hi, welcome to the national portrait gallery at the civilian institution. i am the curator of votes for women, a portrait of resistance. for this exhibition, i worked 3.5 years researching, teaching myself this history, and finding all the objects. in this exhibit we have about 124 objects, including 63 portraits. in thisw exhibition, i was hoping to commemorate the 19th amendment and tell the history of the 19th amendment and how women lobbied to get this amendment passed and ratified. but also ask questions about it and ask what does it do and not do and why 1965, the voting rights act, was considered a part two of the voting amendment. i will show you a few of the objects that tell this history, so let's go. we're in the first gallery of the exhibition. and i mentioned we have portraits that drive the narrative, but i also wanted to include in the exhbitionj pieces of art, like the one we're looking at which is titled "the war spirit at home". it's by a female artist. he was active in the 1860's. i wanted to include this painting, because it or trays young children, these four kids, one is a baby. and the mother is reading the new york times. then you have a servant or helper cleaning the dishes. what i like about this painting is it's from 1866 aqnd it depicts the civil war and the battle of vicksburg. it's kind of looking back and spencer decided to portray this moment in time by looking at the lives of women. and the women are very serious. but the children are very much engaged in the celebration, because they don't understand how severe and difficult that battle was. vicksburg, during the battle, the men on both sides starved, because the city was surrounded and embargoed. and so why am i talking about the civil war in a suffrage exhibition? that's a good question. what i wanted to do was demonstrate the divide between the north and the south as well as between the races, african american and white, because this plays a big part in the suffrage movement, especially when the 14th amendment was passed and ratified in 1869, it included the word "male". this is the first time in the history of the constitution that gender was specified, and it delivered a severe blow to the suffrage movement, where women try to advocate for their for their right to vote, if they weren't even considered citizens, which is what the 14th amendment does, it granted citizenship to anyone in the united states, then when the 15th amendment enfranchised american citizens, it only enfranchised half the population. this is a huge divide. the suffrage movement disagreed on how to handle it. and that's when they split between each other. susan b. anthony and elizabeth katy stanton they wanted to advocate for suffrage by including black women, whereas lucy stoewe was trying to add the case for universal -- trying to advocate for universal suffrage. one of the major african-american suffragists. she famously gave speech at a convention. she was trying to explain to people that she was also an african-american and a woman combined. black women couldn't just sit around and let people take away their rights and not advocate for them. so they became active in church groups and they really worked on learning how to speak in public, understanding their rights, understanding how to get those rights by their local communities, by being involved in those local community church groups, and that's an interesting topic not a lot of people have gone into or understand as much. so people do understand the suffrage movement was divided, but they don't understand that african-american remain very active. so this exhibition endeavours to include people like sarah parker, whose portrait is on the far wall. she was an activist in anti-slavery society of massachusetts. and she took her activism abroad. this is another interesting story in how american suffragists were not only focused in the united states, but they were also active elsewhere, in europe especially. we are going to talk about seneca falls and what is referred to as the myth of seneca falls. this is a portrait of susan b anthony. he captured them together. anthony is pointing to a book, and they are very dignified. this would be a publicity shot today. they were using this portrait to represent them to a wider audience. they didn't even meet until 1851. seneca falls, as most of us recall from our history books in high school, was a gathering, the first convention in 1848. elizabeth cady stanton and others penned the declaration of sentiments, which is the beginning document, one of the first documents that women were advocating for the vote. what i hope this exhibition explains is by going back way back to 1832 is that women were getting together and talking and advocating for their rights, for their citizenship rights well before 1848. suffrage just didn't appear out of thin air. it has a long history that others argue. that is a great intellectual debate i encourage you to look into. i brought us up to 1869 and now we are going to move into the next gallery, which starts in 1870. we are in the second gallery and i wanted to make sure to include representation of the women's christian temperance union. because it helps us get into a lot of different issues that american women were facing. temperance was a large organization that had 100 thousand women across the united states involved. they would gather and meet in what was called chapters. in 1973, the women's christian temperance union actually endorsed the women's sufferage cause. at the top you see the women's holy war. you see a woman on a horse. she is leaping over these well marked barrels of alcohol. behind her are all of her compatriots. women weilding axes and hatchets, they are part of the temperance league. "in the name of god and humanity", that reads the banner one of them is carrying. when women were married to alcoholics, they became a vulnerable population. they were organizing amongst each other in ways that helped them not only get support but understand their rights and what they can do to advocate for their rights. on the bottom you see the oratorical prize and it says wctu at the top and i wanted to include this little metal because i was curious to know how women were teaching themselves how to speak in public. so if you think about like toastmasters of today, that's a good analogy to what they were doing because they were actually awarding prizes to women who was speaking and having a contest in order to award them for good speeches. and of course they were talking about christianity. so that was an interesting object i was able to find. the reason why it was important for women to know how to speak in public was in part because the suffrage cause was, the word about it was being spread through speeches. a lot of women were going on what was called the lecture circuit. they were speaking at auditoriums and being paid lots of money. dickinson earned $20,000 annually. she made more than mark twain. i think that is an interesting comparison. whose name is remembered today? even though anne elizabeth dickinson was more famous than mark twain at the time. this woman started her own business as a wall street banker. she advocated for free love, which means sex outside of marriage, which was definitely outside of the norms for women, 1870s. and she also ran for president on a third party ticket. she was the first woman to do so. we have a nice portrait of her attempting to vote, or asserting her right to vote, as she would see it. she voted when you weren't supposed to vote as a women. and lots of women at this time were doing what would be referred to today as illegal voting, because it was explicitly illegal for women to vote. victoria woodhull was one of thousands across the country who thought to change the system by going out, voting, getting arrested, not paying fines, and serving a sentence in jail so they can appeal through the court system. and they tried to change the laws that way and they failed and there was another severe blow dealt to the suffrage movement in 1873 when the supreme court ruled against a woman named virginian miner who had tried to vote and had gone up through court system but then the supreme court found women should not vote legally in the united states. we were discussing how victoria woodhull asserted her right to vote. here we have a different type of ballot box. this one is made of metal, whereas that one was most likely wood. what i like is it explicitly says women's ballot on it. it's very much in your face that women were voting separately and likely not on equal terms. so they could maybe vote for municipal suffrage or school suffrage. or in some states, about 15 were allowed to vote in the presidential election. this box is from ellwood, indiana, which is one of those states that allowed women before 1920 to vote in the presidential elections, and it was made out of st. louis, and they made these boxes between 1860 and 1920, and i think this is an interesting peaceful material culture that illuminayes what women's rights were like and what it looked like, what it felt like. we are looking at a caricature of victoria woodhull done by thomas nast in 1872. this exemplifies some of the struggles women were going through at the time. if you see, this is a caricature, victoria woodhull has been known for wearing what is known as victory rolls. but the cartoonist turns them into devil horns. she has become a demon. she is walking away from a woman who is looking over her shoulder, maybe a little undecided that she made's her decision, she's going up this mountain. you can tell there are three children she is carrying as well as the alcoholic husband strapped to her back. this exemplifies the choices that women had. either you throw in your stock with somebody like victoria woodhull, who is advocating for free love at the time, and that is a very soft term for sex outside of marriage. she was advocating that women should enjoy sex and have sex outside of marriage and why get married therefore? why have this burden of ill husbands and children without and support? victoria woodhull was trying to promote choices women had. at the time women were definitely not supposed to be having sex and enjoying it. so this is very much a taboo subject. and thomas nast captures that in his caricature of victoria woodhull as this demon lady. we are looking at a portrait of velda ann lockwood. she was argue a case before the supreme court, it was about a cherokee man's rights. she became an expert witness for native americans in subsequent trials. what i like is how dignified she looks, she had her hair bound up in this beautiful cloth. she had her collar on, and it represents her as this respectable woman, because she was a suffragist and they were constantly being accused of being outside the bounds of femininity. she was actually the first woman to campaign for a presidency. i mentioned victoria woodhull, who is the first woman to name herself as candidate for presidency, but she couldn't campaign because she was serving a jail sentence, and yet she had founded what was called equal rights party. this was like a democrat party and like the republican party, but it's a third party ticket. so these suffragists are running for president on what is called a third party ticket. it is thanks to victoria woodhull that lockwood is able to run in 1884 and 1888. a good example of what women could do. she was advocating for rights in the supreme court and running for president. here we have a lovely portrait of abigail scott dunaway, who is an oregon suffragist active in trying to persuade male legislators to change the laws of these western states. she was based in oregon and founded the new northwest, which was a newspaper in 1871, that advocated for women's rights. and so a lot of people think that suffrage was only based in the northeast, but in fact it was very active across the united states. there were lots of mormon women advocating in utah. wyoming famously became the fist state ot endorse suffrage in 1869. there is a nationwide approach to this reform movement. it was probably one of the longest reform movement's in the united states in american history, and one of the most widespread. we're in the third gallery and this is entitled "the new woman". it goes up to 1912. the new woman was educated, on her bicycle, not in her home, physically active. as you can see in this depiction of the farmer, his wife and possibly his daughter. this new woman, in her riding habit, she is wearing what looks like bloomers, or pants, she asked them for a glass of water. they of course oblige, but as she is drinking, they are thinking to themselves, what is this person? is she a woman? what is she doing? why is she outside of the home? you can see a lot of the confusion women had when women started to advocate for their rights. magazines were picking up on this. leslie's was owned by miriam leslie who married frank leslie who died and she changed her name to become mrs. frank leslie. in order to assume the authority it took to publish a magazine like this, you can see the use of the color. she's obviously carrying the banner of votes for women. it speaks to some of the privilege behind the movement. so a lot of wealthy white women were the ones that were actually out there advocating in parades like this. in part because the parades excluded african americans, but they were doing well and getting the word out. miriam leslie changed her magazine to include illustrations like this, so if you studied leslie after she took over, you can see a clear trajectory into the feminist causes. finally we're going to look at an example of anti-suffrage. this is from 1894, andnew york had tried to change its state referendum to include women's right to vote. but it failed, despite having 600,000 signatures in support of changing the legislation, the referendum failed area this exemplifies what was happening in this era, where the suffragist had taken on a state-by-state approach. there were no longer going for this amendment change that hadn't -- that had been proposed in the 1870's. they try to do a full court process state-by-state. you can see how can she vote when the voting booths are so narrow. it is depicting this woman as a fanciful serious bit. if you can't figure out how to dress yourself, much less finish voting -- how could women even see themselves having a political voice? there is a lot of anti-suffrage that accompanies the whole movement and in the exhibition i chose to highlight some of those examples but really not focus on it too too much, because i was more interested in how african-americans were really involved and what the strategies were in the movement. so we're looking at two examples of ephemera that speak to the history of colorado and women's voting rights. i want to highligh colorado because it's the first state where they were able to convince the lobby and legislatures to change the state constitution. wyoming was a territory, they sort of grandfathered in the right to vote when it became a state, but women didn't have to lobby wyoming legislators after it became a state to get the right to vote. it was already written into their constitution. so the colorado example is pretty interesting. if you come in close, you can see the three party tickets and at the bottom, this would be what they voted with in 1893. you can see equal suffrage approved or equal suffrage not approved. once colorado women achieved the right to vote, they then of course elected female legislators. so this is a portrait of three of the four female legislators from the era from 1893, 1894 louise curwin, louise jones, and agnes riddell two democrats and one republican. we've got three portraits of african-americans. there is anna cooper in the middle and mary church tyrell on the right. these were studio portraits that were made of these women while they were students at oberlin college. it is not the first in the united states to accept african-american students. what i love about these portraits is how young they are. you know they each went on to lead great lives as activists, as women that were advocating for citizenship rights for all people of the united states, but particularly for african-americans. especially anna julia cooper was a teacher in at a school washington, d.c. which is now the dunbar high school, and she was living the life of someone who truly believed in giving liberal arts education to african americans, as did mary church terrell. she was also teaching at the m street colored school. what i like about these two women was they were especially taking on the responsibility to assimilate african-americans in the post-civil war reconstruction era in a way that would give them white collar access so they can become, once they went to the dunbar high school, then they went to college, and they were business people, leaders, other teachers or nurses. they embody that argument of w.e.b. dubois and booker t. washington that these two men have been having. booker t. washington advocated for technical training and dubois for liberal arts training. and these women were walking the walk. they are less recognized than the men and they are very much equal to both of these men in the ways in which they were strategizing how to make life better for african-americans during a very difficult time. and so these three women are in this exhibition because they were not advocating for only suffrage, but they were advocating for other things outside the parameters of this single issue focus. african-american women were doing lots of activism, even though they were still excluded from the national american woman suffrage association, which the two factions we were talking about in the very beginning when in 1870, they have come back together in 1892, so they then move forward with great force and good strategy, so they're still doing the state by state strategy but also excluding african-americans the whole time. my point is these women were not just sitting around waiting on the sidelines. they were being very active in and of themselves in their own groups and their own societies and their own local communities. we are standing in front of a banner carried in 1911. the writing is actually an excerpt of a text called the glorious light, written in 1871 by the british dean of canterbury. what i love about this banner is how it has that sense of spirituality that was so importance to the suffragists through the 19 teens. it also has that sense of emerging onward and making progress forward. i want to make sure to include a couple of banners in the national women's party because they speak to the thinking because the movement and it also points to the activism. this concludes the first half of the exhibition. we have covered the movement up through 1912. and we've covered the first generation of suffragists and from this point on, we're going to discover that suffragists still haven't achieved the right to vote, that women still don't have the right to vote in the united states, but we'll trace how they switch tactics and really achieved progress in a very comparatively small amount of time, up through 1920, and then talk about the changes and the ongoing battle through 1965 in the second part. >> this was the first of a two-part tour of the national portrait gallery's exhibit marking the centennial of the 19th amendment. you can watch this and american artifacts programs by visiting our website. >> next, a visit to the smithsonian's national portrait gallery. in is the second of a two-part program, a historian gives american history tv a guided tour about the exhibit marking

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