Lynne Scott Constantine
Digital Photomontage, 2023. 20” x 24”

Who was the first woman to serve in the US Senate? Rebecca Latimer Felton was appointed to the Senate from Georgia on November 21, 1922, serving only one day. The event occurred a little more than two years after the Nineteenth Amendment granting federal voting rights to women became part of the Constitution on August 26, 1920.

Felton was given this symbolic honor supposedly because of her years of work promoting voting rights for women. But that, unfortunately, was not all she was famous for. Felton was an ardent and vocal racist and white supremacist. In an especially brutal speech in Georgia in 1897, she advocated lynchings to protect the purity of white women. A version of the speech was reprinted in the Wilmington, NC, newspapers in August 1898, and its vile ideas became part of the public pretexts for the Wilmington Massacre and Coup three months later. Senator Felton’s additional dishonor: she was the last serving senator to have been an enslaver.

My image is an anti-memorial: instead of lifting up a single moment or figure in a single line of narrative, it imagines contradictory events that persist and coexist, spectral presences that cannot be exorcised or resolved–in short, the disorderly history that tugs against our desire for linearity and order. – Clearly, the American past is far too complex for simplistic narratives of progress.

Image Sources: The image of Felton celebrating her swearing-in, the newspaper front page, and the poster lying on the floor are in the archives of the Library of Congress. All other images in the photomontage are photographs I made and have manipulated for the purposes of this photomontage.