Suffrage Statuary and Commemorative Accountability: An Intersectional Analysis of the 2020 Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument in Central Park, New York

ABSTRACT

This essay explores the controversy surrounding the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument (WRPM) that was unveiled in Central Park on 26 August 2020 to commemorate the centennial anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment. To read the WRPM’s commemorative process and product, I use an intersectional feminist analytic to consider how interlocking concerns of gender, race, and power inflected the debates and decisions that shaped the WRPM. This intersectional analysis explores how the WRPM became an opportunity for the public to wrestle with the ways this statue could (not) address a complicated suffrage history that would celebrate women’s collective activism and reckon with its racist past.

KEYWORDS:

• Feminist rhetoric
• intersectionality
• public memory
• women’s suffrage

Acknowledgments

The author would like to thank the reviewers for their helpful revision suggestions as well as the thoughtful comments on drafts by Kristy Maddux, Ashwini Tambe, Holly Brewer, and Laura Rosenthal.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ For rhetorical scholarship that explores the racist rhetorics that inflected white suffrage arguments see August, Gold, Harris, T. Lewis, McDaneld, Palczewski (“1919”), Poirot (“Unmaking”), Skinnell.

² See also Rooney’s “The Politics of Commemorating the Woman Suffrage Movement in New York City: On the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument” that considers the WRPM debates by connecting them to the controversy surrounding the Portrait Monument in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C.

³ See, for instance, Browne, Dunn (“Grinding”; “Remembering”; “Whence”), Fitzmaurice, Gallagher and LaWare, Hatfield, Helmbrecht, King, Nelson, Ohl, Poirot and Watson, Tell.

⁴ For intersectional feminist memory scholarship, see Brown, Coker, Dubriwny and Poirot, Dunn, Enoch (“Embroidering,” “Feminist”), Frink, Mandziuk (“Commemorating”), Poirot (“Gendered”), Pruchniewska, Reed, Woodley.

⁵ Monumental Women successfully raised the funds for the endowment that would support Bergmann’s work as well as the installation and maintenance of the statue, which included financing from a $500,000 New York Life Insurance Company Challenge Grant and $10,000 in Girl Scout cookie sales.

⁶ For a detailed description of the requirements and design guidelines, see “The Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Woman Suffrage Movement Monument.”

⁷ See, for example, books such as Elaine Weiss’s The Woman’s Hour: The Great Fight to Win the Vote; Kirsten Gillibrand’s Bold & Brave: Ten Heroes Who Won Women the Right to Vote; performances such as 19: The Musicial and the virtual play Finish the Fight. One example of the art installations that marked the centennial is Marilyn Artus’s “Her Flag.” In Washington, D.C., alone there were suffrage centennial exhibits at the National Archives, the Library of Congress, and the National Portrait Gallery. In August 2020, the Quarterly Journal of Speech published a special issue titled “The Centennial of (White) Woman’s Suffrage,” and in its winter 2020 issue Peitho published a cluster conversation, “The Suffrage Centennial: How, Why, and On What Terms Should We Mark This Moment?” The March 2020 conference “Citizenship at the Intersections” held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, focused on the 100-year anniversary of the Nineteenth Amendment. Additionally, the author’s current book project, “Remembering Suffrage: Feminist Memory and Activism at the Centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment,” takes up centennial memorialization as its major analytical concern.

⁸ See the A Path Forward monument in Salt Lake City, Utah; the Woman’s Suffrage Centennial Sculpture in Rockford, Illinois; and the Tennessee Woman Suffrage Monument in Nashville, Tennessee. There are plans in place for the Every Word We Utter monument in Washington, DC, and the Ripples of Change monument in Seneca Falls, New York.

⁹ For a detailed description of how Bergmann revised the monument, see Bergmann’s essay in Sculpture Review.

¹⁰ In terms of monuments dedicated to mothers, see, for instance, monuments like Whistler’s mother, the Madonna of the Trail monuments, the American War Mothers Memorial, and the Pioneer Mother Memorial.

¹¹ For extended feminist rhetorical examinations of spatio-rhetorical revisions to the home, see Enoch (Domestic).

¹² There was a debate about the historical accuracy of the WRPM and its representation of Truth. While experts on Truth such as historian Nell Irvin Painter endorsed her depiction in the WRPM, there was a group of over twenty New York City historians who raised concerns about the cross-racial collaboration the statue conveys and submitted a public letter to the Monumental Women organization (see Small, “Historians”). The signers argued, “If Sojourner Truth is added in a manner that simply shows her working together with Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton in Stanton’s home, it could obscure the substantial differences between white and black suffrage activists, and would be misleading” (qtd. in McGreevy). Furthermore, the group argued “even at that time, Stanton and Anthony’s overall rhetoric comparing black men’s suffrage to female suffrage treated black intelligence and capability in a manner that Truth opposed.” Signers also raised questions about the historical accuracy of the statue, noting “that while Truth did have a relationship with Stanton and Anthony and that they did all attend the May 1867 meeting of the Equal Rights Association, it’s not actually known whether or not they all were at Stanton’s house at the same time” (qtd. in Franklin).

¹³ As Buchanan writes, Truth did collaborate throughout her life with abolitionists like Olive Gilbert and William Lloyd Garrison. Nevertheless, Buchanan makes clear that even seemingly “productive collaborations” such as those in which Truth took part can be read as “inescapably treacherous when substantial power inequities exist between partners” (Regendering 140).

¹⁴ See Biesecker (“Coming”), Campbell, Glenn.