How an exhibition of a small artifact helps celebrate an historic moment for US women
The day after celebrating her 80th birthday with a huge gala thrown by her friends at the Metropolitan Opera House, pioneering suffragist Elizabeth Cady Stanton met with her longtime collaborator Susan B. Anthony. The two clearly had posterity in mind as they sat down with an artist who created a plaster cast of their two clasped hands
Anthony afterward memorialized the occasion in her diary.
It seems a little odd to us now, but the 19th Century saw something of a craze for casting hands. People then believed the features of the hand held great spiritual significance, and it was not unusual for loved ones to be remembered this way.
These clasped plaster hands, the slender fingers of Anthony around the shorter, broader hand of Cady Stanton, form the centerpiece of a new exhibit, called Hand in Hand, at the Susan B. Anthony Birthplace Museum in Adams, Massachusetts.
“Their mutual leadership, their dependence on one another, and the value they placed on collaboration are portrayed in this clasped rendering of their affection for one another in their struggle to win for women the right to vote,” said Carol Crossed, president of the museum
The exhibit is timed to commemorate Women’s Equality Day; on August 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment was ratified, giving women in the United States the constitutional right to vote.
The two-story Federal-style house where Susan B. Anthony was born, and where her father, Daniel Anthony, had his store, opened in 2010 as a museum after a restoration program. It depicts family, work life and the Quaker community in the early 1800s.
The hand cast at the center of the new exhibit is one of four known copies of the piece that were originally gifted to Anthony and Stanton family members and friends. Another, which was bronzed, is on show at Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s house, now part of the Women’s Rights National Historical Park in Seneca Falls, NY.
“I loved exploring and celebrating this piece,” said intern Mia Campbell, who curated the exhibit for the Susan B. Anthony Birthplace museum. She’s a recent graduate of the University of Texas at Tyler.
“For me it represents how a meaningful and respectful working relationship and friendship can not only enrich the lives of these two women, but enrich the lives of those around them,” Campbell said.
She believes Anthony and Cady Stanton may have had not just sentiment, but also a strategic purpose in mind in creating this kind of artifact.
“I think they recognized that they were icons, that people looked at them and saw their movement,” she said. “And they used that to their advantage. They used their fame to spur on their movement.”
This copy of the hand cast was owned by Susan B. Anthony’s favorite nephew, Bert Anthony, and then passed down to his daughter, Charlotte Anthony Sabo.
In addition to the cast, the exhibit also features Anthony’s personal bank book and a letter she wrote to Bert. The hand cast and the other items were donated on permanent loan by Nora Sabo, the daughter of Charlotte Anthony Sabo.
The Hand in Hand exhibit will be open to the public through the fall season.