Institute Library Goes To The Ballot Box

The message is clear enough. It’s the letters themselves that bear a closer look, because it turns out the T is built around the shape of a uterus, the P around a raised fist, the S around a dollar bill, the E around a ballot. The letters appear to comment on what they’re spelling; the message is to smash the patriarchy, but it’s the letters that suggest what’s needed to make it happen.

The feminist typeface — providing commentary on whatever you might decide needs spelling out with it, from grocery lists to letters to senators — is part of ​“Declaration of Sentiments: A Visual Celebration of 100 Years of Women’s Right to Vote in the U.S.A,” an art exhibit running at the Institute Library on Chapel Street through December 15. The exhibit comes on the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, stating that ​“the right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex” — ​“which is insane,” said Martha Lewis, the Institute Library’s gallery curator, referring to the fact that granting women the right to vote took so long. To commemorate the achievement, Lewis ​“wanted to do something that highlighted the past of the library — people who had spoken here.” Among those speakers were Frederick Douglass, Anna E. Dickinson, and Grace Greenwood (a.k.a. Sara Jane Lippincott), all of whom were activists for women’s suffrage.

The library itself had no materials about them, other than records that they had spoken. Fortunately, it did have intern Ava Hathaway Hacker, who dove deep into the history of the suffrage movement — and emerged with a more complex story than the simple narrative of getting the 19th Amendment passed would suggest.

First, said Hacker, she learned ​“how many women were still disenfranchised after the 19th Amendment passed,” and ​“how much longer that would take.” The 15th Amendment had granted Black men the right to vote, and the 19th Amendment should have extended those rights to Black women — except that in 1920 Jim Crow laws were fully in effect to stymie that possibility for all Black people, which wasn’t addressed at all until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Individual restrictions from states also prevented many Native Americans from voting even after the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act in 1924. The timeline Hacker put together for the exhibit is, in effect, as much a history of continued disenfranchisement as it is a story of expanding voting rights.

“It’s really important to not see the 19th Amendment as the end of the fight for women’s suffrage,” Hacker said. She pointed out that the timeline could continue right up to the present day. As citizenship and the right to vote became inextricably linked, many immigrant groups faced, and continue to face, hurdles to becoming citizens. There is also our continued disenfranchisement of felons and Puerto Ricans, and the slow but steady pushback against the movement’s gains.

During the suffrage movement, Hacker also saw that Black and Brown women ​“weren’t just fighting for women’s suffrage. They were fighting on multiple fronts.” Activists Mabel Ping-Hua Lee and Komako Kimura were discriminated against for their Asian ancestry as well as their gender. Zitkala-Sa, president of the National Council of American Indians, fought for the rights of all Native Americans to vote.

Some of that discrimination came from within the suffrage movement itself. ​“There was a lot of racism in the White suffrage movement,” Lewis said. Black suffragists did not appear at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848. The impending passage of the 15th Amendment (in 1870) created a schism in the movement. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the National Women’s Suffrage Association to reject the amendment. ​“They were insistent that White women get the right to vote before African-American men,” Lewis said — even as Douglass, who supported women’s suffrage, pointed out that ​“White women weren’t being lynched for being women.”

“Why do we have to be in situations where we think about which wrongs are more important?” Lewis added. And even when the 19th Amendment was passed, Lewis said, ​“a lot of women didn’t vote, and a lot just voted with their husbands.”

Hacker’s research for the exhibit also meant that she and Lewis became acquainted with Dickinson — orator, author, activist, mountaineer, and actor. ​“Ava and I believe there should be a TV show about Anna Dickinson,” Lewis said. ​“She’s the Greta Thunberg of her age.”

“During the Civil War, she was everywhere,” Hacker said. By then, at the age of 17, she was already an in-demand public speaker on the issues of the day, including abolition and women’s rights. She’s credited with swaying elections in New Hampshire and Connecticut. When her public speaking career declined, she turned to mountaineering in Colorado, and to the pen and the stage. In 1891, her sister committed her to a mental institution, first in Pennsylvania, then in New York. When she got out, Lewis said, ​“she sued everyone.” That, Lewis and Hacker agreed, would be an appropriate final episode for the series.

Drawing attention to all of this history is its own form of activism, but Lewis and Hacker also intended it to be fun. ​“In a joyful, celebratory, interesting way,” Lewis said, they hoped to ​“get people more interested in voting.”

Lewis put out an open call for artists to participate, but it appears that each of the 16 artists in the show took that message to heart. Linda Lindroth and Zack Newick have found a voting machine that, Lindroth informs us in an accompanying statement, was the ubiquitous method of voting when Lindroth took her son, then a child, to vote in the 1980s.

Viewers are encouraged to manipulate the levers, which allows them a better look at what they’re voting for.

A couple of the pieces lean into traditional crafts — long a sign of both domesticity and political action, from Penelope doing and undoing her work in The Odyssey to weavers in Guatemala forming women’s cooperatives and activist groups. Katrina Majkut makes the connection clear, showing how getting together and airing grievances can lead to changes at the ballot box. Similarly, Judy Polstra’s A Woman’s Place decorates a slip by giving the old misogynist joke (“A woman’s place is in the home”) a feminist twist (“A woman’s place is in the House and Senate”).

Rita Valley then returns all the way back to Lewis’s intent. The fun is in the form, as Valley has made her quilt from faux pearls and camouflage, even some fake alligator skin. The design is whimsical, even festive. The message couldn’t be more straightforward, or serious.

“Declaration of Sentiments” runs at the Institute Library, 847 Chapel St., through Dec. 15. Related to the exhibition, the curator will host a digital presentation in November by art historian Katherine Manthorne, CUNY professor of art history, who will discuss her books Restless Enterprise: The Art & Life of Eliza Greatorex and Women in the Dark: Female Photographers in the US, 1850 – 1900. Both books focus on women making images during the suffrage movement — careers made possible through the burgeoning women’s movement.