Monumental Women

To commission and maintain a statue in Central Park dedicated to honoring women's history. To create an educational campaign around women's rights history. To challenge municipalities to honor more women and people of color in public spaces.[6]

Since 2013, the Statue Fund/Monumental Women campaign has been dealing with the City to "break the bronze ceiling" in Central Park to create the first statue of real women in the Park's 165-year history.[7][8][9]

Monumental Women raised $1.5 million in mostly private funding to pay for the statue,[10] including contributions from foundations, businesses and over 1,000 individual donations.[11] The statue campaign is dependent on private donations.[12] Several troops of the Girl Scouts of Greater New York have donated money from their cookie sales to the fund[13] and the fund has received a $500,000 grant from New York Life.[14]

The effort has the support of numerous elected officials, including Manhattan Borough President Gale Brewer, every member of the New York City Council Women’s Caucus, Congresswomen, U.S. Senators, as well as historians, foundations, and others.[15]

The Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument is being created by sculptor Meredith Bergmann,[16] who in July 2018 was chosen out of 91 artists who applied for the commission to create the statue.[17]

The New York City Public Design Commission approved Bergmann’s statue design on October 21, 2019.[18] The sculpture is scheduled to be unveiled in Central Park on August 26, 2020, also celebrated as Women’s Equality Day, to mark the centennial anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote nationwide.[19][20]

In 1995, the artist Meredith Bergmann was working on a film set in Central Park and noticed there were "no sculptures of actual women of note and accomplishment." and 23 years later she was the sculptor who was awarded the commission for the design chosen to honor women of the suffrage movement in Central Park.[21]

The call for sculptors involved a Request for Qualifications and Request for Proposals, in which Monumental Women invited sculptors to submit illustrations of previous work, curriculum vitae and their approach to the design of the monument in sketch, text form or both. 91 artists from across the nation applied. The submissions were reviewed in a blind selection process by a diverse jury consisting of art and design professionals, historians and representatives from New York City Parks and the Monumental Women.[22] Four qualified finalists were invited to submit models for the monument[23] with Bergmann ultimately receiving the commission.[24] The competition was coordinated and managed by architecture firm Beyer Blinder Belle Architects & Planners LLP.[25]

The statue depicts Sojourner Truth speaking, Susan B. Anthony organizing, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton writing, “three essential elements of activism,” in Bergmann’s vision. Bergmann researched the women extensively, painstakingly studying every photo and description she could find in order to accurately portray not just their physical characteristics, but also their personalities.[26]

Bergmann researched the women extensively, painstakingly studying every photo and description she could find in order to accurately portray not just their physical characteristics, but also their personalities.[27] She believes it is important that a monument to them be “larger than life” to reflect the large impact that they had on history.[28]

Bergmann is working on a very tight timeline to complete the statue in time for the unveiling on August 26, 2020, the fastest she’s ever completed a work of this scale.[29] After receiving approval for her design from the New York City Public Design Commission in October 2019,[30] Bergmann immediately began creating the 9-foot-tall clay figures. The rest of the process, including making molds, casts, pouring the molten bronze, final touch-ups and patina, will take nearly all the remaining time until the scheduled unveiling on August 26, 2020.[31]

The sculpture is currently scheduled to be installed in Central part on August 26, 2020, to mark the centennial anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment, which granted women the right to vote nationwide.[32][33]

The Statue Fund/Monumental Women campaign has withstood criticism during the approval process of Bergmann's statue. The initial design of the statue featured Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton holding a scroll listing the names of 22 other suffragists.[34] This was criticized as marginalizing these 22 other activists (7 of whom are women of color) and reducing them to a mere footnote. In the second maquette of the statue, the scroll was removed entirely, leaving only Stanton and Anthony.[35] This version of the statue was unanimously approved by the New York City Public Design Commission.[36]

The Commission mostly issued critiques regarding the artistic elements of the statue, but concluded their statements saying, "(...) the Commission gives approval conditioned upon the understanding that, separate from the statue of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, the applicant will work to identify meaningful ways to acknowledge and commemorate women of color who played an active role in the Woman Suffrage Movement."[37] However, the monument began receiving public criticism about its lack of representation of women of color. This seemed an especially acute issue given that the subjects of the statue, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, were co-editors of the first few volumes of The History of Woman Suffrage, a six-part history of the women's suffrage movement that, some scholars and journalists claim, largely omitted the contributions of black women.[38] This criticism was made despite a word search of the first three volumes of The History of Woman Suffrage finding African American woman suffragists mentioned at least 85 times, often with much detail and direct quotes. Sojourner Truth is mentioned over 50 times, Frances E. W. Harper 16 times, Mary Shadd Cary four times. Historian Rosalyn Terborg-Penn said she used The History of Woman Suffrage and Stanton and Anthony’s newspaper, THE REVOLUTION, to help identify African American woman suffragists.[39]

In the wake of public criticism, the statue was redesigned yet again, this time featuring three figures: Anthony, Stanton, and Sojourner Truth.[40] Truth, an African American abolitionist, suffragist, and activist, was active in the same time as Anthony and Stanton. Many people are satisfied the inclusion of Truth as representation of women of color in the suffrage movement. However, Truth is most famous for her 1851 "Ain't I a Woman" speech,[41] and Monumental Women lists this speech as a reason for her fame. Several versions exist, as provided at The Sojourner Truth Project and the one most commonly reproduced portrays Truth as using a southern slave dialect unlikely for a New Yorker.[42] It written by Frances Dana Barker Gage, nearly twelve years after the speech was given, and the statue does not specify any version.

• Monument Women website
• Elizabeth Cady Stanton
• Susan B. Anthony