Suffragette Statue Celebrated as Increasingly Vital Symbol
In front of the statue is Brenda Berkman, the first woman to join the FDNY in 1982.
By Carol Tannenhauser
With voting rights a central issue in Congress and the nation today, Meredith Bergmann’s monument to the leaders of the U.S. Woman Suffrage Movement takes on new meaning.
“Women’s Rights Pioneers” is the first monument to be placed in Central Park in over 50 years, and the first ever to feature a real woman — in fact, three: Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It occupies a coveted spot on Central Park’s famed Literary Walk, located mid-park around West 66th Street, and it’s become a destination and symbol, Park officials say. Pilgrims came to it to honor Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and to plaster it with “I voted” stickers last Election Day.
The spot seems to have been waiting for the women. Prior to their arrival in August 2020, each male statue faced another, albeit unlikely male partner: Columbus and Shakespeare, Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott. Only Fitz-Greene Halleck, a 19th Century poet and essayist, had an empty space across the promenade from him, until the three women moved in. They don’t have much to do with Halleck, so absorbed are they in their work to abolish slavery and win women the right to vote.
Mitchell Silver.
It was a man who actually secured the spot for the new monument: outgoing Parks Commissioner Mitchell J. Silver. At an event organized by Borough President Gale Brewer on Monday, commemorating Women’s History Month, Silver and Coline Jenkins, the great-great granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, recalled how it had happened back in 2014.
“Coline approached me after my first speech as commissioner,” Silver said, “and she told me that there were no monuments of real women in Central Park. And I said, that can’t be. I didn’t believe it. I went to my staff and they said, it’s true. And I said, well, it has to change. Who can change it? And they said, you.”
At first, Central Park said there was no room for the women’s monument. They could, however, place the statue right outside the Park’s wall. Jenkins and Pam Elam, president of the board of Monumental Women, the nonprofit that worked tirelessly to make the statue a reality, weren’t having any of that, and the present site was eventually found.
Meredith Bergmann, the sculptor.
“It took my breath away,” said Meredith Bergmann, the sculptor, who was seeing the statue for the first time since October. “I’m just so happy to have it here. It’s different from the other monuments and I wanted that very much. I wanted it to stand out and tell a story.”
“Donating a Work of Art to the City has been a very complicated and challenging experience,” Pam Elam has written. “But Monumental Women persisted and moved history forward in New York City’s Central Park. We are proud that our all-volunteer, not-for-profit group has broken the bronze ceiling. It took seven years. We raised over $1.5 million in private funding. We fought through many obstacles. It was not easy to take the long bureaucratic roller-coaster ride which traveled through the Parks Department, the Central Park Conservancy, The Public Design Commission, The Landmarks Preservation Commission and every single Community Board surrounding Central Park. Step by step, meeting by meeting, we crossed the minefield which is New York City government. In New York City’s public spaces there are 150 statues and only 5 of them were women. Now, thanks to Monumental Women there are 6.”
Women’s Rights Pioneers is a “talking statue.” By using your phone you can listen to brief histories of the three women and the statue itself, narrated by Jane Alexander, Viola Davis, America Ferrara, Rita Moreno, Zoe Saldana and Meryl Streep.
You can tell a lot about a person by their bag.
Check out Gale Brewer’s bag in the picture above. It looks an awful lot like Sojourner Truth’s bag behind her on the pedestal.
“They should commemorate Gale’s bag one day!” wrote Aries Dela Cruz, her press secretary.
SO great that this memorial is now in Central Park. Outrageous that at first the response was that there was no room in the park for such a memorial. We need 100 more such memorials honoring women all over New York City. I’d like to see one in Central Park for Ida B. Wells.
Dear Bob,
Thank you for your remark about a statue of Ida B. Wells in NYC.
Meanwhile, in full recognition of Ida B. Wells, her great granddaughter Michelle Duster is actively creating a statue and a mural of the suffrage movement in Chicago.
In addition, planned for Washington DC’s Mall, is a proposed women’s monument of Ida B. Wells and Alice Paul, among suffragists. Check its progress through its sculptor Jane DeDecker.
Please Google and support Michelle and Jane!
Great to hear all these honors coming for Ida B. Wells.
Memorializing Republican women, whether Anthony or Tubman, is problematic. I would recommend more contemporary progressives, like Abzug or Cortes.
AOC? why? WHAT HAS SHE DONE?
Lincoln was a Republican, do you have a problem with that monument? Are you referring to AOC? What is her landmark contribution at this point? I think this is a well-deserved statue.
It is sickening to read here that Harriet Tubman shouldn’t be honored with a memorial. Was she wrong to risk her life MANY times to help free enslaved Africans? Does Roda, predictably hiding behind a fake name, suggest that it was a terrible “Republican” thing to do what Tubman did? (And, by the way, I’m 73 years old and have never voted for a Republican.)
I’m still waiting for AOC to denounce the kids being kept in cages at the border right now like she did with the trump Administration. Where’s the outrage?
Please stop using the word suffragette. The proper term is suffragist. Men used the word suffragette as a derogatory and demeaning term formthe women fighting for our right to vote.
https://www.nps.gov/articles/suffragistvssuffragette.htm
These women were suffragists, not suffragettes. In 1906, a reporter writing in the Daily Mail coined the term suffragette, from suffragist, to belittle the women advocating women’s suffrage.
There is no need to perpetuate this term.
suffragist
Such a wonderful statue and long overdue.There are so many trailblazers such as Rosa Parks(Claudette Colvin before her); Kamala Harris; Sonja Sotomoyer and even Nancy Pelosi who have established histories and contributions. AOC is just a one/ term very vocal Congresswoman from Queens.
Three valid complaints so far and yet the headline of “suffragettes” hasn’t been changed. The critics are correct. How many complaints will it take to change this?
Research, Bob. “…many women decided to reclaim a word that their opponents tried to use to insult them, much like the LGBT community has adopted queer, Democrats have embraced Obamacare and women now proudly rap about being bad bitches. Their success is partly evident in the fact that, over time, people have forgotten the controversial connotations of the word, using it to describe any supporter of women’s suffrage in any country.”
https://time.com/4079176/suffragette-word-history-film/