Picturing Early Black Women Leaders
From Phillis Wheatley Peters to Ida B. Wells-Barnett, leading Black women activists defined their public images through their portraits to advance their ideas.
Allison K. Lange is a writer, speaker, and curator. She focuses on images, gender, and politics in United States history. In 2020, the University of Chicago Press published Lange’s book, Picturing Political Power: Images in the Women’s Suffrage Movement. She is an associate professor of history at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston.
For the 19th Amendment centennial in 2020, Lange served as Historian for the United States Congress’s Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission. She curated exhibitions at the Massachusetts Historical Society and Harvard’s Schlesinger Library as well as a website for Melinda Gates’ Pivotal Ventures called Truth Be Told: Stories of Black Women’s Fight for the Vote. Lange is on Council of Advisors for the Women’s Suffrage National Monument Foundation. Various institutions have supported her work, including the National Endowment for the Humanities, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and Library of Congress. Most recently, she won a teaching fellowship from the Université Gustave Eiffel in Paris, France and Wentworth’s Distinguished Scholarship Award.
From Phillis Wheatley Peters to Ida B. Wells-Barnett, leading Black women activists defined their public images through their portraits to advance their ideas.
© 2021–2024 This project is a collaboration of Getty Images and Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective.
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