Celebrating the 19th Amendment at Heritage Square Museum

Mitzi March Mogul, the feisty curator of a summer-long exhibit on women’s suffrage at Heritage Square Museum, has a question for the ladies.

“Do you think you’re too busy to vote?” she asks, gesturing toward a wall covered with yellowed photographs of suffragists in their buttoned-up finest. “These women were plenty busy. Elizabeth Cady Stanton had seven kids!”

The exhibit, called “Their Rights and Nothing Less: Commemorating the 90th Anniversary of Women’s Suffrage,” celebrates the 19th Amendment and is gleaned from Mogul’s personal collection, with a focus on women who defined the movement in Los Angeles. It’s modest in size and composed mainly of ephemera such as postcards, photographs, books and magazine articles, along with a sampling of portraits augmented with brief biographies.

Among the many inspirational stories on display is that of Clara Shortridge Foltz, after whom L.A.’s downtown criminal court building is named. Abandoned by her husband, Foltz was a single mother of five as well as the first female lawyer on the West Coast. She was also a magazine and newspaper publisher and columnist and the first woman to run for governor of the state.

When she was denied admission to law school based on her gender, “she sued, argued her own case and was admitted,” reads a particularly wry portion of her biography.

Then there’s the heart-rending saga of Biddy Mason, a slave who moved to California with her owner in the 1850s. She eventually petitioned the court for her freedom — and that of her children— and was emancipated. She worked as a nurse and a midwife while simultaneously purchasing real estate and growing a fortune that she used for philanthropic endeavors, including founding an elementary school for black children and helping black women agitate for the vote.

“These women could see what was going wrong with the world but they had no power over it,” says Mogul, dressed in the colors of the suffrage movement: purple, green and white. “They understood that getting the vote was the key to everything else.”

The show is housed in a stately Victorian mansion called the William Hayes Perry Residence, which was built in Boyle Heights in 1876 and is one of eight such historic structures relocated to this “living museum,” as it is called, at Heritage Square. The house’s high ceilings, majestic windows, wooden floors and marble mantelpieces help conjure a feeling of intimacy with the subject matter.

“I wonder what William Perry would think of this exhibit,” jokes Brian Sheridan, the museum’s director of development and communications, making note of the social mores of the mid-1800s.

No matter, says Mogul: The men and women who have seen the exhibit — some before the museum’s weekly classic film screenings — have been uniformly educated.

Whether they are looking at the contents of a 1915 “Suffrage Cookbook,” the 1913 all-suffrage issue of Life magazine or gazing at an original poster from the 1960s heralding the birth control pill, they are coming face to face with the great accomplishments of their forebears and contextualizing those accomplishments within their own lives.

And that, after all, is what history is about, says Mogul, adding, “This movement doesn’t have a beginning or an end. It is always ongoing.”

jessica.gelt@latimes.com

‘Their Rights and Nothing Less: Commemorating the 90th Anniversary of Women’s Suffrage’

Where: Heritage Square Museum, 3800 Homer St., L.A.

When: 12 to 5 p.m. Fridays to Sundays through Sept. 26

Price: $10, adults; $8, seniors; $5, children ages 6 to 12; free, children younger than 6. Cost includes a tour of the museum.

Contact: (323) 225-2700; https://www.heritagesquare.org