Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth Statue Unveiled at Central Park
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Central Park has unveiled a new tribute to the women of America!
On Wednesday, the park revealed a statue honoring women’s rights pioneers Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Sojourner Truth. The new memorial is the park's first to depict real-life women.
"You've heard of breaking the glass ceiling," Meredith Bergmann, the sculptor of the piece, told CNN. "This sculpture is breaking the bronze ceiling."
The park is home to 23 statues honoring male figures, as well as a handful of statues depicting fictional women, such as Alice in Wonderland, Mother Goose and Juliet from Romeo and Juliet, AMNY reported.
"It's wonderful that now the city of New York and Central Park are focusing on seeing women's accomplishments as worthy of statuary," Bergmann added.
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Marking the 100th anniversary of women getting the right to vote, @MorganRadford reports from the unveiling of the first statue of women in New York’s Central Park. The statue portrays women’s suffrage activists Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth. pic.twitter.com/R6fd84uOu6
— TODAY (@TODAYshow) August 26, 2020
Central Park's new statue comes just one week shy of the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th amendment, which gave women the right to vote. It depicts all three women gathered around a table in discussion.
Bergmann’s original design only featured the two white activists, but she later changed it to include Truth after critics called out the design for whitewashing the fight for women's suffrage.
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Anthony is famously known to have been arrested and convicted of voting illegally in 1872. She and Stanton later co-founded the American Equal Rights Association in 1866, which campaigned for equal rights for both women and African Americans.
Truth was born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, but ultimately escaped in 1826. She went on to become a famous abolitionist and women's rights activist.
“Our charge now as we stand in the great river of history is to take the stories of the women in this statue and carry them into our schools, social media and into our lives,” Hillary Clinton said at the statue's unveiling, according to AMNY . “There is nothing more important, however, to honor the women portrayed in this statue than to vote.”
The monument will be installed in Central Park's Literary Walk, which also features statues of Shakespeare, Scottish novelist Sir Walter Scott and more.
"My hope for little girls who see these statues is that they will be inspired to do serious work for social change with the knowledge that women have been doing this kind of work for centuries," Bergmann told CNN, "and their rights descend from the work these women did."
