March 15, 2020

Dr. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich told visitors to the Brandywine River Museum of Art that “Well behaved women seldom make history,” as she explained the significance of the illustrations of Liberty used to promote the women’s suffrage movement. She made the comment in conjunction with the “Votes for Women” exhibition.

“What most people don’t realize is that by 1915, the only states in the nation that had granted women the full right to vote, were west of the Mississippi,” said Ulrich.

“The Awakening” appeared in a special publication of Puck Magazine in support of the 1915 referendum in New York to give women the right to vote. The cartoon shows the Statue of Liberty, liberated from her pedestal, with torch held high, striding across the western United States – the states where women have already been granted the right to vote. The eastern states are depicted as teeming black sludge from which frantic women struggle to emerge.

“It tells a simple story – the west has gotten ahead of us, let’s step up now,” said Ulrich. She explained that in the 1700s, liberty was portrayed with a pole topped with a floppy cap. This cap, a pileus, was used in Roman ceremonies to emancipate people from slavery. “They were touched with the pole and then given the pileus cap.”

According to Ulrich, American revolutionaries like Paul Revere called themselves political slaves due to their oppression by parliament with taxes without representation. Revere and others used the female image of Liberty with pole and hat to support their cause. After the revolution, 1792 illustrations of Liberty were used by abolitionists and suffragists.

“Women’s rights are entwined with the abolition movement, they merged together,” said Ulrich pointing out the 1855 illustration from The Leger’s Annual Greeting published in Philadelphia. “Two women are holding up a liberty pole and a liberty cap. One is black and the other Caucasian. They are joining together to hold up the pole of liberty.”

The liberty pole and cap became so associated with abolition and women’s rights, that when Bartholdi designed the Statue of Liberty, he changed the cap in his design to a crown to avoid controversy.

“It took quite a while for Liberty to become a welcoming emblem for immigrants, but it was not considered a welcoming emblem for African-Americans or women,” said Ulrich. She cited the Indignation Meetings held to protest the female figure of the statue, in a country where women did not have liberty.

Race continued to play a role in the fight for and against women’s right to vote. An illustration published in San Francisco in 1882, “Three Troublesome Children” shows Columbia, Liberty’s sister, struggling with three children while her husband, Uncle Sam, sits with his back to her reading the paper. The three misbehaving boys are Chinese, Native American and Mormon. “The message,” said Ulrich, “is Uncle Sam needs to turn away from Washington to take charge of the crisis in the west.”

This meshed with the Eastern notion that progress in this country came from the East and went westward. The Awakening turned things upside down.

“In the 1915 March on Washington … icons of the 18^th century, Justice, Mercy, Peace and Liberty all came alive and walked down the steps of the treasury building to join the march. They go from representations of an ideal to actual women,” said Ulrich.

While the men in New York voted to deny women the right to vote in 1915, on November 6, 1917, New York became the first state in the East to grant women the right to vote. The exhibition continues until June 7. For further information on events at the museum, go to www.brandywine.org/museum

[Editor’s Note: This article was written before the museum closed in reaction to the coronavirus.]