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Celebrate International Women's Day: Getting the vote

By Linda Perney and Lauren Johnston | amNY.com staff writers

3:31 PM EST, February 22, 2008

Marble bust of Susan B. Anthony on display at the Votes for Women exhibit at the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art at the Brooklyn Museum (The Brooklyn Museum)

Your great grandmother won this one. But she didn't get the vote without a fight, one that the Brooklyn Museum's Sackler Center for Feminist Art is celebrating in a year when Hillary Clinton is running hard for the presidency.

Clinton isn't the first to go that route, though. Back in 1872 stockbroker Victoria Woodhull was the first woman to try for the job. Almost 50 years before she and her sisters won the right to vote, she ran and was savaged by just about everyone, including those erstwhile sisters.

The show highlights a series of newspaper engravings showing Woodhull demanding women's rights, campaigning, and, courtesy of the cartoonist Thomas Nast, proclaiming her support of "Free Love," leading the innocent astray in the guise of the devil.

Woodhull, despite her achievements, isn't the show's main focus. In fact, it celebrates all those women who marched, protested, picketed, and otherwise demonstrated on behalf of women's suffrage.

Comemorating their efforts, there are pamphlets, postcards, pennants, playing cards, sheet music, and broadsides; 60 or so objects that trace the movement that culminated in victory in 1920.

Campaign buttons are a major part of the show: Our favorite one bore the legend: 'Let Mother Vote,' a sentiment as American as, dare we say it, apple pie. Not that everything puts a positive spin on the issue. One manufacturer, clearly taking his stand firmly in the middle, put out two versions of the same pin. One said: Votes for Women: YES; the other, Votes For Women: NO.

Among the other exhibits, a marble bust of Susan B. Anthony and photographs of the likes of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, and Carrie Chapman as well as others pay homage to the movement's leaders. But it's the photographs of the masses of anonymous women demanding their rights are the most moving.

There's one picture, taken at a demonstration outside the White House as Woodrow Wilson crosses the women's picket line, a massive banner hanging in the background.

At the show, the very same banner hangs above the photo, posing the question: Mr. President, what will you do for Woman Suffrage?