Votes for Women! A Portrait of Persistence

The centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment in 2020 has ushered in a raft of commemorative books. Among them is Votes for Women!, a handsomely illustrated volume edited by Kate Clarke Lemay. The book straddles popular and scholarly history while simultaneously providing a complex, rather than merely celebratory, view of the suffrage movement and its legacies. Produced in conjunction with an exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery, Votes for Women! is a hybrid creature—part scholarly essays written to be accessible to a general audience, part historical narrative, and part gorgeous and ambitious exhibition catalog with the easy visual appeal of a coffee-table book. Publishing a book in conjunction with a National Portrait Gallery exhibit commemorating women's suffrage inevitably bakes in some conceptional boundaries. The primacy of portraiture in the volume puts individual agency front and center as a historical force, while the overarching topic of the vote cannot help but privilege a limited, state-centric model of citizenship. Two of the scholarly essays in the volume, however, push these boundaries. Lisa Tetrault, adapting her essay from her 2014 book The Myth of Seneca Falls, argues against the narrow vision of women's activism that Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton passed down through their monumental six-volume History of Women's Suffrage (1881–1922) and other writings. Brilliant as public relations but highly selective as history, their work emphasized their individual public personas and crafted a cohesive brand for the movement. Their brand appealed to the popular imagination but did so by marginalizing the competing suffrage organization headed by Lucy Stone, overlooking women's activism for rights other than the vote, and ignoring African American women's advocacy altogether. Taking the challenge to individualism and the primacy of the vote to citizenship even further, Martha S. Jones's essay sketches sixty years of African American women's activism. Arguing that activist African American women, “would never limit themselves to a stand-alone set of women's concerns,” Jones shows how churchwomen, clubwomen, lecturers, and journalists counted women's votes as an important aim, but one tied up with a host of other goals, including abolition, ending Jim Crow, improving black women's standing in the church, and attaining racial equality more generally (p. 30

Agency (philosophy · Art · Art history · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Portrait · Social science · Sociology · Suffrage · Historical Gender and Feminism Studies · History · Law

• A política da memória constitucional

  Open Access•Reva B Siegel, Reva Siegel et al.•Revista Jurídica da UFERSA•2023

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