How Susan B. Anthony made her face the best-known of the suffrage movement

Most people asked to name a suffragist say Susan B. Anthony, and many even know her face. Historian Allison K. Lange argues that this is not an accident: Anthony spent real effort and money making sure the women's movement had faces, and hers was the one that stuck. This National Park Service article, first published by the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission in April 2020, traces how.

"A society of patriotic ladies, at Edenton in North Carolina," printed 1775. Library of Congress.

Anthony's recognition, as of the article

In 1979 Anthony became the first woman whose portrait appeared on a circulating U.S. coin. The article says many states require students to learn about her, and that a planned statue in Central Park, the first of historical women there, would feature her with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth. Anthony was one of many activists but one of the few who devoted time to distributing portraits of reformers, and she borrowed the idea from antislavery campaigners.

Mocked in print

Printed portraits of women were rare in early America. Women were expected to prefer privacy, and engravers seldom copied the painted portraits that hung in wealthy homes. Women in politics were instead ridiculed. A 1775 London print mocked women who boycotted tea, showing them ignoring a child, one drinking punch, and an apparently enslaved Black woman who seems to want to sign too. In 1851, three years after the Seneca Falls Convention, the print "Bloomerism in Practice" showed a smoking wife and a husband mending clothes while a child cried; its banners read "no more basement & kitchen" and "no more massa & missus." The message was that rights for women would upset gender norms, slavery, class and white supremacy. Reformers had weak organizations, little money and no control over the popular press.

Learning from Douglass and Truth

Frederick Douglass, born in 1818, escaped slavery at 20 and began distributing his portrait, starting with his autobiography. In 1861 he told audiences in Boston and Syracuse that pictures could advance racial equality. Sojourner Truth, born in New York in the late 1790s, escaped slavery in 1826, a year before the state ended it. In the 1860s she sold cheap, popular carte de visite photographs, posing in plain Quaker clothing, with a white head wrap and glasses, and holding yarn as if knitting. The pose showed her as respectable and domestic, though she sold the pictures to earn a living. In 1865 Anthony showed Truth's portrait to the Women's Loyal National League, which she founded, to raise money for newly freed people, and recorded that it worked.

"The Woman Who Dared," from The Daily Graphic, 1873. Library of Congress.

Anthony manages the pictures

Anthony sold portraits of herself and favored leaders through her newspaper, The Revolution, and her organizations. In 1876 she, Stanton and Matilda Joslyn Gage began the History of Woman Suffrage, which grew to six volumes of about 1,000 pages each, and she insisted it carry portraits. She told contributors which photograph to send. In an 1882 letter she asked for a head-and-shoulders view in three-quarter profile, neither full face nor full profile. She asked Amelia Bloomer which photograph had the best eyes, hair and mouth, then paid an expensive engraver to combine the best features.

The portraits modeled the movement's leaders on those of political men, such as presidential candidates, and showed middle- and upper-class white women. Anthony could have featured Truth and Douglass, but she and other white suffragists distanced themselves from suffragists of color, fearing that backing Black women's votes would cost support. The article notes that Stanton, in an 1869 letter, called Black men by a derogatory term that this page does not repeat, and believed she deserved the vote before them.

As suffragists became recognizable, cartoonists mocked individuals. In 1873 The Daily Graphic printed "The Woman Who Dared" on its front page, drawn from Anthony's popular 1870 portrait: she holds an umbrella like a general's sword, a policewoman watches a rally of women, and a man comforts an upset child.

Susan B. Anthony seated at her desk, 1900. Library of Congress.

The portraits that outlasted her

In 1900, at 80, Anthony sat for a portrait surrounded by pictures she had commissioned over decades, including Mary Wollstonecraft, Lucretia Mott and Stanton. Libraries, archives and museums still hold copies. After her death in 1906, suffragists made her a "suffrage saint." From the 1890s they set up national press committees, hired publicity professionals and founded a publishing company, and the National American Woman Suffrage Association often stressed white women's roles as mothers. Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Mary Church Terrell distributed their own portraits but lacked the resources to reach a broad audience.

Lange expected Anthony and her favored leaders to stay the most familiar faces during the 2020 centennial, but urges readers to give less familiar figures attention too.

Sources

• National Park Service article by Allison K. Lange, associate professor of history at the Wentworth Institute of Technology, originally published April 21, 2020 by the Women's Suffrage Centennial Commission (https://www.nps.gov/articles/000/how-susan-b-anthony-became-the-most-recognizable-suffragist.htm). Public domain. Library of Congress images are from its collections; the Commission's logo and the bibliography are left out.
• Allison K. Lange and the National Park Service; rewritten in hubnx's own words.