Votes for Women exhibit closes

On November 5, 2018, the Oklahoma History Center opened a photographic exhibit celebrating the 100th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote in Oklahoma. Votes for Women features twenty-eight black-and-white photographs from the Oklahoma Historical Society’s photograph archives and the Library of Congress highlighting some of the key moments and events, and the people who fearlessly led the way. Three reproduction postcard illustrations are also on exhibit.

This exhibit is on display in the Chesapeake Event Center and Gallery through October 26, 2019. This room also is utilized for meetings and events. Please call in advance to make sure the exhibit is open to the public on the day of your visit.

On March 16, 1917, the Oklahoma Legislature passed a resolution allowing a referendum on the suffrage amendment in the November 2018 general election. On November 5, 1918, the suffrage amendment to the Oklahoma Constitution was ratified by a vote of 106,909 to 81,481. Equal suffrage nationwide for white women was not granted until 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment to the US Constitution. African-American women did not get full voting rights until the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Oklahoma women continued to fight until 1942 for the right to hold state executive offices.

Women suffrage hikers General Rosalie Jones, Jessie Stubbs, and Colonel Ida Craft before a mass suffrage meeting in Brooklyn, New York in the early nineteen-teens. The women handed out leaflets and displayed banners advocating for women’s suffrage across the country. Photograph courtesy of the Library of Congress.