, and her organizations. In 1876, as the nation reflected on its century of history, suffragists decided to write their own. Anthony knew their history needed portraits. She worked with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Cuff to produce the History of Woman Suffrage, a serial that eventually included six volumes with virtually one,000 pages in each.
Anthony managed the portraits. She wrote to suffragists and specified what type of photograph she wanted from them. In an 1882 letter to Elizabeth Boynton Harbert, for example, she clarified that she wanted a portrait that showed "just the head shoulders [sic]" in "about three quarters profile—non a total front end—nor however an entire profile—nearly halfway between."[2] Anthony also told Amelia Bloomer, famous for wearing bloomers, to specify which photograph had the "best optics," "best hair," and "best mouth" in club to make the engraving "the all-time possible."[three] Anthony hired an expensive engraver to combine all of these all-time features into a portrait.
The portraits defined the movement's leaders as eye- and upper-grade white women, a stereotype that persists today. Anthony modeled the portraits later on those of leading political men, like presidential candidates. She could accept included Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, but she and other white suffragists distanced themselves from suffragists of color. They thought that if they fought for black women's voting rights, fewer Americans would support their cause. Many Americans, even reformers, viewed people of color as junior. For case, in 1869 Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anthony's co-editor, referred to black men using the derogatory term "Sambo."[4] She believed she deserved the vote before they did. Anthony also could have featured white colleagues like Henry Ward Beecher, but she wanted the portraits to make a case for women'southward leadership.
As suffragists like Anthony became recognizable, cartoonists started to mock specific women. In 1873, The Daily Graphic, a magazine published in New York, printed this cartoon on its front page. The caption labels Anthony as "The Woman Who Dared." The editor causeless that viewers would identify her from her popular 1870 portrait that the artist clearly copied. She holds an umbrella the way a general might hold a sword. On the left, a policewoman surveys an all-female rally. On the right, a homo holds an upset child, while the other carries a handbasket with food. Almost a century after the 1775 "A Society of Patriotic Ladies, at Edenton, in North Carolina" drawing, the artist anticipated that Americans would be entertained enough past the picture show to purchase information technology.
In 1900, Anthony sat for a new portrait. At 80 years old, she is surrounded by her accomplishments. She worked for decades to commission many of the portraits that comprehend the wall and her desk. Many of them remain familiar today, such equally Mary Wollstonecraft, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She highlighted numerous important women whose faces might have otherwise been lost. We tin can give thanks her for the many copies of these portraits in libraries, archives, and museums today.
After Anthony's decease in 1906, suffragists turned her into a suffrage saint. Starting in the 1890s, suffragists established national press committees, hired publicity professionals, and founded their own publishing company. They continued to distribute Anthony's portrait, just they also promoted more traditional ideals of female person domesticity. Anti-suffragists still argued that women should not vote considering they needed to focus on their homes, and so suffragists responded that women needed the vote to improve family life and protect their children. Propaganda distributed by the leading suffrage group, the National American Woman Suffrage Association, often emphasized white women's roles as mothers. Although leading women of color like Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church building Terrell distributed their portraits, they lacked the resource and back up to reach a broad audition.
During the 2020 centennial, we will meet many new documentaries, exhibitions, and statues about the history of women'south suffrage. Anthony and the portraits of her favored leaders will probably remain the about familiar. But, now that nosotros know the history behind the movement's most famous faces, we should highlight less familiar figures too. Susan B. Anthony promoted a vital vision of public female person leadership, and we should continue to refine it.
This article was originally published by the Women'due south Suffrage Centennial Commission (WSCC) on April 21, 2020 every bit a part of the WSCC web log, The Suff Buffs. The Women'due south Suffrage Centennial Committee was created by Congress to commemorate 100 years of the 19th Amendment throughout 2020 and to ensure the untold stories of women'south battle for the election continue to inspire Americans for the next 100 years.
Author Biography
Allison K. Lange is an acquaintance professor of history at the Wentworth Institute of Technology. Her book, Picturing Political Ability: Images in the Women's Suffrage Movement, will exist published in May 2020 by the University of Chicago Press. The book traces the means that women's rights reformers and their opponents used images to define gender and power in the U.s.a.. She is curating suffrage exhibitions at the Massachusetts Historical Society and Harvard's Schlesinger Library. Lange delivers talks across the land, including at the National Portrait Gallery, Cornell University, and the American Antique Social club.
Footnotes
[ane] Frederick Douglass, "Pictures and Progress: An Address Delivered in Boston, Massachusetts, on iii Dec 1861," in The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews., ed. John Blassingame, vol. three, 1855–63, 1 (New Oasis: Yale University Press, 1985), 457.
[2] Susan B. Anthony to Elizabeth Boynton Harbert, Feb 4, 1882, in Ann D. Gordon, ed., The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 4 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 150–151.
[3] Susan B. Anthony to Amelia Jenks Bloomer, November 30, 1880 in Ann D. Gordon, ed., The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. 4 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006), 23.
[4] Elizabeth Cady Stanton to Edward M. Davis, April ten, 1869, George E. Nitzsche Unitariana Drove, Massachusetts Historical Order.
Bibliography
Images
"A society of patriotic ladies, at Edenton in North Carolina." Library of Congress, accessed March thirty, 2020.
"Bloomerism in Practise." National Museum of American History, Smithsonian, accessed March 30, 2020.
"Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony." National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian, accessed March 30, 2020.
"Frederick Douglass." National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian, accessed March 30, 2020.
"Epitome ii of Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, an American slave." Library of Congress, accessed March xxx, 2020.
"Sojourner Truth. I sell the shadow to support the substance." Library of Congress, accessed March xxx, 2020.
"Susan B. Anthony Sitting at Desk-bound." Photo by Library of Congress.
"The Woman Who Dared" in The Daily Graphic. Library of Congress, accessed March xxx, 2020.
Selected Texts
"Where are the Women? A Report on the Status of Women in the United States Social Studies Standards." National Women's History Museum, accessed March thirty, 2020.
Blassingame, John, ed. The Frederick Douglass Papers. Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. iii, 1855–63, i. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985.
Gordon, Ann D., ed. The Selected Papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, vol. four. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2006.
Lange, Allison M. Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women'south Suffrage Movement. Chicago: Academy of Chicago Printing, 2020.
Lemay, Kate Clarke, ed. Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019.
Painter, Nell Irvin. Sojourner Truth: A Life, a Symbol. New York: W.Due west. Norton, 1997.
Stauffer, John, et. al. Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century'due south Most Photographed American. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2015.
Tetrault, Lisa. Myth of Seneca Falls: Retentiveness and the Women'due south Suffrage Motion, 1848-1898. Chapel Loma: University of North Carolina Press, 2014.
Ware, Susan. Why They Marched: Untold Stories of the Women Who Fought for the Right to Vote. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press: An Imprint of Harvard Academy Press, 2019.
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Source: https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/how-susan-b-anthony-became-the-most-recognizable-suffragist.htm