Some Day is Now | Allison Lange and "Picturing Political Power"

Join Allison Lange in this Zoom webinar as she discusses her book Picturing Political Power in honor of special exhibition Someday is Now: Women, Art & Social Change.

For as long as women have battled for equitable political representation in America, those battles have been defined by images. Picturing Political Power offers a comprehensive look at the connections among images, gender, and power. In this examination of the fights that led to the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Allison K. Lange explores how suffragists pioneered one of the first extensive visual campaigns in modern American history. She shows how pictures, from engravings and photographs to colorful posters, were central to suffragists’ efforts to change expectations for women and oppose the norms of their time. In seeking to transform notions of womanhood and win the right to vote, white suffragists emphasized the compatibility of voting and motherhood, while Sojourner Truth and other leading suffragists of color employed pictures to secure respect and authority, despite efforts to exclude them from the political process entirely. In demonstrating the centrality of visual politics to American women’s campaigns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Picturing Political Power reveals how images can change history.

Allison K. Lange

Allison K. Lange is an associate professor of history at the Wentworth Institute of Technology. She received her PhD in history from Brandeis University. Lange’s book, Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement, was published in May 2020 by the University of Chicago Press. The book focuses on the ways that women’s rights activists and their opponents used images to define gender and power during the suffrage movement.

Various institutions have supported her work, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Library of Congress. Her writing has appeared in Imprint, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post.

Lange has also worked with the National Women’s History Museum and curated exhibitions for the Boston Public Library’s Leventhal Map Center. For the 2020 centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment, she is curating exhibitions at the Massachusetts Historical Society and Harvard’s Schlesinger Library.