I recently watched the Great Performances broadcast (available for free online here ) of the Broadway musical Suffs. The musical centers on the career of suffragist Alice Paul, mostly focusing on the period 1913-1920, the formation of her militant National Women’s Party and their the fight to get an amendment passed to give women the right to vote.
{Spoiler: they were succressful, as the passage of the 19th amendment in 1920 gave women the right to vote}.
Anyway, while I enjoyed the musical, I have enjoyed even more finding out more information about some of the members of Alice Paul’s group who was mentioned in the musical. The search led me to a book called Jailed for Freedom, written by Doris Stevens, a prominent member of Alice Paul’s NWP. The book, published in 1920, is dedicated to Alice Paul, and the frontispiece is a photo of Paul. According to the book, the photo is copyright “Edith Derwant” – her ©ED mark is marked right on the photo in the lower right-hand corner of the photo. Here’s the page from the book:
Chris and I looked into finding out more about “Edith Derwent” to see if she was an early women artisan photographer (EWAP) of the type typically profiled here on Photographs, Pistols & Parasols. We ran into numerous challenges tracking down information about this photographer, though. However, Chris triumphed in the end.
Let’s take look at what he found:
Sounds promising, eh? Mrs. Luther Derwent took a photo of Alice Paul, Mrs. Luther Derwent could be “Edith Derwent”. Here’s the photo of Alice Paul from “Everbody’s Magaine” in 1919; let’s see if it looks like the same photo as in the book::
OK, that looks like the same photo that’s in the book, albeit cropped and presented in an oval “frame”. So it looks like Mrs. Luther Derwent should definitely be Edith Derwent, ©ED.
But here’s the puzzling part: Mrs. Luther Derwent’s first name is Emma not Ethel, at least in all records we found for a photographer named (Mrs) E. Derwent who had a studio in Rockford, Illinois in the early 20th century. So, apparently the photo credit in the Jailed for Freedom book doesn’t have the correct first name for the photographer who put their “©ED” on the photo. It strikes me as too bad that Mrs. Derwent only marked “©ED” on the photo that’s printed in the book.
Ah well.
The story of that photo doesn’t end there. though. At some point in the 1920s a news agency in Washington, DC, by the name of Harris & Ewing, took over ownership of that photo (photogrpahers would routinely sell their photos to agencies like that). Two copies of Derwent’s Alice Paul photo were donated to Library of Congress as part of an archive of 41,000 photos from the Harris & Ewing agency. There are two versions of Derwent’s Alice Paul photo at the Library of Congress, shown below:
The two versions are cropped and edited in different ways. Both of the versions are missing the ©ED marking (not surprising, I guess since the copies were owned by the Harris & Ewing agency when the versions of the photo were made and the original photographer would no longer own the copyright). But if you look at these two photos compared to the photos earlier in this post, I think they are started from the same negative.
(BTW, here on Photographs, Pistols & Parasols we have already run across the Harris& Ewing agency, related to a snowman. One of the partners in the news agency was the woman Martha Ewing. Click here to see the old post.
Anyway, I thought it was fun to share the unexpected twists and turns of the hunt for information about the photographer who took a rather well-known photo of a famous suffragist. A hunt that was unexpectedly triggered by my interest in the finding out more about the lives of suffragists from the early 20th century. And, of course, that interest was sparked by watching a 21st century musical about them.
I guess it just goes to show that you just never know where watching a musical will take you, eh?. 😉
P. S. Emma Derwent’s career as a photographer encompassed far more than just the photo of Alice Paul – look for more information about Mrs. Derwent’s life and career coming soon.
P. P.S. And, in the way these things go …
While looking online to see if I could find it any other versions of the Alice Paul photo that were credited to “Edith Derwent”, I happened upon a photo of another suffragist, Carrie Chapman Catt. credited to “Abby Scott Baker”.
So, that leads us back to another instance of our original question: was this photo of a prominent suffragist photo taken by an EWAP or by a amateur photographer who taking a photo of a friend and fellow suffragist?
But tracking down the information about Abby Scott Baker will be a story for another day… 😉
