Moment of ‘Truth’ for suffragettes statue
BY ALEJANDRA O’CONNELLDOMENECH
The Central Park statue honoring
women’s suffragettes Elizabeth
Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony
will be redesigned to include Sojourner
Truth.
The Monumental Women Statue
Fund announced the redesign in a
statement published on its Web site last
week.
“When the Public Design Commission
unanimously approved our previous
design with Anthony and Stanton
— but required that a scroll with
the names and quotes of 22 diverse
women’s suffrage leaders be removed
— we knew we needed to go back to
the drawing board and create a new
design,” said Pam Elam, president of
M.W.S.F., in the statement.
The statue originally depicted Stanton
and Anthony working alongside
each other at a desk over a long scroll
that tumbled down to an old-fashioned
ballot box below them.
In a homage to the movement’s
breadth, the scroll featured the names
of nearly dozen other women — including
Sojourner Truth, Lucy Stone, Ida
B. Wells, Anna Howard Shaw, Lucretia
Mott, Matilda Joslyn Gage and Alice
Paul — who fought for women’s suffrage.
The statue will now show Stanton,
Anthony and also Truth working together
in Stanton’s home, “as they often
did in life,” the M.W.S.F. statement
said.
But just like the statue’s original design,
the new redesign is facing some
criticism.
When the nonprofi t announced last
year that it would be creating the fi rst
statue in Central Park honoring real
women, the decision to create a monument
featuring two white women to
represent the broad and diverse movement
was met with immediate criticism.
In January, icon feminist Gloria
Steinem took issue with the statue and
told The New York Times that Anthony
and Stanton looked as if they were
standing on the names of the other
women, therefore diminishing their efforts.
In March, both the New York Times
and The Washington Post published
pieces that called the statue a “whitewashing”
of history.
Both pieces referenced Stanton biographer
Lori D. Ginzberg’s description
of the suffragist as someone openly
used racist language, referring to black
men as “sambos” and rapists, and who
prioritized the rights of white, middleclass,
educated, Protestant women over
others.
Last month, Harlem historian Jacob
Morris declared the statue racist and
drafted a community board resolution
Abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth.
calling for a halt to public funding
for the monument barring a redesign.
Harlem’s Community Board 11 has expressed
support for the resolution, but
is currently on recess for August and
will vote on it next month.
Although Morris told this paper that
the redesign was a step in the right direction,
he said it is still not enough.
Morris and Todd Fine, a Ph.D. student
at the City University of New York
Graduate Center, drafted a letter to
Elam and Coline Jenkins of the Statue
Fund, asking that those in charge of the
redesign not make the decision lightly,
in order not to repeat the same mistake.
Other signers include Leslie Podel, the
creator of “The Sojourner Truth Project,”
as well as university professors
from Yale, Columbia, N.Y.U., Lehman
College, Brown, Duke, and Fordham.
“If Sojourner Truth is added in a
manner that simply shows her working
together with Susan B. Anthony
and Elizabeth Cady Staton in Stanton’s
home, it could further obscure the substantial
differences between white and
black suffrage activists, and would be
misleading,” the letter states.
Truth was born into slavery in Ulster
County, in Upstate New York, in 1797,
escaped from slavery in 1827, and later
joined the abolitionist movement. By
the 1850s, Truth had joined the fi ght for
women’s rights. At the 1851 Women’s
Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, she
delivered what is now recognized as
one of the most famous abolitionist and
women’s rights speeches in American
history, “Ain’t I a Woman?”
Although there is documentation to
prove that Truth stayed at Stanton’s
home, Morris and Fine argue that
there is no evidence to prove that they
planned to work as a group of three.
Also, grouping the three women together
doesn’t adequately refl ect their
sharp disagreement over who should
get the right to vote. Cady and Stanton
prioritized white women getting
enfranchised fi rst, but Truth wanted
universal suffrage.
In order to create an accurate and
inclusive monument, Morris and Fine
are asking the Monumental Women
Statue Fund to change the piece’s “thematic
scope” and consider black fi gures
whose efforts were marginalized during
the fi ght for women’s suffrage.
“We believe that there may be elegant
ways to memorialize the full scope of
the suffrage movement to incorporate
these challenging differences,” their
letter states, “but they will require careful
consideration, explicitly including
black community voices and scholars
of this history.”
If the city’s Public Design Commission
approves the redesign, the monument
is slated to be erected on Aug. 26
of next year on Central Park’s Literary
Walk.
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