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Living Power explores the modernist aesthetics of the women's suffrage movement in the United States in the decades leading to the Nineteenth Amendment's passage in 1920. Artists and activists in this period envisioned, and even materialized, new forms of inclusive, modern political citizenship. But at the same time, many progressive advocates premised the right to vote on whiteness, splitting suffragists along racial lines. Lauren Kroiz analyzes how artworks—including Charlotte Perkins Gilman's design for soap trading cards, Adelaide Johnson's marble portrait busts, Anne Brigman's photographs in the California wilderness, and Meta Warrick Fuller's sculptures of mothers and children—interrogated the unstable divide between subjecthood and objecthood at the heart of demands for political agency. Expanding the scholarship of feminist art, Kroiz traces a history that remains both pivotal and unresolved.
"Lauren Kroiz provides a new art history of the suffrage era in the United States that accounts for the paradoxes and contradictions of the movement and the female artists who responded to it. Showing how their artworks intersected with modernist aesthetic debates and social currents surrounding gender and racial equality, Kroiz expands and disrupts the history of feminist art."—Erika Doss, author of Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists and Religion
"Kroiz's indispensable monograph on the aesthetics of women's suffrage is lamentably timely during our current period of antifeminist backlash and retrenchment. Her nuanced account grapples with the revanchist politics of respectability and the exclusionary logic of white supremacy that often informed the movement but at the same time uncovers surprisingly radical forms of image making cloaked in traditional academic conventions."—John Ott, author of Mixed Media: The Visual Cultures of Racial Integration