Women of Progress: Early Camera Portraits

Lucy Stone by an unidentified photographer, half-plate daguerreotype, c. 1855. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

June 14, 2019 – June 13, 2021
National Portrait Gallery
8th and G Streets, NW
Washington, DC

In mid-nineteenth-century America, the growing presence of women in public life coincided with the rise of portrait photography. This exhibition of daguerreotypes and ambrotypes from the 1840s and 1850s features portraits of early feminist icons, women’s rights advocates Margaret Fuller and Lucy Stone, abolitionist Lucretia Mott, and best-selling author Harriet Beecher Stowe.