160 years in the making
When Allie told me she wanted to be blended with Susan B Anthony for Apple Pie, I was non-plussed at first. At the time, I thought that the immigrant/icon combinations should to be startling—like a Taiwanese-American Richard Nixon or a Mexican-American Superman. Making a modern day Anglo-American woman into a 19th century white lady didn’t seem like enough of a remix for my series. We played with a few other ideas during the photo shoot, and I wrestled with what to do with her face and story for many months afterwards. In the end, I followed the subject’s suggestion…
...though not without adding my own twist in the form of this woman: Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Though Anthony’s equal partner in the women’s suffrage movement, today Stanton is the lesser known of the two women.
Since Allie was interested in Anthony not because of her particular accomplishments but because of her current role as the representative of the women’s suffrage movement, I figured she could just as easily be blended with Stanton.
Stanton is the hidden half of the woman’s suffrage movement. She’s the one who officially kicked it off with her Declaration Of Sentiments at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, before Anthony was even interested in women’s rights.
Stanton is often described as the philosophy or the voice of the movement, while Anthony was supposed to have been more the doer, the one who knocked on people’s doors and changed their minds. This version of their partnership holds some truth, but both were actively involved in all aspects of the movement and even leaders of it for most of their lives.
How is it then that Stanton is no longer a household name and Anthony was the first woman* to appear on a US coin? Elizabeth Cady Stanton simply does not cut as dashing of a figure as Susan B Anthony when viewed through the filters of the modern American.
Both Anthony and Stanton came to woman’s suffrage from an abolitionist background, but Stanton betrayed her activist origins when black men were given the vote before women of any color in 1870 with the Fifteenth Amendment. She started calling for educational requirements for voter eligibility. This dangerous elitism probably reflected more her own disappointment than any real animosity towards emancipated slaves, immigrants, and other less privileged groups, but it’s nevertheless not what we want to see when we look at the heroic women’s suffrage movement.
So, despite her close partnership with the tireless Anthony, Stanton was taken out of the history. Her removal was effective: she is barely known today.
Gwenn Seemel
The Declarer (Anglo-American, Alexandra)
2008
acrylic on canvas clutch, button
7 x 10 inches
It’s for that reason that I made Allie-as-Elizabeth in the form of a clutch handbag. It’s a kind of purse which is often paired with a bigger day bag and even lives in the larger purse, only to be brought out for quick errands or for an evening out. The Susan B is Allie-as-Susan in the form of a practical day bag, and it’s the match to this clutch since Anthony is the more presentable half of the partnership.
photo by David
I worked on both portrait bags simultaneously. Here I am doing detail work on The Declarer while wearing The Susan B to soften paint-encrusted strap a little bit.
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*Other women had appeared on commemorative coins before Anthony, but never on coins which were circulated generally—except, of course, the female representations of Justice and Liberty.
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CATEGORIES: - Process images - Philosophy - On feminism - Apple Pie -
