Images and the Fight for American Women’s Voting Rights

In response to popular anti-woman’s rights cartoons that dominated nineteenth-century America, suffragists developed a national visual campaign to re-define ideas of gender, power, and politics in the US. In this talk, historian Allison K. Lange will speak about the ways that suffragists used visual culture in the fight to win the vote.

Doors open at 5:00 pm; come early to view our exhibits! Talk begins at 5:45 pm.

$10 for CMCH members, $15 for non-members. Free for members of the Decorative Arts Council. Light refreshments will be served. Please tell us you’re coming by emailing rsvp@chs.org or calling 860-236-5621 ext. 238.

Questions? Contact Adult Programs Manager Natalie Belanger  at (860) 236-5621 x289, or email natalie_belanger@chs.org.

About the Speaker:

Allison K. Lange is an assistant professor of history at the Wentworth Institute of Technology. She received her PhD in history from Brandeis University and is currently completing a manuscript entitled Picturing Political Power: Images and the Fight for Women’s Votes in the United States, which is under contract with the University of Chicago Press. The book traces the ways that woman’s rights activists and their opponents used images to define gender and power during the US woman suffrage movement. Lange’s research focuses on visual culture and politics, especially in relation to social movements. She has taught classes on images and politics as well as a studio course on digital women’s history. To commemorate the 2020 centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, she is curating exhibitions at the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Schlesinger Library at Harvard University.

Image: “The Awakening”, Henry Mayer, 1915, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division