by Gudrun Hutchins

On August 26, 2020, Women’s Equality Day, the first statue of real historic women was unveiled in New York’s Central Park. The statue honors Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Sojourner Truth, three key figures in the women’s rights movement with roots in New York. All three died before the 19^th Amendment was passed and ratified.

Statues of women remain rare in New York City and across the country. Central Park currently has statues of several fictional girls and women, such as Alice in Wonderland and Mother Goose. But the statue of the political campaigners will be Central Park’s first monument of actual flesh-and-blood women in its 167-year history. The Park currently features 23 statues honoring men.

The non-profit group Monumental Women began pushing for a women’s rights statue in Central Park in 2014. “It is not easy to donate a work of art to the city of New York,” says Pam Elam, President of the Board of Monumental Women. They needed to get approval from the Parks Department, the Central Park Conservancy, the Public Design Commission, the Landmarks Preservation Commission, and every single community board surrounding the park.

The initial plan was to design a statue featuring Stanton and Anthony working on a document. However, the organization received criticism for minimizing the role of non-white women in the suffrage movement. Last year, Truth was added to the Central Park monument to better reflect that history. “They all were contemporaries. They did share a lot of the same meetings and speech opportunities. They were on the same stages, so why not have them all on the same pedestal,” Elam said. “We have to make sure that the historical record both respects and reflects all women and people of color.”

In the monument designed and executed by sculptor Meredith Bergman, Truth is speaking, Stanton is writing, and Anthony is organizing–all representations of the three essential elements of activism. Truth and Stanton are sitting at a small table while Anthony stands behind the table with a traveling bag. The scene depicts a moment in an indoor space because much of women’s political activism originated in the home, Bergmann explained.

Sculptor Meredith Bergman working on a clay model of the monument in her studio.

Monumental Women raised over $1.5 million in private donations from more than a thousand supporters to break the “bronze ceiling” for women. Among the donors were Girl Scouts who donated their cookie money. “My hope for little girls who see these statues is that they will be inspired to do serious work for social change with the knowledge that women have been doing this kind of work for centuries,” Bergmann said. She continued: “Their rights descend from the work these women did.”