Montana
1865-1955
“Equal suffrage is not an end; it is a beginning. It is the commencement of responsibilities and opportunities so vast that time itself is hardly long enough to work out the problems set before us. For years our resolutions have begun with the familiar preamble, ‘We, as women.’ The enfranchised woman has passed to a higher plane. It is not we as women, nor we as men who will make this world better, but all of us, working together as human beings.”
Ellis wrote her own column in the Rocky Mountain News called “A Woman’s World”. She was so instrumental in the Colorado woman suffrage movement that she became known as the Susan B. Anthony of Colorado. Ellis was the daughter of another well-known suffragist and pioneer of Montana, Emily R. Meredith. Ellis went to Chicago for the World Exposition in 1893, and there she met with Susan B. Anthony. That same year, women in Colorado won the right to vote. Ellis was active in politics in many ways and she even spoke in front of the U.S. House of Representatives in 1904 to campaign for a constitutional amendment for woman’s suffrage.
I have actually painted two portraits of Ellis Meredith. The first one was included in my show “On Their Shoulders We Stand” in 2017. As I started researching women suffragists from Colorado, I discovered this tiny but fierce woman. I also discovered that my own Great Grandmother went door-to-door for woman’s suffrage at the same time Ellis was leading the movement in Colorado. I like to imagine my Great Grandmother Stevenson reading her column in the Rocky Mountain News or eventually meeting this important Colorado woman.
In this piece I imagine Ellis looking out past the viewer to the future, as if she could see beyond the present struggle, into a better future. I see that resolve in her words “It is not we as women, nor we as men who will make this world better, but all of us, working together as human beings.”. I also wanted to capture the colors of the Colorado sky and sun in the background. As with many of my pieces, I included text. The flower is made from clippings from the Rocky Mountain News which I included because of her time as a journalist there.