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(1) The text reads: "I sell the shadow to support the substance." The term "shadow" referred to the photograph, which at that time was made using sunlight.

(2) Most 19th-century Americans expected women to focus on their homes and families. Most Black women, however, had to work. Selling portraits was one way Sojourner Truth supported herself.

(3) The famed public speaker poses with a knitting project, a book, and flowers to make the professional studio look like a home and emphasize her femininity.

(1) White suffragists did not acknowledge Truth as a women's rights leader in their histories or portraits, but civil rights advocates celebrated her even after her death.

(2) In 1938, civil rights activist Arthur Fauset wrote the biography, Sojourner Truth: God’s Faithful Pilgrim. He wanted her story to inspire new generations.

(3) Civil rights leaders made Truth into an icon of Black women's leadership, naming clubs after her, purchasing her portraits, and urging a new generation to continue her work.

(4) Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley, the first Black woman elected to Congress from Massachusetts, even named her cat SoJo after the famed activist.

(1) The 1893 book Women of Distinction includes portraits and biographies of remarkable Black women like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper.

(2) While other books celebrated white women in history, Women of Distinction was intended to inspire a generation rising from enslavement to fight for equality.

(3) In addition to Harper, the book featured the once enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley and activists Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Josephine Ruffin.

(4) The author, Lawson Andrew Scruggs, called Harper "a great and profound writer in both prose and poetry" and "a master-hand at whatever she applies herself."

(1) This portrait appeared in Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman, which tells the story of Tubman's enslavement, escape, and work on the Underground Railroad.

(2) Tubman holds the barrel of a rifle. Similar to Sojourner Truth, she wears practical clothes that remind us of her work on the Underground Railroad and in the Civil War.

(3) During the Civil War, she coordinated Black spies and guided soldiers to disable a Confederate supply line. She never received a military pension for her work.

(4) Recently, a photograph of a young Tubman was discovered and is now housed at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture.

(1) The portraits in this photo feature women including Mary Wollstonecraft, Ernestine Rose, Lucretia Mott, Anna Dickinson, Anna Howard Shaw, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

(2) Susan B. Anthony had Sojourner Truth's portrait, but she did not distribute pictures of Truth or any Black women. As a result, their portraits are harder to find today.

(3) Frances Benjamin Johnston, one of the first professional female photographers, took this photograph of Anthony. She also photographed leaders like Theodore Roosevelt.

(4) Anthony, seen in profile, is posed like a political leader. Johnston highlighted the outline of her head by draping a dark cloth behind her.

(1) In 1904, Susan B. Anthony wrote this note on the official letterhead of the National American Woman Suffrage Association, which lists her as its Honorary President.

(2) The letterhead also names other leaders, including its then-President Anna Howard Shaw and activist Carrie Chapman Catt, who became the group's next president.

(3) Anthony lived with her sister Mary, who ran their household while she traveled and worked. The letter includes the address to their home in Rochester, New York.

(4) See the handwritten additions to the letter? Rather than re-typing the entire page, Anthony corrected grammar and added details by hand.

(1) The famous civil rights leader Booker T. Washington featured this portrait of Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin in his book A New Negro for a New Century, published in 1900.

(2) The book highlighted the achievements of Black leaders, including Ruffin, Mary Church Terrell, and W.E.B. DuBois, to advance racial equality.

(3) In her portrait, Ruffin wears glasses to signal her education. Her fine clothes and dignified posture convey her respectability.

(4) In the early 20th century, "Negro" was considered a respectful term for Black people. Later civil rights and Black Power activists rejected that term, and it is no longer used today.

(1) Mary Talbert raised money to purchase Frederick Douglass's home in Washington, D.C. and turn it into a historical site now run by the National Park Service.

(2) The book Twentieth Century Negro in Literature featured portraits of Talbert and other Black leaders such as Josephine Silone Yates and George Washington Carver.

(3) Talbert wears an elegant dress against a decorative backdrop. Her fine clothes, elaborate hairstyle, and setting in a professional studio signal her status.

(4) The frame illustrates the shift from slavery on the left to new opportunities for Black Americans on the right. This change occurs under the watchful eye of an American eagle.

(1) Women in some states won the vote long before the 19th Amendment. The 1915 referendum in New Jersey was one of many state campaigns.

(2) The National American Woman Suffrage Association was composed of numerous smaller local groups like the Equal Suffrage League of the Northern Jersey Shore.

(3) The New Jersey Men's League Chairman offered to send his members to watch the polls and make sure the election was fairly managed.

(1) Parades were made up of different sections, including college graduates, nurses, and immigrants. They aimed to show that women from various backgrounds wanted the vote.

(2) Activists designed costumes for each section, made banners, and wore colorful sashes to create a spectacle that newspapers would want to cover.

(3) Like many of the pussy hats crafted for the Women’s March in 2017, suffragists crafted these items by hand using shared patterns.

(4) In this photograph, crowds peacefully watch the parade. Sometimes, however, suffragists faced violence. After a 1913 parade, 100 marchers went to the hospital.

(1) These women are well dressed and wear hats decorated with ribbons and flowers. Members of Black clubs tended to be middle- and upper-class women.

(2) Many photographs of marching suffragists were taken by professional photographers. This photograph is more intimate and was perhaps taken in someone's backyard.

(3) Many light-skinned Black Americans had white ancestors, often the owners of their Black ancestors.

(4) Some light-skinned Black women, such as Mary Church Terrell, strategically passed as white to avoid discrimination. When they did, they feared discovery and violence.

(1) Harriot Stanton Blatch's portrait appears alongside an article about the famous suffragist Inez Milholland.

(2) In 1907, Blatch founded the Equality League of Self-Supporting Women. Inspired by labor activists, she organized the first suffrage parade in 1910 in New York City.

(3) Blatch was the daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who wrote the Declaration of Sentiments for the Seneca Falls Convention of 1848.

(4) The Library of Congress has a photograph of Elizabeth Cady Stanton holding Harriot when she was a baby. Harriot was one of Stanton's seven children.

(1) Inez Milholland dressed as a herald who will save the day, wearing a tiara and white cape and sitting astride a white horse.

(2) Numerous newspapers printed photographs like this one. By the 1910s, photographs could be sent via telegraph wires for printing across the country.

(3) Professional photographers also printed her photograph on postcards, an extremely popular medium in the early 20th century.

(4) In 1916, the 30-year-old Milholland collapsed during a speech and died. Suffragists remembered her as a martyr for the cause.

(1) In this portrait from the 1890s, Ida B. Wells-Barnett looks into the distance. This pose was common among leaders and suggested that she was thinking of future plans.

(2) Wells-Barnett wears a fashionable dress covered in lace and fine beads with a simple, elegant pin to emphasize her respectability.

(3) Sallie E. Garrity, who took this photo, was among the first female professional photographers. She opened a studio in Louisville, Kentucky and later moved it to Chicago.

(4) In 2020, Wells-Barnett was posthumously awarded a Pulitzer Prize citation for her "courageous reporting on the horrific and vicious violence against African Americans."

(1) In her portrait, Alice Paul sits with her hands in her lap and looks straight at the viewer. The photograph was cut from a newspaper, probably for a scrapbook.

(2) Paul grew up as a Quaker, a religious group that valued gender equality, especially in education. She earned a PhD in economics and a law degree.

(3) Paul protested with militant suffragists in Britain, where she met fellow American Lucy Burns. When they returned to America, they organized the 1913 parade.

(4) After the 19th Amendment's ratification, Paul spent the rest of her life fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment to prohibit discrimination based on sex.

(1) Women in Kansas, the "Sunflower State," voted in city elections starting in 1887. To celebrate, suffragists adopted the flower as one of their logos and yellow as their color.

(2) Anti-suffrage pins and propaganda often featured red or pink as their color. Activists and politicians wore red or yellow roses to signal which side they supported.

(1) This portrait is from an advertisement for Mary Church Terrell's lectures. The booklet's other pages note that she is "specially gifted in speech."

(2) Terrell loved fine clothes and hats and often wore them in her portraits. She said wanted to prove "false" the popular cartoons that mocked educated women as "bad-looking."

(3) She believed that Black women needed to look elegant. Most Americans were prejudiced, and she hoped that Black women could help change their minds through their appearances.

(4) Terrell fought for equality her entire life. Even in her 80s, Terrell picketed segregated restaurants and lobbied Congress for the Equal Rights Amendment.

(1) Suffragists often hired professional female artists. Rose O'Neill, famous for her Kewpie doll design, created this poster for the National American Woman Suffrage Association.

(2) O'Neill's design features suffrage yellow as the background. The female figure points the way out to a man, presumably her husband, to suggest that she knows best.

(3) The poster says to vote yes on November 2, 1915 in New York's referendum. The date was updated to November 6 for the referendum in 1917. That year, suffragists won.

(4) The National American Woman Suffrage Association printed numerous posters featuring white women, but they did not include Black women in their materials.

(1) Massachusetts suffragists marched in Boston in 1914 (pictured here) and in 1915. Despite their efforts, they did not win the vote until the 19th Amendment's passage.

(2) Crowds of people gathered to see the suffragists march. Though it's common for women to march today, it was unusual a century ago.

(3) Suffragists wore white dresses in many of their public protests. Sometimes they purchased them from stores, but they also bought patterns to make their own.

(4) Marchers wanted the press to photograph them. The white dresses helped them show up well in the black-and-white photographs printed in newspapers.

(1) Alice Stone Blackwell was the daughter of Lucy Stone and Henry Brown Blackwell, both of whom helped found the American Woman Suffrage Association in 1869.

(2) Her parents edited Woman's Journal, the longest running women's suffrage newspaper. She edited the paper after they died and continued their fight.

(3) The National Woman Suffrage Publishing Company printed the pamphlet in November 1915 when activists were campaigning in several states, including New York.

(1) Anti-suffragists argued that women had special privileges and did not want to be equal to men. Here, Alice Stone Blackwell states that chivalry is less valuable than equality.

(2) Blackwell declares that her opponents are corrupt. Suffragists disapproved of the alliance between anti-suffragists and alcohol lobbyists, who feared women would ban drinking.

(3) Opponents believed that women were "too emotional" to vote. The pamphlet includes a quote arguing that some emotions, like loyalty, are in fact vital to good government.

(1) This cartoon by Nina Allender asks viewers to feel sympathy for the imprisoned activists. Rather than portrayed as unruly criminals, they are depicted as respectable ladies.

(2) Allender trained as an artist at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, one of the first American art schools to admit women.

(3) Allender worked with the National Woman's Party for years and often drew for The Suffragist, the group's weekly newspaper. She was their official cartoonist.

(4) The Suffragist featured this illustration on its cover in November 1917. The newspaper kept readers up to date on the latest campaigns for women's right to vote.

(1) This banner features the National Association of Colored Women's motto: "Lifting as We Climb." The members hoped to improve Black communities.

(2) The regal purple cloth is decorated with gold paint and fringe, colors associated with the National Association of Colored Women.

(3) The banner was likely made by hand and was owned by the Oklahoma Federation of Colored Women's Clubs.

(4) Members might have carried the banner in parades or displayed it in their headquarters. Today, the National Museum of African American History and Culture has it.

(1) The Oklahoma Federation of Colored Women's Clubs designed this banner. The state club was part of the larger National Association of Colored Women.

(2) The regal purple cloth is decorated with gold paint and fringe, colors associated with the National Association of Colored Women.

(3) The banner was likely made by hand, possibly by the members of the Oklahoma Federation of Colored Women's Clubs who owned it.

(4) Members might have carried the banner in parades or displayed it in their headquarters. Today, the National Museum of African American History and Culture has it.

(1) Suffrage images often included the female figure of justice. In this picture, she presents the "appeal of womanhood"—that all women should "Dare to Be Free."

(2) In the background, a group of women seek justice. They are hunched over, suggesting that they are oppressed. The lady justice is their hope.

(3) American suffragists often worked with British ones. They used their images too—like this one. The National Woman's Party reprinted it in their newspaper.

(1) Hallie Quinn Brown became one of the first Black women to earn a bachelor’s degree in 1873. She taught, authored seven books, and delivered lectures in the U.S. and Europe.

(2) In her portrait, Brown looks into the distance while wearing pearls and an elegant dress and hairstyle to emphasize her role as a respectable leader.

(3) A Half Century of Freedom of the Negro in Ohio, published in 1915, celebrates the successes of Black people like Brown to inspire progress toward racial equality.

(4) The book featured Brown because she was a commissioner for the state’s 50th anniversary celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation.

(1) Long before Shirley Chisholm entered politics, she was a civil rights and women's rights activist. She was a member of the League of Women Voters and the Urban League.

(2) Chisholm started her political career as a representative in New York's legislature. She forged a path for other women and people of color to run for office.

(3) While in the House of Representatives, Chisholm advocated for policies to create a more equal America, including a measure to provide free and subsidized school lunches.

(4) Her campaign slogan, "Unbought and Unbossed," underscored her independence. Chisholm used the phrase as the title of her autobiography.

(1) Chisholm didn't win the presidency, but she did call attention to enduring injustices. This button advertises her as a "catalyst for change."

(2) Some white women's rights activists and Black male politicians opposed Chisholm's candidacy because they feared a Black female candidate was too controversial.

(3) Chisholm held her position in the House of Representatives from 1968 through 1983. After she left office, she helped co-found the National Political Congress of Black Women.