Monumental Women has set a date for the unveiling of the Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument on the Mall in the City of New York’s Central Park. The statue is the first statue depicting a real woman in the Park’s 167-year History.
The original statue of women’s rights pioneers Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony was redesigned to include Sojourner Truth after criticism that the original design excluded the contributions of people of color. It’s being sculpted by Meredith Bergmann.
The unveiling will occur on August 26, 2020.
More information about the Monumental Women Statue Fund can be found on their website monumentalwomen.org or by following them on social media at Facebook, Twitter, and their #100YearsWomenVote campaign on Instagram at @monumentalwomennyc.
The campaign highlights key people and events from the long fight for women’s suffrage.
Photo provided.
What about Frances Perkins? There needs to be a statue to her in New York City
It’s a statue, not a “statute” (law)! Do we know if Sojourner Truth ever sat down with the two other women, Anthony and Stanton? If not, why represent that it happened? I really dislike making historical stuff up. Why not give Sojourner Truth her own memorial? Maybe with Frederick Douglass who also was a strong proponent of woman suffrage. BTW, that’s how it was referred to earlier; we now prefer the term “women’s suffrage.” Tennessee erected a five-figure statue several years’ ago at the Bicentennial Mall near the State Capitol in Nashville. This includes prominent suffragists from all parts of the state–an African-American woman leader from Nashville is included, too.
Stay tuned for a big centennial event in Tennessee this August as we will commemorate the historic vote in the Tennessee legislature making TN the “Perfect Thirty-six” — ie number of states needed to ratify the 19th Amendment back when there were 48 states in the Union. Great story. Look up “Harry Burn”;-)
This is not the first statue with a “real woman” in Central Park. Audrey Munson, the Gilded Age model and a New York woman, is depicted atop the USS Maine monument at Columbus Circle. She’s also on the NYC public library. The point I want to make is that like NYC history, women were always there; they were just not acknowledged.
For more on Audrey, see my Untapped Cities article, Audrey Munson: The Most Visible New York Woman You Don’t Know: https://untappedcities.com/2016/04/15/audrey-munson-the-most-visible-new-york-woman-you-dont-know/
It’s a bit of semantics, but those statues are not real women, although they were modeled on a real woman. The Maine memorial is Columbia Triumphant and the woman depicted on the NYPL is Beauty.
I wasn’t familiar with Audrey Munson – what a story, thanks for sharing it.