According to UUCF visual arts committee chairwoman and former Blanche Ames Gallery manager Meg Menke, very few.

“I can count on one hand how many times I’ve been asked who Blanche Ames is over the years,” she said.

For those who aren’t aware of this historic figure, get ready to have your mind blown and wonder why you hadn’t heard of her sooner.

Ames was an artist, yes, but also an inventor, a writer, and a leader of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in Massachusetts, often organizing rallies and calling meetings at her home.

She was a political cartoonist, an illustrator, an artist.

A visionary. A humanitarian. A leader.

A wife, mother, grandmother and friend.

Those who are curious to learn more about the life of this fascinating woman are invited to get educated via the documentary film “Borderland: The Life & Times of Blanche Ames Ames”.

Blanche Ames Gallery will host an online viewing at 7 p.m. June 27 via Zoom, followed by a Q&A session with the film’s director, Kevin Friend, and writer, Kate Klise.

Ames finally gets her due in Friend’s documentary. As it’s stated in the film, if she were alive today, we would call her an influencer.

—

Friend had initially set out to create a documentary on Borderland State Park, the former home of Ames and her husband and children. Borderland sits between two towns, Easton and Sharon (hence its name), and was acquired by the state of Massachusetts in 1971 and is now run by the Massachusetts Department of Conservation and Recreation as a public park, offering hiking, biking, frisbee golf and tours. It’s also listed on the U.S. National Register of Historic Places.

But as Friend began his research, he became more and more fascinated by Ames and her story and eventually chose to focus the documentary on her, especially because there has been so little written about her since her death in 1969. In fact, as an author and historian points out in the film, if she’d been a man, there would have already been five books written about her.

Ames’ husband, Oakes Ames, was a Harvard professor and world-renowned botanist. (They both shared the same last name but were of no blood relation, which is why Ames’ full name was Blanche Ames Ames.) Ames gained a reputation as an artist for the botanical illustrations she drew for her husband’s books and research. In fact, the headline of her obituary in The New York Times simply read, “Mrs. Oakes Ames, Botanist’s Widow,” despite her other numerous contributions, like becoming the first president of the Massachusetts Birth Control League in 1916.

“They were this power couple of the day,” Friend said. “He was the foremost authority on the planet for orchids, but then I’m reading about Blanche, and it was just like peeling back an onion.”

She was a leading figure and led the charge locally for the passage of the 19th Amendment, using her mansion at Borderland as the epicenter of local groups by gathering together people and hosting meetings there. Massachusetts was staunchly anti-suffrage then, including Ames’ own family, who was very much split politically on the 19th Amendment.

The more the onion got peeled, the more the question became, “What didn’t Blanche Ames Ames do?”

She developed a system to categorize paint colors with her brother.

When the family car, a Model-A Ford, broke down on an orchid expedition, she fixed it — with a hairpin.

When John F. Kennedy’s book “Profiles in Courage” contained a section on Ames’ father, Aldebert Ames, a governor and senator, that Ames felt dishonored him, she wrote to Kennedy, told him it was historically inaccurate, and asked him to correct it in subsequent editions. When he didn’t agree to doing so, she set the record straight by writing and publishing a 625-page defense of her father in book form.

Maybe most spectacularly, while in the process of creating her home at what would become called Borderland, she fired the architect and then — no joke — became the architect. She had no prior experience but designed a mansion that is still standing (and toured by the public) to this day.

But it’s evident that the thing that meant most to her was women’s rights, whether it be the right to vote or the right to birth control. (She also once got arrested and jailed while demonstrating in public, with a carved, wooden penis, how to put on a condom.)

“When I was at Smith College, I’m going through her papers — she has such a trove of archives that she meticulously organized — and I’m pulling out these drawings and photographs of women with no clothes on, pinned to a cross, like scenes of the crucification,” Friend said. “I just got this sense that she was fiercely adamant about women and their autonomy, especially specifically to control their own bodies. … I knew she was an artist, I kind of knew she was an inventor, and I learned about her work as a suffragist, but this was something that really felt hidden. I’ve really come to believe that this was the thing she cared about most.”

“Borderland” was released in 2020 and screened locally just prior to the onset of the pandemic. The film team has since hosted virtual screenings in other locations and has also created a curriculum guide for high school AP and college courses to coincide with the film.

“There was a moment after the 2016 election, when it just felt like there was a wave of this misogynistic attitude sweeping across the country,” said Friend, who lives with his wife and two daughters in Massachusetts. “I’m thinking, man, we are moving backwards with things like this and voter suppression. Here I am, making this film, and yet, everything she fought about is so relevant today. Even though it is a historical documentary, I feel like it’s just as relevant, if not more relevant, today.”