Daily Nourishment for February 17, 2024: Longer Endings with Lauren Winner, Portraits, Women’s Suffrage, and More
Daily Nourishment Read Time: 50 seconds
Pause/Prompt/Practice Time: 10-15 minutes
Interviewer: What is art for?
Kara Walker: Figuring it out.
Pause.
For one minute, gaze at this 1913 lithograph by B. M. Boye. Let your eyes linger where they linger.
Prompt.
Last Saturday, we met Kate Clarke Lemay, a curator and historian at the National Portrait Gallery. She curated the 2019-2020 exhibition Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence, in which the lithograph appeared. Women whose portraits were featured in the exhibition include Ida B. Wells, Alice Paul, and Mary McLeod Bethune.
Votes for Women also included images made as recently as 1965, such as a photograph of activist Fannie Lou Hamer. Explaining why she included images and objects created after 1920, Lemay told the Washington Post “The 19th Amendment didn’t wrap things up in a pretty bow…It didn’t resolve the disenfranchisement of women for everybody. Black women, Native American women — any minority woman — still had all of these impediments to their voting rights until” the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
The story of woman suffrage, in other words, is a story that in fact unfolds for many years after the event that some people might have thought its conclusion.
What are other stories that extend long beyond the event that many might mistakenly think their end? Brainstorm for three minutes.
Practice.
Call up an older relative—your sister, your aunt, your grandmother—and try to learn as much as you can about woman suffrage in your family. Who was the first woman in your family to vote? Under what circumstances? What voting barriers, if any, have women in your family faced in the past few generations?
If no one in your family knows, try piece together what’s plausible: who, likely, were the first women in your family to vote? Where were they likely living when they voted, and in what election might they have cast their first ballots? In response to what you learn, or what you suppose, write a scene that places one of your foremothers in an electoral context.
Want More?
Read “A Conversation: Diversity in Votes for Women” Read and See “Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence”
*
Upcoming Workshops & Gatherings
February: February Co-Writing schedule and registration options are ready.
February: Online Thoughtful Readers Gatherings with Crystal Wilkinson(2/18), and Erik Fuhrer(2/25)
February 24: Online Revision Stations Designed by Lauren F. Winner
Today’s Daily Nourishment was provided by Lauren Winner.
*Please help us protect our intellectual property, our creative process, and the integrity of our work. Spiritual Direction for Writers® Daily Nourishment is covered under the Spiritual Direction for Writers® trademark. You are welcome to share this link with others, but any other use (written or spoken) is prohibited without written permission from Charlotte Donlon.