backstory: Not so fast ...

Yesterday marked the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment granting the right to vote to millions of women. Technically all women could vote, but in practice, only white women were able to vote with any ease in many places until the Voting Rights Act was passed in 1965. Even after the passage of the VRA and through the present day, voting access for BIPOC can be a challenge.

The Dress Barn clips I used protected a brochure for a project called Artful Advocacy: Cartoons from the Woman Suffrage Movement, a small show I created for the 75th Anniversary of Woman Suffrage at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington DC. The exhibition, which was picked up by the Associated Press (the great goal in those days) and featured nationally (much to my joy as an assistant curator) focused on three women who created cartoons advocating for woman suffrage in both suffrage journals and popular magazines in the second decade of the twentieth century.

As I look back at those images now, I am struck by many things about which I was unaware then, particularly the signature image for the exhibition, a work by Lou Rogers called Tearing off the Bonds, which illustrated the Judge series “The Modern Woman” on October 19, 1912. Here, Rogers’ use of breaking rope—easily read as the bonds of slavery—to express disenfranchisement conveys much different meanings to me now, especially within the context of today’s conversations about race and justice.

Looking backward always leads me to new perspectives.