As far back as 1893, suffrage leaders dreamed of and planned for the exhibitions that might one day honor them. Adelaide Johnson, the so-called “sculptor of suffrage,” created busts of Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Lucretia Mott for the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, and she believed that these three would one day form the basis of the much larger “Gallery of Eminent Women” that she spent the next fifty years trying to establish.

Other groups of suffragists explored related strategies to enshrine their history and their leaders in the institutions that consecrate America's national heritage. Just days after Congressional passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, Helen Hamilton Gardener, working on behalf of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), contacted the Smithsonian Institution about donating the artefacts that had adorned NAWSA headquarters in Washington, DC. Similarly, as soon as the thirty-sixth state ratified the Nineteenth Amendment in August 1920, leaders of the National Woman's Party (NWP) commissioned Adelaide Johnson to re-create her suffrage statues for display in the Capitol Rotunda. Gardener's grand plans for a major suffrage exhibition ended up being truncated into a small corner exhibit benignly titled “An Important Epoch in American History.” Johnson's Portrait Monument was displayed in the Rotunda for just one day before being sent to a basement storage area for the next seventy-five years.

When the National Portrait Gallery unveiled Votes for Women! A Portrait of Persistence in March 2019, suffragists – of all factions, races, and creeds – finally received a fitting exhibit in one of the nation's premier institutions. As I have written elsewhere, this exhibit is a major contribution to the national commemoration of women's rights history.Footnote ¹ Curator Kate Clarke Lemay, PhD, incorporated cutting-edge research to reframe and expand the long suffrage movement. Lemay's exhibit reveals new sides of better-known suffrage leaders, such as Lucy Stone's marriage protest and Susan B. Anthony's 1872 arrest for voting, as well as introducing new movement leaders such as Ida A. Gibbs Hunt (who organized the first YWCA for black women) and Felisa Rincón de Gautier (who worked for women's suffrage in Puerto Rico and became the first woman mayor of San Juan).

The exhibit's companion book – also titled Votes for Women! A Portrait of Persistence and edited by Lemay – is an even more important contribution to the history of women's rights. For starters, the book includes 183 beautiful colour images allowing readers to digest the pictures in ways not possible during a brief museum visit. These visuals include stunning portraits of movement leaders, action shots of major suffrage milestones such as the March 1913 suffrage procession in DC, and even examples of suffragists’ rich material culture, such as sashes and dinnerware. The book is well worth the price just for these images alone, which are very helpful in the classroom and for those who might be called on to give public lectures related to various suffrage landmarks.

Beyond curating the exhibit, Lemay also curated an all-star group of historians (including herself) to contribute to the volume: Susan Goodier, Martha S. Jones, and Lisa Tetrault. Tetrault, author of the award-winning The Myth of Seneca Falls: Memory and the Women's Suffrage Movement, 1848–1898 (2014), grounds readers in the suffragists’ own clever myth making and in the rich nuances of suffrage history. Tetrault highlights many of the issues that the exhibit makes visual, including the rifts between women's rights leaders over the Fifteenth Amendment, priority, memory, and white suffragists’ general lack of concern for African American voting rights.

Martha Jones's essay, “The Politics of Black Womanhood, 1848–2008,” argues that to fully understand suffrage history we must take an intersectional approach and look beyond the mainstream suffrage groups, which tended to be segregated, and toward the places and groups where black women long advocated for civil rights, including anti-slavery societies, churches, and the black women's club movement. As she explains, “the story of African American women and the vote overturns basic assumptions about the history of American political culture and women's suffrage” (30).

Susan Goodier answers the vexing questions of which women opposed suffrage and why. As she explains, we must not dismiss the anti-suffragists, who held sway for much of the movement's history, for they reveal just how radical women's rights activists were. Dividing the opposition into four distinct periods, Goodier traces how the antis' objections shifted over from those based on women's proper sphere to those opposed to amendments to the US Constitution in general.

Lemay contributed the introductory essay, the framing chapters on the exhibit, and a chapter on the American Women's Overseas Hospitals Unit. Many shorthand accounts of the 1919–20 success of suffrage name World War I and suffragists’ war efforts (mainly NAWSA) as defining factors, but Lemay unpacks these vague generalizations to reveal more precisely what the Great War meant to women, how they used it to build a case for full citizenship, and how women's status in scientific and medical fields has been linked to women's political rights. In a stunning display of ingenuity and chutzpah, NAWSA organized an all-female medical corps and dispatched them to France to care for injured soldiers and civilians. This chapter includes images of female doctors in military uniform treating injured men and reminds us that, to this day, none of these intrepid women have been honoured by the government and most of their names have been lost to history.

Further adding to the utility of this book as both a scholarly and teaching resource, it includes a thorough bibliography, index, and chronology of suffrage milestones. By centering a diverse array of women, including images and material culture, and presenting classic and cutting-edge scholarship, Votes for Women provides one of the most valuable contributions to the centennial outpouring of new work on the suffrage movement.