Portrait Tablet of Lila Meade Valentine

This portrait tablet, of Virginia suffragist and activist Lila Meade Valentine, was placed in the State Capitol in her honor in 1936. Valentine co-founded the Equal Suffrage League of Virginia in 1909 and worked at length to secure what became the Nineteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, granting women the right to vote. Ironically, while the General Assembly installed the memorial in 1936, it would take that same body sixteen more years officially to ratify the Amendment.