Women's Suffrage Memorabilia by Kenneth Florey

Author:Kenneth Florey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2013-07-17T00:00:00+00:00

Mrs. Toscan Bennett, pictured here with her children, was a neighbor of Mrs. Thomas (Katherine) Hepburn and her ally in the Connecticut Woman Suffrage Association.

Another Real Photo card by a photographer identified only as McElroy is lettered on the front identifying Grace Wilbur Trout as the main speaker at a Chautauqua event in Pana, Illinois. Trout is seen in a group shot with eighteen other women. Trout was president of the Chicago Political Equality League and a central figure in securing passage of the suffrage bill in Illinois in 1913. The Chautauqua was a lecture circuit and study school held throughout the United States, and Trout was one of the official speakers. What makes this particular card especially interesting is that someone has identified in pencil on the back of the card each of the women depicted, suggesting, perhaps, that the card was at one time owned by a person who was present at the event. It is not known how many copies of this card exist, but the number is probably quite low, perhaps restricted to the participants at the Chautauqua.

Despite the number of extant photographic cards, Real Photo or otherwise, American suffragists were not quite as focused as their English counterparts were on the potential of the postcard to record history. It is far easier to trace most of the major events in the English suffrage movement through postcards than it is in the American struggle, perhaps because English suffragists maintained closer relationships with both individual photographers and commercial studios. The Bexleyheath firm of F. Kehrhahn, for example, is sometimes regarded as the semi-official photographer of the WSPU, commissioned by them to capture their activities, processions, and related happenings, and many of their resultant photos appeared on WSPU cards.34 Other photographers and firms involved with the production of postcards included Mrs. Albert Broom, Lizzie Caswell Smith, Graham of Morpeth, Emeny of Felixstowe, and Allworth Brothers of Tonbridge.35

There were, nevertheless, American suffrage demonstrations that attracted their share of cameras, including the Pennsylvania Liberty Bell campaign, “General” Rosalie Jones’ march to Washington, the suffrage parade at President Wilson’s 1913 inaugural along with the accompanying pageant on the steps of the Treasury, and, to a limited degree, the activities of the “Silent Sentinels,” who demonstrated outside the White House gates around the time of the First World War.

As part of her strategy to generate publicity for the 1915 suffrage campaign in Pennsylvania, Katharine Wentworth Ruschenberger developed plans to “recast” the Liberty Bell (see Pennsylvania Liberty Bell Campaign). The resultant bell, carried on a specially reinforced truck, criss-crossed all sixty-seven counties of the state, traveling a total of 3,935 miles, before the campaign ended on Election Day, November 2. There are Real Photo cards that follow the journey of the 2,000-pound bell, from the time that it was first presented to the Pennsylvania state organization on June 23, 1915, through several of its many stops along the way, to its triumphant ceremonial ringing in Independence Square in Philadelphia on September 25, 1920, in celebration of the passage of the National Suffrage Amendment.

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