The first time I set foot in the State House with my wife, nearly a decade ago, we wandered around in wonder at its architecture, art and atmosphere.
What struck us most, though, was this: that among the many lush paintings of Maine politicians hanging all over the place, only two portrayed women.
One showed legendary Mainer Margaret Chase Smith, nearly everyone’s default hero. The other showed the wife of an obscure 19th century governor (Louisa Sophia Fuller Smith, who won a spot because her husband, Gov. Samuel Smith, insisted on including her).
Most everyone else on display seemed to be just another long-forgotten guy, usually a former governor but sometimes a judge or some other luminary of days past.
There, at the heart of Maine’s democracy, women appeared to have no more to do with the history of the state than Gov. Percival Baxter’s dog, an Irish setter named Garry that made it into his official portrait. To be fair, the dog’s death in 1923 proved a big enough deal to warrant putting state flags at half-staff. Heck, they even preserved Garry’s scratches on the governor’s door, with a little plaque installed to ensure future Mainers would know who was behind the claw marks.
Against that backdrop, I felt some joy the other day when I took a road trip to the State House with retired U.S. Naval Academy historian Claude Berube, who lives in Bath, to see artist Jerri Whitman’s paintings of 37 women who have held office in Maine over the years.
On easels set up in the Hall of Flags, surrounding a bust of Baxter perched atop a pedestal, were images of everyone from Dora Pinkham, Maine’s first woman lawmaker, to Mana Abdi, a second-term Democratic state representative from Lewiston.
“They may have these white men hanging in the hallway, but we got the history here,” said Whitman of Dresden, a 60-year-old woman with seven children and 16 grandchildren.
State Rep. Amy Kuhn, a Falmouth Democrat, stopped in to admire the pop-up gallery.
“It’s so inspiring,” Kuhn said.
Claude quickly tracked down the portrait he most wanted to see: his mother, Georgette Berube, a longtime state representative from Lewiston. This friendly historian had tears in his eyes as he looked at the Whitman painting.
“You did a great job on my mother,” Berube told the artist.
State Sen. Rick Bennett, an Oxford Republican who happened by, added that he’d known Rep. Berube in his early days as a legislator. He called her “just a great stateswoman.”
Bennett said the steady rise in the number of women in Maine politics has brought “a vast improvement” to the Legislature. “Men behave a lot better when there’s women around,” he observed.
I wondered what possessed Whitman to tackle the project. The artist said she took a granddaughter to see the State House in 2022 and they each realized that, a century after Pinkham’s election, almost no women were among the many politicians honored within the building.
“This is ridiculous,” Whitman told the youngster at her side. And then: “We can do something about it.”
A Tennessee native who returned to painting after raising her children, Whitman, who works as a second-shift stitcher at L.L.Bean, got into portraiture only six years ago. She figured, though, that she had the talent to take on what she termed the “Women in Politics” project.
Whitman is pretty much on her own pushing the project forward, shelling out the money for canvas, paint and frames. She estimates she’s already spent $30,000 or more on the portraits project. She paints about a dozen portraits for the project annually and has plans to capture images of at least 20 more women. She doesn’t see an end to it, saying she’ll keep at her project “until they put dirt on me.”
Whitman’s work shines a light on a part of Maine’s history that continues to be wrongly downplayed at the State House.
There isn’t any valid reason that the walls must continue to display the same old artwork forever.
Whitman’s work shouldn’t just be a one-day-a-year delight. Let’s dust off the old paintings, put some of them in storage, and make room for this bold new work. It would serve as a daily inspiration both to visitors to the State House and to all those who work there in pursuit of a better Maine.
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