Perspective: How New York’s new monument whitewashes the women’s rights movement
Famed women's rights activist Sojourner Truth. By Martha S. Jones Martha S. Jones is the SOBA presidential professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and author of"Birthright Citizens: A History of Race and Rights in Antebellum America" and, in 2020,"Vanguard: A History of African American Women’s Politics." March 22 at 6:00 AM Over the last two years, fierce debate has kept Confederate monuments in the news for weeks on end.
Unfortunately, Central Park’s women’s monument also trades in myth. Initially proposed as a way to remedy the startling absence of monuments to “real,” rather than fictional, women, proponents began with a list of some 50 women, all New Yorkers worthy of remembering. When Stanton and Anthony were singled out as the focus of a statue, monument organizers rooted their choice in Stanton’s role convening the 1848 women’s meeting at Seneca Falls, N.Y.
At the same time, however, Stanton stands for an impoverished vision of equality that never admitted that black Americans, male and female, were her equals. As Stanton’s partner, Anthony was too often complicit with this view. And when it came to writing the earliest history of women’s suffrage, Anthony and Stanton elevated their own ingenuity and activism above that of all others — black and white, men and women — who also labored for the rights of women. These were myths of their own making.
A decade later, in 2016, Tennessee corrected the record, erecting a second monument. Among the five figures depicted was Frankie Pierce, an African American suffragist included as a reminder to Tennesseans that both black and white women had been part of realizing the vote for women, both in their state and nationally.
Truth’s name was among those that vied, early in the planning process, for a place in Central Park. In an early model for the Stanton-Anthony monument, her name was included on a scroll that unfurled across the lap of the seated figure of Stanton. The final monument, approved this week, erased even that possibility. The scroll is gone and so is any public acknowledgment of Truth.
This debate is not simply one over abstract meaning or historical accuracy. Planners of the Central Park monument have promoted it as especially important in the lives of the city’s school-aged girls. Fund leader Lynn Sherr explains that the monument “gives more little girls someone to look up to. Someone who looks like them.”
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