Lynne Scott Constantine
Diptych, Digital Photomontage, 2024. 18” x 24” total
By the time women’s right to vote was enshrined in the US Constitution in 1920, two visual symbols of the fight for the vote were instantly recognizable: the long white dress, and the cross-body sash, usually festooned with violet and gold and either an affiliation or simply the phrase “votes for women.” In the suffragist images here, we see these symbols deployed to petition for the vote at the White House, to protest lynchings in an enormous silent march organized by the NAACP, to engage the imagination with civic pageants, and to remind the white women of the suffrage movement that Black women also deserved the power of the vote.
But just a year after the 19th Amendment was ratified, the sash developed a strange afterlife when a group of businessmen in Atlantic City cooked up an idea to keep tourists coming to the boardwalk after Labor Day: the Miss America beauty pageant. The cross-body sashes worn by the participants were inspired by the suffrage sashes. Apparently, the idea was that women’s empowerment through the vote meant that young women should now feel liberated enough to parade around in public in their swimsuits.
Image Sources: Suffragist Sashes
Top image: Silent protest at the White House, January 1917, including the only known image of Mary Church Terrell, Oberlin College graduate and first president of the National Association of Colored Women, participating in the protests (Library of Congress). The photograph was a souvenir owned by one of the participants, who wrote the names of the women she knew beneath them; Terrell, who stands at some distance from the white protesters, was not identified.
Images below, from left: 1) NAACP silent protest parade, July 28, 1917, in which Black women marchers, like the suffrage marchers, wore white attire and protested in silence to demand government action against lynching and racist terror (Library of Congress); 2) Margaret Vale, niece of President Woodrow Wilson, participates in a suffrage pageant, 1915 (Library of Congress); 3) Sculpture of Laura Cornelius Kellogg (Oneida) holding the Haudenosaunee Women’s Nomination Belt, Ripples of Change Monument, Seneca Falls, NY, commissioned by the U.S. Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission to honor under-told contributions to women’s suffrage; the monument also includes sculptures of Harriet Tubman, Martha Coffin Wright, and Sojourner Truth; 4) Ida B. Wells-Barnett, journalist and civil rights leader, here seen participating in the 1913 Woman Suffrage Procession despite the objections of most white marchers to Black women’s presence (Chicago Daily Tribune).
Image Sources: Miss America Sashes
Top image: Contestants in the first Miss America competition, 1921 (Miss America archives)
Images below, from left: 1) Norma Smallwood, Miss America 1926, receiving an electric permanent wave treatment (Library of Congress); 2) Official winner photo of the 1921 Miss America, Margaret Gorman, dressed as a mermaid (Miss America archives); 3) Cedar Lane hope chest ad from the 1950 Cedar Lane catalogue, featuring Miss America 1949, Jacque Mercer; 4) Detail, Barbies and photographer Ken, from “Toy Story,” part of interactive performance installation entitled “The Truth Game: Stop, Look, Don’t Play,” by Suzanne Scott Constantine and Lynne Scott Constantine, 2000 (collection of the artists).