It is a well-known and long-lamented fact that almost all the statuary in New York City depicts men. Virtually the only women are fictional (Alice in Wonderland, Mother Goose), mythical (Hebe, Minerva) or personifications of virtue (Liberty, Justice). (SNIP) It would be nice to balance out the sexual ratio and create a kind of New York City women's folk trail. But we should do it in a way that makes sure the statues come with their stories intact. (SNIP)
Down near Battery Park, I'd put the Woman Who Burned Down New York. In 1776, as Washington's battered army was trying to retreat from New York, the troops were able to flee under the cover of a sudden conflagration. The blaze destroyed much of the young city, but Washington lived to fight another day. Back in London, Edmund Burke told the House of Commons that the fire had been set by a rebel woman. She was found hiding in a cellar, Burke said, and although she knew she would be hanged for her crime, she proudly told the soldiers she was "determined to omit no opportunity for doing what her country called for." (SNIP)
Wall Street would be a good place for a statue of Victoria Woodhull, who overcame the sex barrier at the stock exchange as the ''bewitching broker.'' Woodhull was actually all over the place in the post-Civil War era -- inserting a rather unnerving amount of glamour into the suffrage movement, running for president as the first female candidate on any ticket, getting into trouble over free love (which she advocated). The story of how she incited the trial of the famous minister Henry Ward Beecher, for having sex with a parishioner's wife, is a conversation starter all by itself. (SNIP)
For the Lower East Side there are so many potential subjects that it might be better to commandeer an entire city park and create a walk flanked by statues. You'd obviously include some of the women who came out of tenements to lead radical political movements and organize labor unions. It would also be a good place to honor Margaret Sanger, who first became obsessed with the need for effective birth control when she worked as a nurse there. Dorothy Day, who founded the Catholic Worker movement in the neighborhood and went on to organize pacifist rebellions against every American war in her lifetime, ought to be in there, too. (Day could also stand somewhere near St. Patrick's Cathedral, grouped with Elizabeth Bayley Seton and Mother Cabrini. Once the Vatican comes to have the proper appreciation for Day's work, you could have a triptych of three American saints, all female New Yorkers.)
By Grand Central Terminal, we'd want a statue that told a travel-related story. I'd nominate Elizabeth Jennings, a black New York teacher who was racing to play the organ at church in 1854 when the conductor of the horse-drawn trolley told her to get off and wait for a vehicle that allowed colored people. Jennings grabbed hold of the car window and hung on for dear life, and when that didn't keep the conductor from ejecting her, she hired a lawyer (who turned out to be the future president Chester Arthur) and successfully sued for damages. Like the woman with the matches, she represents a much bigger tale. A century before Rosa Parks made history, lots of black women in America were standing their ground against conductors, ticket takers and cabdrivers. Harriet Tubman was injured in New Jersey by a railroad conductor who dragged her out of her seat and threw her in the baggage car, and Sojourner Truth waged a successful legal war to integrate streetcars in Washington. But Elizabeth Jennings came first.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/05/magazine/WLN110106.html Our forebears faced much bigger obstacles than we do, and they had almost none of our advantages. And look what they accomplished. You are made of the same stuff. "We can do it!"
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