((PKG))  SUFFRAGISTS EXHIBIT 
((Banner:  
A Little History
Access – The Vote)) 
((Reporter:  Julie Taboh))
((Camera:  Adam Greenbaum))  
((Adapted by:  Martin Secrest)) 
((Map:  Washington, D.C.)) 
 
((Music)) 
((Popup Banner:   
After decades of struggle, US women gained the right 
to vote in 1920. 
The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery chronicled 
the American suffragist movement))  
((Kate Clarke Lemay, Curator, Smithsonian National 
Portrait Gallery)) 
Suffragists were really looking for any kind of way to get 
out the message that if women broke out of the 
domestic sphere, it was okay.  So there is a cookbook 
that they produced which I think is kind of interesting.  
So like the ballot box, this exhibition really hopes to 
flesh out some of the context of the era by using the 
portraits to drive the narrative but then also by kind of 
filling in sort of the feeling of the era with these material 
cultural objects. 
((NATS)) 
((Kate Clarke Lemay, Curator, Smithsonian National 
Portrait Gallery)) 
The movement became very visual and employed this 
kind of visual literacy that people were developing from 
illustrated magazines on, from the 1890s on, and so 
these posters are about women's suffrage and equality 
and sort of the message being made very visual 
through a winged petasos hat or a double-sided axe 
and these are allegorical symbols really that date back 
to the Greek era, the ancient Greece. 
((Kate Clarke Lemay, Curator, Smithsonian National 
Portrait Gallery)) 
The posters create kind of a different kind of 
understanding about women's freedom, women's 
citizenship rights that viewers would have had in a way 
that was different from reading a book or reading a 
hand bill or reading a text. 
((Pop-Up Banner:  US women gained the vote in 1920 
with the ratification of the 19th amendment to the 
Constitution)) 
((Kate Clarke Lemay, Curator, Smithsonian National 
Portrait Gallery)) 
The suffrage movement is one of the longest reform 
movements in American history. There is no question 
that it is among the most important stories in American 
history.