Exhibitions

Curator, Truth Be Told: Stories of Black Women’s Fight for the Vote Digital exhibition here, Summer 2020
Melinda Gates’ organizations Pivotal Ventures and Evoke

Curator, Seeing Citizens: Picturing American Women’s Fight for the Vote
Digital exhibition here, Summer 2020
Harvard University’s Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America

Assistant Curator, America Transformed: Mapping the Nineteenth Century
Part one open from May through November 2019, part two open from November 2019 through May 2020, digital exhibition here
Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library

Curator, Can She Do It? Massachusetts Debates a Woman’s Right to Vote On display from April through September 2019, digital exhibition here
Massachusetts Historical Society

Exhibition Research and Curatorial Assistant, We Are One: Mapping America’s Road from Revolution to Independence
On display in 2015, exhibition traveled to Colonial Williamsburg and the New-York Historical Society in 2016 and 2017, digital exhibition here
Norman B. Leventhal Map Center, Boston Public Library

Allison stands with one of her favorite features of the exhibition, a suffrage bluebird and anti-suffrage rose mobile

Jud Wright, “Can She Do It?” from The Remonstrance, ca. 1910s

In this illustration, a woman attempts to juggle four items that symbolize the work society expects from her. She keeps her baby, a pot that symbolizes cooking, and a ballot in the air, but the broom has fallen to the side. The Remonstrance, an anti-suffrage publication, printed this picture to argue that women could not juggle all of these tasks. For women, voting and caring for one’s house and family were not compatible tasks.

Interactive feature

Allison created this interactive feature to help visitors identify visual details that would have been shocking to 19th-century viewers, such as women smoking and proposing marriage.

Exhibit introduction

For over a century, Americans debated whether women should vote. They wondered: was voting compatible with women’s traditional domestic work? If women participated in politics, would men continue as heads of the family? Would women remain virtuous and “feminine,” or would they start to look and act like men?

In Massachusetts, suffragists were especially powerful. In 1850, Worcester hosted the first national women’s rights convention. Later, Lucy Stone led the nation’s largest suffrage organization and edited the longest-running woman’s rights newspaper from her Park Street office. In 1895, fellow Bostonian Josephine Ruffin founded one of the first national groups to advocate for the rights of women of color.

Local anti-suffragists proved influential too. Their arguments against extending the vote to women dominated legislative debates and newspaper articles. In 1895, Massachusetts men and women formed the nation’s first organized anti-suffrage association.

This exhibition highlights the fight over a woman’s right to vote in Massachusetts by illustrating the arguments made by suffragists and their opponents. Women at the polls might seem unremarkable today, but these contentious campaigns prove that suffragists had to work hard to persuade men to vote to share the ballot. These century-old arguments formed the foundations for today’s debates about gender and politics.

Video feature

Students at the Wentworth Institute of Technology designed these documentary videos. During the fall 2018 and spring 2019, they worked with Allison Lange, the exhibition curator and their professor, and collaborated with MHS staff to highlight the collections. The assignment prompted them to craft a three- to four-minute video about the debate over women’s rights in Massachusetts.

Cases and wall displays

This room featured questions on the walls that suffragists and their opponents answered differently, such as “Can Women Lead?” and “Should Women Protest in the Streets?” Images on the walls demonstrated responses from each group.

Henry Mayer, “The Awakening,” from Puck, February 20, 1915, Library of Congress

In 1869, women in Wyoming became the first female voters in the United States. Gradually, women in other western states also won the ballot. This illustration features Lady Liberty, wearing suffrage yellow, bringing women’s voting rights from western states to eastern ones. The magazine Puck, which printed this cartoon, had mocked suffrage for decades. During the New York state suffrage campaign in 1915, the editors changed their minds. The tide had changed.

19th Amendment and the Aftermath

The exhibit concluded by discussing the successes and limitations of the 19th Amendment and the continued efforts to win women’s rights.

The brave old Hendrick the great sachem or chief of the Mohawk Indians, etching and engraving, London, 1755.

Mohawk Chief Hendrick was killed while fighting with the British colonial troops at the Battle of Lake George in 1755. He appears on a horse on the next map, identified by the number three. Hendrick was a powerful leader within the Iroquois Confederacy. His leadership and alliance with the British helped the Mohawks maintain their strength even as the British Empire grew. This portrait, printed in London, depicts him in a European-style military uniform, with a wampum belt in his left hand and a hatchet in his right. Contemporaries mentioned facial tattoos, which likely accounts for the markings on his face.

Samuel Blodget, A Prospective View of the Battle Fought near Lake George London, 1756. Engraving, hand colored, Richard H. Brown Collection, Norman B. Leventhal Map Center.

This map depicts the Battle of Lake George. Blodget created the map based on his viewpoint during the battle. A booklet accompanied the map, which can be viewed here. The booklet explains the numbered points on the map, including the one that references the Mohawk Chief Hendrick.

“Phillis Wheatley, Negro Servant to Mrs. John Wheatley, of Boston,” in Phillis Wheatley, Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral London, 1773. Engraving, Library of Congress.

Phillis Wheatley came to Boston as a slave from Africa when she was around eight years old. She received an usually good education for a woman, especially a slave, and became a prominent poet in America and England. In this portrait from her book of poems, Wheatley sits at her desk with her quill thinking about her next lines. The portrait challenged racial hierarchies by representing her as an author instead of as a slave.

The Royall Family

While Southern states are usually associated with slavery, this grouping of maps tell a story about slavery in Boston. The Royall family (pictured on the bottom left) owned a plantation in Antigua (on the right). The map on the top right shows their property just outside of Boston, where they lived in a large mansion that is now open to the public. They owned dozens of slaves, and the grounds feature the only remaining slave quarters in New England.

George Washington, Surveyor

Long before he became an military and political leader, Washington was a land surveyor. He knew the value of maps, especially during battle. This quote in the picture above emphasizes that the colonists lacked the extensive maps that the British had access to during the Revolutionary War.

Pierre Simon Benjamin Duvivier, Congressional Gold Medal Awarded to George Washington, Paris, 1789. Gold medal, diameter, 2.75 inches.

Congress awarded Washington this medal after he forced the British to evacuate Boston in 1776. Because the event is so central to the city's history, Bostonians banded together to purchase it from his descendants for the library in the 1870s.

John Wallis, The United States of America Laid Down from the Best Authorities, Agreeable to the Peace of 1783 London, 1783. Engraving, hand colored, 19 x 22.5 inches

These maps from the 1780s featured the outlines of the new United States and served to legitimate the existence of the new nation. The decorative cartouche from John Wallis's map covers the back wall. The image features early American iconography, including portraits of George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, a figure of liberty, and one of the first representations of the American flag.