For Black women, according to Martha Jones, author of the forthcoming book Vanguard: How Black Women Broke Barriers, Won the Vote, and Insisted on Equality for All, the 1965 Voting Rights Act would prove to be the "15th and 19th Amendments rolled into one." It would give teeth to what had been merely a promise when it came to granting them the vote. And they would prove a crucial part of the fight to make it a reality. Amelia Boynton Robinson, the first Black woman in Alabama to run for Congress (her campaign motto: "A voteless people is a hopeless people"), even turned her husband's memorial service into Selma's first mass meeting for voting rights. She then became a key organizer of the 1965 march from Selma to the state capital, Montgomery, during which an Alabama state trooper beat her brutally as she tried to cross the Edmund Pettus Bridge. A widely published photograph of her lying on the ground, bloody and unconscious, would form part of the campaign that led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act a few months later.
Glamour Shots in Bronze
With its gentle portraits of Stanton, Anthony, and Truth, the Women's Rights Pioneers Monument is far from that image of a bloodied protester. In following the model of the very kind of traditional monument it means to replace, it leaves out the pain and the struggle of the women's movement.
It didn't have to be that way. In 2015, one of Monumental Women's leaders told the New York Times that they wanted a memorial that wouldn't be "old-fashioned." Nonetheless, the design they ultimately selected, with its realistic, larger-than-life portrait statues on a pedestal, would prove to be in precisely that traditional style.
The group has claimed that just such a stylistic compromise was necessary because the New York Parks Department refused to allow an "overtly modern" monument in Central Park. (That department disagrees that it should be blamed for the monument's style. Its press officer told me that they "encourage innovative contemporary art" and pointed to a number of examples of modern, abstract monuments that "grace our parks" in Queens, Manhattan, Staten Island, and Brooklyn.) The Pioneers Monument sits on a leafy promenade nicknamed "Literary Walk" because of its statues of authors like William Shakespeare and Robert Burns. It fits in perfectly there, and would go hardly less well with the future "National Garden of American Heroes" President Trump demanded in response to Black Lives Matter protests. In his executive order to make it so, he specified that the statues in his garden must be realistic, "not abstract or modernist."
Monumental Women's style choice conveys important messages. For one, monuments traditionally show the people they honor in the most flattering form imaginable and this one is no exception. Bergmann has sculpted the women as attractively as possible (while being more or less faithful to the historical record). If the monument represents the moment in 1857 when the three women were together, Truth would have been 70 years old and Anthony, the youngest, in her late 40s. Yet all three are shown with unwrinkled faces, smooth hands, and firm necks. Stanton's hair falls in perfect curls. While they may not look exactly young, neither are they aging. Think of the monument as the equivalent of Glamour Shots in bronze.
As historian Lyra Monteiro, known for her critique of the way playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda erased the slave past in his Broadway hit "Hamilton" -- even as he filled the roles of the founding fathers with actors of color -- pointed out to me, the monument makes the three women into feminists of a type acceptable even to conservative viewers. Besides portraying them as conventionally attractive, the sculpture uses symbols that emphasize the more traditional feminine aspects of their lives: Truth's lap full of knitting; Stanton's delicate, spindly furniture; and Anthony's handbag. Who could doubt that their armpit hair is also under control?
The women's faces are, by the way, remarkably emotionless, which is unsurprising for a monument in the traditional style. Since Greco-Roman antiquity, heroic statuary has famously sported faces of almost preternatural calm. Such expressions, however, only contribute to what Monteiro called the concealment of "the struggle" that marked feminism from its first moments.
Sojourner Truth, for instance, was known for speeches like "Ain't I a Woman?" in which she drew deep and emotional reactions from listeners by describing the sufferings she experienced before escaping from slavery. The triumphalist calm of the Pioneers Monument avoids those emotions and so belongs to a long tradition in American statuary that celebrates revolutionary deeds as, in Monteiro's words, "very old and very, very done." Such monuments ask viewers to offer thanks for victory instead of spurring them on to continue the fight.
Monteiro also points out that the choice of commemorating universal suffrage is telling in itself. No matter how many fierce debates it once inspired, the idea that women should have the right to vote is today uncontroversial. But other women's rights issues remain hotly debated. Imagine statuary celebrating the fight for the right to abortion or to use the bathroom of your choice.
As an example of monuments that energize viewers in an ongoing fight instead of tranquilizing them into thinking victory has been won, Monteiro pointed to Mexico City's antimonumentos (anti-monuments), large if unofficial displays aimed at calling out government negligence. A typical one, made of metal and portraying the international symbol for women with a raised fist at its center, installed during a 2019 protest march in one of that city's main squares, bears an inscription indicating that protestors were not going to shut up when it came to the gender-based violence that then continues unchecked in their country. City officials have let such antimonumentos remain in place, undoubtedly fearing negative publicity from their removal. So they continue to act as reminders that the government's actions are both questionable and being scrutinized.
The triumphalism of the Pioneers Monument suggests that the problem of women's rights is oh-so-settled. But of course, in the age of Donald Trump in particular, the kinds of oppressions that Truth, Stanton, and Anthony fought couldn't be more current. Many feminists of color feel that white feminists still tend to ignore racial issues and seldom have the urge to share leadership in activism.
And today, despite Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden's recent choice of Kamala Harris as his running mate, the voting rights of women of color remain imperiled. Since a 2013 Supreme Court decision struck down one of the Voting Rights Act's key protections, minority voters have found it ever more difficult to exercise their theoretical right to vote amid growing efforts by Republican officials to suppress minority (and so Democratic) votes more generally. The fight for women's votes is hardly over, no matter what the Pioneers Monument might have to say about it.
Todd Fine, a preservation activist, told me that he wishes Monumental Women had focused their discussions on what a truly diverse community might have wanted for such a commemoration rather than responding to bursts of criticism with modest tweaks of their proposed statue.
One explanation for the group's resistance to change is that it is led by exactly the type of well-off, educated, white women whose right to vote hasn't been in question since 1920. In the same period that they were reacting to criticism of their proposed monument's exclusion of women of color, I found that Monumental Women's tax filings reveal that they added three women of color to their board of directors. Diversification of leadership is certainly a positive step, but the organization's president and other officers remain the same. And at least two of the new directors had already raised funds for the planned Stanton and Anthony monument, writing and speaking positively about the organization and its goals, and so could be expected to be at best modest critics of its path.
Historic Lies and Scented Candles
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