Why Susan B. Anthony Spent 50 Years Dressed in Black

Just as she had in almost every portrait for the previous 50 years, Susan B. Anthony sat dressed in black. It was a nod to her New England Quaker upbringing—but it was also the uniform of her movement. The grande dame of women's suffrage was at least 80 years old when this picture was taken around the year 1900, and she had abandoned experimenting with her clothes decades earlier. Since the 1850s the black dress had been her uniform and equality for women her cause.

On the other side of the camera crouched Frances "Fannie" Benjamin Johnston, a well-to-do and world-famous photographer who by her 40th birthday had set up her own studio in Washington, D.C., exhibited in Paris and photographed presidents, celebrities and the leading artists of the day. More than four decades younger than her subject, Johnston’s life—single, self-determined, bisexual—was in part a tribute to the tireless work that Anthony had done in hers.

Frances Johnston’s distinctive style of clean-cut portraiture shot from slightly below eye level, which she practiced with great success on male subjects such as Booker T. Washington, William McKinley and Mark Twain, is on display in this image of Anthony. It is a purposefully severe photograph in which brightness and contrast create a traditionally "male" composition. (In her other portraits of women, such as a 1906 portrait of Alice Roosevelt on her wedding day, Johnston often deployed softer, gentler, grayer tones.)

Restoring color to an image like this is a delicate job—hardest in areas of the frame where the shot has been deliberately over- and under-exposed for effect. Anthony’s dress collar glares, while the right side of her face is in shadow, allowing the texture of the paper on which it was printed to interfere with the image.

Through years of campaigning, speaking, writing, demonstrating and advocacy, Anthony hammered the collective American consciousness with her argument that women ought to be paid their worth, and should be free to divorce drunken or abusive husbands and deserved to have the vote. She would not live to see the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women the right to vote: Anthony died in 1906—not long after this photo was taken. Anthony once declared her wish “to live another century and see the fruition of all the work for women.” The women’s rights movement she helped lead continues today.