NYC's First Female Historical Statue Was Unveiled 105 Years Ago. The 6th Just Arrived This Week

On Wednesday morning — Women’s Equality Day, commemorating the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment — a group of New Yorkers gathered in Central Park for the unveiling of New York City's sixth statue honoring real women. Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton now join the 23 historical statues in the park that honor men, along with fictional females like Alice in Wonderland.

This is the first statue in Central Park to depict real women, a celebratory occasion, but one that was briefly controversial when the group behind it — the nonprofit Monumental Women's Statue Fund — originally chose to feature only white women, casting aside the importance of Black women’s voices in the fight for the right to vote.

Additionally, the original statue design called for Anthony and Stanton to hold a scroll, which listed 22 more women who had important roles in the Suffrage movement. About 1/3rd of the 22 listed were Black activists, including Truth, Ida B. Wells, and Mary Church Terrell. At the time, Gloria Steinem told the NY Times, "It is not only that it is not enough, [it’s that it looks as if Anthony and Stanton] are standing on the names of these other women."

Following the criticism, the group redesigned the statue to include Truth alongside Anthony and Stanton. And today, the monument — located at the park's Literary Walk — has become a celebratory occasion once again, even if it took a long time to get here.

Over a decade ago, when I first wrote about the lack of female statues in New York City, there were around 150 male historical statues here, compared to just five female historical statues (Joan of Arc, Golda Meir, Gertrude Stein, Eleanor Roosevelt, and Har­riet Tubman). With the unveiling of the Central Park statue, there are now six statues in the entire city dedicated to real women.

How did we get here? Sexism. But let's take a look at the timeline.

Sarah Henry, the chief curator and deputy director at the Museum of the City of New York, told me that the earliest statues in New York City were of King George III and his advisor William Pitt. These were located at Bowling Green and Wall Street, respectively, and erected in 1770. The first female historical statue in New York City went up in 1915 — Joan of Arc Memorial in Riverside Park — which means it took 145 years after the first male historical statues were dedicated, to give the same honor to a woman.

Only one of the three mentioned above remains. It's the woman.

"King George was famously torn down by Revolutionaries in 1776 and the metal carted off to be melted down for ammunition," Henry told us, noting that a portion of the statue is in the museum's collection. Meanwhile, William Pitt was decapitated by British troops, and you can now find his remains at the New-York Historical Society.

The next female historical statue to go up was Golda Meir in 1984 (near Broadway and 39th Street) — that's 69 years that passed before the city decided to honor another woman. And then about a decade later came Gertrude Stein (1992 – Bryant Park) and Eleanor Roosevelt (1996 - Riverside Park) — "the first American women to be so honored with full statues on public land," Henry said.

It wasn't until 2008 that the city honored a Black woman with a statue, when a memorial to Harriet Tubman was unveiled on 122nd Street.

In all that time, over one hundred statues went up in tribute to men, not to mention all of the buildings, bridges, rooms and plaques honoring men. Meanwhile, women were "honored" with statues of fictional characters and muses, often modeled after Audrey Munson, "America's first supermodel."

"Many of the figurative statues around the city were put up as part of a movement known as City Beautiful in the 1890s-early 1900s," Henry said. "This was really an idea about social uplift through environmental and aesthetic improvement in cities. There was a political angle of promoting citizenship, civic pride, patriotism, good government. With that in mind, women were generally not represented for their actual leadership and good works but as allegorical ideals," such as liberty and justice. (But even Lady Liberty may be a man.)

It was from this movement that the City’s Art Commission (now the influential Public Design Commission) was born. "Beginning in the 19th century, private citizens, civic leaders, and ethnic community groups were often behind individual statues, spearheading the call to create them and undertaking the effort raising the money to commission them and donating them to the city," Henry explained, "as in the case of the statue of Columbus at Columbus Circle."

There have been unsuccessful efforts for more statues honoring women over the decades, including one notable push to install a 35-foot tall statue of Catherine of Braganza — the Queen of England in 1683, who the borough of Queens is named — at Hunters Point. Yet only now, 250 years from the time New York City erected its first historical statue, do we seem to be inching forward, with the city's sixth statue honoring women — and only its second honoring a Black woman — finally standing tall in a park that has previously only honored men in this way.

Efforts are now underway to bring more historical female statues to the city, most coming through Chirlane McCray’s She Built NY initiative (also not without controversy). The first will be Shirley Chisholm, the first woman ever to seek the Democratic Party's nomination for president of the United States, and the first black woman elected to serve in Congress, representing NY's 12th Congressional District from 1969 to 1983.

In 2018 I asked Yoko Ono what woman she would like to see a statue of in New York City. She told me, "I don't believe in statues." I have come to agree, but if we're not going to wipe out every statue in the city, we need to work towards more equal representation.