Dec 11, 2014 - Sale 2370

Sale 2370 - Lot 80

Price Realized: $ 11,250
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 7,000 - $ 10,000
(SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT)
Remarkable archive relating to Suffragettes Louise Hall and her life partner, Ethel Harte (the daughter of novelist Bret Harte), with a total of 76 photographs by Ollie Hall. Includes an album entitled "The Liberty Bell Tour, Votes for Women," containing 31 prints, with pictures of Hall, Harte, Elizabeth McShane (a tour director), Katharine Wentworth Ruschenberger (the tour's patron, a Main-Line Philadelphian and staunch women's rights supporter), the thousands of spectactors who turned out to hear them (many of them working men), and a replica of the Liberty Bell, which was transported in the flatbed of a Model T. Silver prints, 5 3/4x3 3/4 inches (14.6x9.5 cm.), and smaller, and the reverse, as well as a 2-part panorama measuring 4 3/4x10 3/4 inches (12.1x27.3 cm.), with captions, in white ink, below the images; many of the prints are no longer attached to the mounts; with 45 related prints, which are loose. Oblong 4to, disbound. 1915

Additional Details

with--Typed Letter autosigned by JFK to Sonise [sic] Hall (1960) and a Typed Letter Signed by Governor Adlai Stevenson to Miss Hall (1952).and--A mini-archive of photographs and postcards relating to Bret Harte and his family, with 2 cabinet cards of the novelist (one by Brady), a cdv, other photographs of Harte with unidentified friends or family members, period tintypes, and postcards addressed to Ethel Bret Harte and/or Louise Hall. 1860s-1937.

The marvelous photographs in the album were taken by Louise's brother, Ollie Hall, a highly accomplished amateur photographer who went on to study engineering at M.I.T. The album is accompanied by a group of 45 loose photographs, which were also taken by Hall and are of the same tour; includes multiples of a few of the images in the album. Many of these prints have lengthy captions on print verso.

According to Cathy Pickles of the National Women's History Museum: Katharine Wentworth Ruschenberger commissioned a replica of the Liberty Bell (a.k.a. the "Justice Bell") to help spread the cause of woman suffrage in Pennsylvania. The inscription on the bell likened the denial of votes for women to the tyranny of English rule which fueled the American Revolution. It differed from its brother only in that it lacked a crack and bore the inscription, Establish Justice.

The 2,000 pound bell became something of a sensation. It toured 5,000 miles in a flatbed truck built specifically for this purpose, criss-crossing Pennsylvania. It eventually appeared at suffrage events in Chicago and Washington, DC. Its travels were marked by large crowds and band-led parades. Miniature versions of the bell were sold to defray the cost of its tour.

The bell's clapper was chained into silence until the passage of the 19th Amendment. In a ceremony held in Independence Square in September 1920, the bell was raised and rung by a woman dressed as Justice, signaling true liberty in the United States: suffrage for women. The Justice Bell now resides in the Washington Memorial Chapel at Valley Forge.