Madison Verner: Thank you so much for joining me. What made you first interested in women’s history? 

Allison Lange: That is such a great question. I actually was not. I did not go to graduate school to study women’s history. I took a women’s and gender class in college, and I thought it was not very helpful at all. I’m not kidding. I just thought “I know they just want me to write about how Nancy Pelosi is important because she’s like the first Speaker of the House.” What I realized when I got to graduate school was that the course that I kept coming back to the most. That’s why education is so important and why an end of semester course evaluation is not the final answer. I want to go back to that teacher and say “I didn’t think this was course was great when I took it, but I realized that it was the one I kept thinking about.” 

In graduate school, I took a course on women’s history. It was a United States feminisms course. I was a graduate student with undergraduates, so it wasn’t a traditional seminar. It was more working with women. It was like an advanced undergraduate course. I was working with primary sources and having discussions. It was just really dark. You realize the depth of inequality, and I think the reality is my history classes didn’t cover that. It was just this gender studies class that I took. I think what I wanted from it was women’s history, and I couldn’t articulate it at the time. This class brought that gender studies lens to women’s history, and it all kind of clicked in a way that is both really sad and interesting to me. I think it made me want to find out more and shine a light on the stories that we haven’t really heard. 

Verner: In graduate school, were you mainly going in with a history perspective, and then found that you enjoyed women’s history specifically?

Lange: Yeah, I was really interested in visual material culture, such as historical photographs and objects. I applied it into a few different places. I did photography of the Civil War, and that sort of thing. It eventually became a focus on visual culture and women’s history.

Verner: How do you search for relevant images and curate photos for historical exhibitions? 

Lange: Good question. It really depends on the exhibition; it really depends on the place. An online exhibition has very different parameters than an in person exhibition with a specific gallery. I did an exhibition for the Schlesinger Library at Harvard, and they actually have very few images of women of color activists in their collection.  I think they’ve since acquired one of Sojourner Truth, but at the time, they did not even have one of those. I say that because that really shapes what scholars learn and what students learn, especially a major institution like the Schlesinger Library, which is like one of the two major women’s history libraries. It really depends. Whereas in a digital exhibition, you have much broader scope. You’re maybe borrowing digital images from places, and that’s less about, “what does this physical library have in its collections?”

Verner: Do you usually know the images, or do you actually have to research a lot for each one? 

Lange: Kind of both. It can be both. Sometimes, you have a story that you’re hoping to tell, and you have a sense of like a few images that will help you tell that story. Then, maybe you do some research for more. Then, maybe you find something different. I did an exhibit for the Massachusetts Historical Society, which has a ton of anti-suffrage images because Massachusetts is the state where the first anti-suffrage organization was founded. You may not think that about Massachusetts. It’s also where like the longest running like women’s rights newspaper was, but that exhibit kind of evolved into this exhibit about like arguments for and against women’s suffrage in a way that like other collections couldn’t do that because they don’t have like the same kinds of like anti-suffrage material, for example.

Verner: Can you tell me about your exhibitions, Can She Do It? Massachusetts Debates a Woman’s Right to Vote, Seeing Citizens: Picturing American Women’s Fight for the Vote, and Truth Be Told: Stories of Black Women’s Fight for the Vote? 

Lange: Those all evolved in really different ways. The Schlesinger collection at Harvard was really founded by the National Women’s Party to be a suffrage history archive. Its original purpose was to hold suffrage archives. The national women’s party helped found that library a few decades after the 19th amendment, so a lot of pro-suffrage stuff there. They have a great collection, but it’s all white ladies. That was like the original core of the collection. If you wanted to think about 21st century interpretations of suffrage, they didn’t have much on Ida B. Wells or Sojourner Truth. I think they had one portrait of Ida B. Wells. 

Then, with the pro and anti-suffrage one, we had like a gallery space where we made each corner into a different debate on suffrage. It was a kind of argument using visual material which was really fun. My students created short documentaries that we played in there. It was really great because I think, as you probably know, it’s interesting to see the pro-suffrage material, but it’s even more interesting when you see what arguments people were using to push against it. This feels very logical in the 21st century. Of course, women should have the vote, but why didn’t anyone disagree? I think when my students read the anti-suffrage arguments they’re both amused by them, and then the students who are a bit more in tune to the 21st century debates about gender say this sounds familiar. 

It’s really a mistake when we just think about the people we now see as feminist heroes. It’s a mistake to not recognize why people at the time did not see them that way at all. 

Verner: It’s very interesting to also discuss the women who were part of the anti-suffrage movement because they make no sense to me. If you’re politically active, you would think that you would want the right to vote. Did you cover, cover like Phyllis Schlafly in your work? 

Lange: I have done some minimal research on Phyllis Schlafly. I did a series for the great courses on like 10 important women in United States history, so Phyllis Schlafly was one of those. She is exactly the perfect example of someone who is highly educated, highly trained, amazing at running a political campaign, but is arguing for something that is the the opposite of her ideology or her actions do not match up with her ideas. I will never understand her. 

Verner: Me neither. I’d like to think that people are always fighting for the thing they believe, but it is really hard to see this cognitive dissonance in action.

Lange: There are examples of anti-suffragists who ran for office after the passage of the 19th Amendment because I think some of them recognized that they did have opinions and could run campaigns. We don’t have any official records about whether Isabella Stewart Gardner was pro or anti-suffrage, but that to me as a suffrage historian says she was anti because she didn’t weigh in on suffrage. If she had wanted to, she easily could have. She’s a perfect example of why super wealthy, well-connected, powerful women didn’t want the vote. Voting is so much less effective for her than having the mayor of Boston over for tea. Yeah. You can imagine why someone like her didn’t see it as useful. 

Verner: Was that true for a lot of the women who are fighting against suffrage? 

Lange: Yeah. They tended to be wealthier. They tended to be more politically connected. If you’re wealthy, and you’re inviting these politically powerful figures over for dinner as the host, which I think is a very powerful position, you can have these conversations. I think that they did feel like they could influence politics in a way that was more effective than casting a ballot with everyone else. 

Verner: Is it more about stopping other women who have less power from being able to have power? 

Lange: Yeah, exactly. I think it was class based. There were even conversations within the suffragist movement of “do we need to have literacy tests? Should we actually have that sort of thing?” Even Elizabeth Cady Stanton was talking about that. 

Verner: Would that be race-based then? Because obviously a lot of those literacy tests were related to race. 

Lange: Yeah, in that specific instance, I don’t think it was, but obviously, Stanton was super racist and wasn’t advocating for Black women’s vote. I think that there are other instances where she’s specifically focusing on preventing people of color from voting. 

Verner: Yeah. Because I was going to say that the debate on literacy tests speaks a lot to the exhibition you did earlier where you were saying how you tried to add people of color to the Radcliffe-owned museum. It speaks not only to race but to class as well. Then, many groups are not being represented in the movement. 

Lange: Yeah, definitely not. 

Verner: Was it difficult to find the images for that exhibit or did you already know about the images you were looking for? 

Lange: I already knew about them. I was working on these exhibitions after I had done my dissertation research, so I had already spent like six years with suffrage images. I was, by this point, very familiar with what was out there. 

Verner: I guess we can speak a little bit about your book then. What inspired you to write your book Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement?

Lange: I started graduate school in 2008, and I started working on my dissertation in 2011. At that time, some things were digitized in major archives at the Library of Congress, but not nearly as much as now. I realized that there was this really cool collection on the Library of Congress website where they had the National Women’s Party photographs of women picketing the White House. I thought, “how has no one written anything about this?” It turns out they were  the first people to ever pick the White House. I just thought that was really interesting. It seemed like there was a story there. 

I think there was a moment where I thought about doing 1890 to 1920 in visual culture, but telling the longer story felt right. My book really starts in the late 18th century, around the American Revolution, and goes through 1920. It really shows you how images of gender and womanhood change so dramatically from idealized womanhood of Martha Washington, who was so much more famous than like Abigail Adams. With Martha Washington, people had portraits of George and Martha on their living room walls well into 1876. The juxtaposition of that with these women picketing the White House. It’s really interesting. 

Verner: What figures did you learn about that I wouldn’t know? 

Lange: Let’s see. Well, you know Martha Washington, but I imagine you didn’t know that she was so popular. She’s the first and only woman who has been on United States paper currency. That was in the 1880s. That was right after the centennial of the American Revolution in 1876. She was considered to be a perfect model of American womanhood for a hundred years. I think that in the 21st century, we love Abigail Adams and Dolly Madison, but not for most of the 19th century. 

Verner: What made people so interested in picturing her? 

Lange: Well, I think it’s the same reason I like she’s linked to George Washington. They’re the founding mother and father of the country. Think about the ways that people idealize George Washington as being an honorable man. I think that we’ve lost that same feeling about Martha Washington, but she was a good hostess. People really thought that she was a good mother. People really thought that she supported her husband but didn’t like overstep her bounds. We can talk about whether that is true or not, but like, that’s how people imagined her. 

Verner: Yeah. That’s really interesting. Then, as things progressed in your book, who became pictured more and more?

Lange: By the time we get to the 1870s and 1880s, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton write this series called the History of Woman Suffrage. I don’t know if you’ve encountered this. It has six volumes and a thousand pages per volume. It’s wild. They’re heavy books. They are all digitized and online now, but I was physically carrying copies of it around from my graduate school library. What I found in my research is that Anthony and Stanton really shaped whose portraits we remember traditionally because Anthony collected portraits of the women that they wanted to be pictured in this series. They wanted the people who had their portraits made to pay for the engraving. They had to be engraved in order to be printed in the books. You couldn’t just put a copy of a photograph in. You had to pay an artist to hand engrave all of these photographs. They didn’t include like Sojourner Truth whose portrait especially was pretty famous at the time who collaborated pretty regularly with these women. They didn’t want her in the book. You can see even in 1881, or in years leading up to this, that they are choosing who represents them. Obviously, they are major representatives. There’s a reason why it took a long time for us to go back and say “oh what about Frances Ellen Watkins Harper? What about Sojourner Truth?” She’s literally hidden in these volumes that women’s historians starting in the 1970s were looking at as a starting point to find this additional information. 

Verner: Okay, let me try to understand. Do you mean that many of the photographs that we have of the suffragists of this era came from these books written by Stanton and Anthony? 

Lange: A lot of them! A lot of the people that people assumed were important were selected by Stanton and Anthony. Have you ever heard of Lucy Stone before? 

Verner: I have.

Lange: You have? Good! 

Verner: I don’t know why I have but I’ve pretty sure she might be one of the people that another professor researched.

Lange: Lucy Stone is probably like one of the most central suffragists that no one knows anything about. That’s because Stanton and Anthony hated her! She lived in Boston actually. She lived out of her offices on Park Street with her husband who was like a co-editor of this newspaper and then her daughter who took over. They ran the longest running women’s rights newspaper from 1870 to 1923. They had the much larger competing suffrage organization. They were so much more successful! Stanton and Anthony made the news, made this history series, and they really didn’t like Stone. They had different ideologies. I’m really minimizing it, but she was so much more effective at organizing in so many ways than they were.

Verner: What was the difference in ideology that Lucy Stone had?

Lange: Lucy Stone was really happy to work more at local levels and pass laws at the local level and at the state level and work a little bit more methodically and slowly, whereas Anthony and Stanton from the beginning wanted an amendment. In 1872, Anthony, Sojourner Truth, and Virginia Minor all tried to vote in the presidential election, and ultimately that led to a Supreme Court case Minor vs. Happersett said that voting is not a right of citizenship. That’s when, in 1875, both of the suffrage camps had to decide “okay, if we can’t argue it’s a right of citizenship what is our next step?” Stanton and Anthony are like it’s an amendment, and Lucy Stone believes that we need to pass this on a local or state by state level. That’s one of the major differences. Lucy Stone is also more interested in being a little bit more conservative. She’s still radical at the time, right. She keeps her maiden name, and it’s a big deal, but in comparison, she’s much more moderate in her kind of ideas. 

Verner: I appreciate learning about it! Do we have Lucy Stone museums or anything like that in Boston? 

Lange: No, no. 

Verner: That’s so interesting that she’s so forgotten in history.

Lange: Her daughter worked really hard to try and get people to remember her, but I think, in comparison to Stanton and Anthony, she doesn’t have those big moments because she was such a good organizer, good editor, and good coordinator, but she was never a good star. She was never that kind of person. 

Verner: Interesting. What images regarding women’s U.S. history do you find to be most interesting?

Lange: I mean there are so many. Phyllis Wheatley’s portrait from her book of poetry published in 1773 is really important because it is the first example of a portrait of this published in a book with one’s own work in it. It’s like a representation of a real woman published with her work, not just as a religious figure or a queen. I think that’s a really important thing to have in your book. Obviously, you can guess that they included Phyllis Wheatley’s portrait because she was an enslaved woman, and they were trying to prove that a Black woman could write a book of poetry. On the one hand, it’s not a great thing that they included her portrait, but on the other hand, it’s this great resource and a really interesting moment. 

I think there are a lot of anti-women’s rights political cartoons that if I were in an AP women’s history class, I would want to learn about. I would think that people would need to be aware of those cartoons. I think if you were looking for one, it could be Age of Brass, which is a classic anti-suffrage cartoon picturing stereotypes of women from the Library of Congress. I think that you can talk to undergraduates or high school students about how people thought that women would become masculine if they voted, which seems so absurd to us now. Until you see these pictures and see how many of them there are, it’s hard to believe.  

Verner: Was there almost like a propaganda campaign where they were convincing you that you would become masculine? 

Lange: Except that it wasn’t a campaign the way like Stanton, Anthony, and Sojourner Truth created a campaign. It was much more just like this is the popular idea. Everyone believes in this. We don’t need someone to coordinate it. It’s just the baseline. It’s basically that the suffragists had to actually coordinate a campaign to challenge those ideas because the sexist ideologies were just everywhere.

Verner: Since it was a popular ideology, why did people start making cartoons and about it? Was it more just making fun of the people who were suffragists? 

Lange: That’s a great question, and I think that’s a really important question. It’s a combination. The technology to make illustrated engravings and publish them really cheaply for the public becomes really accessible at the same time as the first national conventions start happening. There are examples of these anti-women’s rights like sexist stereotypes from the 18th century, but they are just distributed so much more widely by the 1850s. This combination of technology and women’s rights activists making the news starts the boom of the cartoons because there are these conventions. You’ve got the Seneca Falls Convention. You know the Declaration of Sentiments. All that is happening at the same time. I think people are creating them and reading them because it’s just like the 21st century. If there’s something in the news that makes you anxious, it’s more interesting to watch a comedian make fun of it. It’s a way of processing it rather than simply letting it make you angry or nervous. Instead, you can laugh at it. It’s minimizing these women’s rights activists and making them seem less powerful. The cartoons make them seem so absurd that we can’t possibly take them seriously. 

Verner: Then, nearing the time when the 19th Amendment was going to get passed and World War I was occurring, did people start actually getting nervous that it was going to pass? Was there an increase in the number of new anti-suffrage imagery?

Lange: Absolutely! That’s a great question. People are legitimately nervous about this but also by 1915, there’s a dramatic shift in the mainstream press. They can see that suffrage is going to happen because the 19th Amendment is going to pass, since there are a lot of states that already have passed suffrage. By 1917 New York State has passed suffrage, which is a pretty big deal because there weren’t that many Northeastern states, so that was a big turning point. I think the mainstream press changed, especially since a lot of the publishing houses were based there. That’s a pretty big moment. There are a few examples of mainstream magazines that continued to be anti-suffrage even after that. Life magazine was really anti-suffrage.

Verner: Really?

Lange: Yeah, but for the most part there’s a pretty dramatic shift even by 1915. With World War I, you have this moment where, just like in the Civil War, people are stepping up in order to prove that they should be treated equally. If you look at African Americans, Native Americans, and women, you can see how people tried to prove that they should be treated equally. Women’s rights activists did that in World War 1. They got enlisted to become nurses and farmers. It convinced Woodrow Wilson to change his mind, both through the picketing and by demonstrating all the ways that they were patriotic. They proved themselves as important citizens supporting the war effort. That was a big turning point in the mainstream media as well. 

Verner: Can you see parts when in the mainstream media they are changing their mind, or was it that they started publishing a bit of both? How did they have this shift that doesn’t feel unnatural? 

Lange: It’s both. There is an example of this magazine called Puck that was published in New York, and it was like a political satire magazine, beautifully illustrated. They had an official issue in 1915 that said, “we are officially endorsing suffrage,” even though they had printed many anti-suffrage cartoons over the past several decades. They declared their favor, and they even instructed suffrage readers to cut out these pictures and put them on their walls and hand them out. One of the reasons why anti-women’s rights imagery was so popular was that it sold. Everyone agreed with it. It wasn’t controversial. Maybe they’re changing their minds too. Maybe I’m a little cynical, but I think that they’re realizing that they might be losing readers if they keep pushing this. 

Verner: It’s so odd to me that a newspaper that has so clearly had an opinion can just shift, and nobody’s upset. 

Lange: I mean, I think we saw that in 2020, right? Around Black Lives Matter, we saw people or institutions really change dramatically in what feels like overnight. I think we’re seeing the backlash to that now. I think it’s kind of similar to that. 

Verner: How do you consider 21st century politics when you are making exhibitions or teaching your classes and relating it to U.S. women’s history? 

Lange: It’s hard not to think about the ways that are rooted in the conversations that people were having a hundred years ago. For example, the Women’s March in 2017, after the inauguration of Trump, his first presidency, was precisely a hundred years after the first picket by the National Women’s Party on the White House, to the month, not to the day, but to the month and within a week of each other or something. That feels very parallel. I think the backlash of this moment feels very parallel. The rise of a Republican beauty standard feels very much like the kind of ideologies that anti-suffragists were promoting: this idealized, super feminine representation of womanhood. There are so many parallels. It’s like the same conversation. 

Verner: Do you try to incorporate that into your exhibitions? 

Lange: Yeah, I included some pictures of the Women’s March in there. All of those exhibitions were like 2019-2020, around the centennial of the 19th amendment, so we didn’t have images of current events back then. That was really what I included. 

Verner: It’s still relevant because in 2020, a lot of things happened. 

Lange: That’s for sure. I definitely think that a lot of things happened. I think it was also really interesting, since then seeing a woman run for president in a really meaningful and serious way. Whereas like I’m studying Victoria Woodhull right now, who was the first woman to run for president in 1872. She wasn’t going to win the presidency, and she knew she wasn’t going to win the presidency, which is very different from having like a major party putting a woman forward. It has a very different meaning.

Verner: Can you tell me about Victoria Woodhull? 

Lange: Oh my goodness. Victoria Woodhull. Victoria Woodhull is wild. She started out as a spiritualist. She was born in Ohio. She worked as a child preacher. Her father made her and her sister make money for the family as a spiritualist. Do you know what a spiritualist is? It’s basically the like 19th century version of someone who talks to the dead. She really believed she could. Eventually, she marries an alcoholic doctor at 16. She has two kids with him. She gets divorced. She remarries a guy who got divorced to marry her. By the time she’s 30, she’s been married twice in 1868. 

Verner: Did she divorce her first husband or did he divorce her? 

Lange: I don’t know what the official legal paperwork is, but she got divorced. After, she moved to New York with her sister in 1868. She and her sister become the spiritualist mediums for Cornelius Vanderbilt, like the big Vanderbilt, who made the money because his wife had died. The sisters learn a lot of finance tips from him, and they become the first female stockbrokers on wall street and become super wealthy. They open up the first weekly newspaper edited by women that they publish themselves. Then, that’s kind of how she runs for office. That’s her platform, how she promotes her ideas. 

Verner: Is through her newspaper? 

Lange: Yeah, exactly, and she becomes super famous. She’s the first woman to address any body of Congress in favor of women’s suffering. Her running mate for the presidency is Frederick Douglas, the anti-slavery advocate, but she didn’t consult him on this. She just said, “my running mate is Frederick Douglas.” Then, her story is more dramatic than I can even ever share. She got arrested due to the Comstock Law. Have you heard of Anthony Comstock? The Comstock Law basically says that you can’t send obscene material through the mail, which in 2025, they’re using to try to argue that we can’t send birth control medications through the mail, but in 1872, when he arrests Woodhull, he’s angry that she’s published this expose of the major scandal of the 19th century, which is that this famous Brooklyn minister who was married, had an affair with his married person in his congregation. She’s arguing for free love and saying that he’s practicing free love, even though he officially disapproves of it. She gets arrested. She goes in and out of jail. She actually spent the election of 1872 in jail. She’s wild! She ultimately is able to get out of jail. She’s arrested and rearrested a few times, but she ultimately is able to get out of jail. It’s because of that, that we have the Comstock Law because Comstock realized that the local New York state law wasn’t enough, so he wanted the federal law. 

Verner: You’re not allowed to send obscene material in the mail? 

Lange: Yes, so people are in 2025 now concerned that people are not going to be able to send pornography, birth control pills, or abortion pills through the mail. One of the fears of this Project 2025 is that they might try and use it for that. Anthony Comstock would open people’s mail, and even if it’s a husband and wife writing to each other about something slightly scandalous, he would arrest them. 

Verner: How was this law passed? I couldn’t imagine it would be very popular, or was it popular due to avoiding obscene materials. 

Lange: Yeah, it had a couple of iterations, but it was passed. He was given a ton of power in the US Postal Service to actually open people’s mail. Woodhull divorces again and ends up moving to England, and she marries this super wealthy British guy. She becomes like this patron of this tiny town and a promoter of eugenics. 

Verner: That’s crazy. 

Lange: She’s crazy. She is fascinating. 

Verner: Could you tell me about the time when you worked as the Historian for the United States Congress’s Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission?

Lange: Yeah, that was really exciting because we created a ton of content. They wanted real historians to read it and say, “No, this is accurate.” That was really great. I think at that moment, people were really concerned about what story was being told. I really feel like we were able to do something that was accurate and shared the latest research. I was one of the editors of a series like the one Wendy Rouse wrote on queer suffragists, which has been taken down by the National Park Service. I thought we did such a great job of telling those stories. I feel really good about it and really sad about the fact that that’s not available in the same way anymore. 

Verner: Okay. I think we are coming to a close. For the last question, do you support the creation of an AP U.S. Women’s History course? 

Lange: Absolutely. I think it would be so exciting to give students the opportunity to take the course. I think I would have loved to have taken it myself. 

Verner: Me too. 

Lange: I think it would have all clicked for me a little earlier I think.