Up at the National Portrait Gallery in DC right now is Women Of Our Time: Twentieth-Century Photographs, ninety portraits of famous and influential American women. Before the show had even officially opened, an element of the press had taken issue with it because the exhibition includes the following photo:
Ira L. Hill’s Margaret Higgins Sanger 1917
The image seems innocuous enough, and it is...in itself. But Margaret Sanger was an important birth control activist and the founder of the American Birth Control League which became Planned Parenthood, and therein lies the issue for some people. The controversy isn’t about the photograph itself: it’s about the life of the woman which the image portrays and the gesture which the Smithsonian Institution is making by including her in its visual canon of iconic women.
Why should a federally-funded show include a portrait of someone who represents a cause that many people in this country hate passionately? Simply put: we live in a democracy. There are at least as many people who believe in Sanger’s primary cause* as those who despise it.
The Gerhard Sisters’ Aimee Semple McPherson circa 1921
It’s for the same reason that this portrait of Aimee Semple McPherson should be welcome in Women Of Our Time. Though our Constitution specifically calls for the separation of church and state, a government institution has every responsibility to honor this important evangelist and founder of the Foursquare Church. Whether or not every citizen agrees with everything that McPherson was about, she played an important role in the development of this country and she should be noted for it.
A portrait is always more than a picture of a face. Unlike a more general figurative work, the image of a specific person comes to represent everything that the person believed in and did: the portrait takes on the same force and responsibilities as the person whom it portrays.
With Women Of Our Time, the National Portrait Gallery is celebrating ninety individuals and their contributions to the United States, but, through their likenesses, the Gallery is also associating itself with these women and what they did. And, as any kindergardener can tell you, it’s important to choose your friends wisely.
Aimee Semple McPherson Battles The Gorilla Of Evolution, courtesy of the Oregon Historical Society
I’m only glad that the Smithsonian didn’t see fit to use this image of McPherson.
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*Besides birth control, Sanger also believed in eugenics and I don’t think that most people today are into that.
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