THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, August 6, 1995 TAG: 9508060004
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: ELIZABETH SIMPSON
LENGTH: Medium: 70 lines
It's affectionately known as ``Three Women in a Bathtub.''
Weighing six tons, the statue of the women carved chest-deep in marble has languished in the basement of the U.S. Capitol for decades.
Susan B. Anthony. Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Lucretia Mott.
Let's see now, Anthony's the woman on the dollar coin, but who are those other two? Everyone up on women's history?
I didn't think so. That's why there's a crusade to move the statue of the suffragists to the Rotunda by Aug. 26, the 75th anniversary of the constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote.
Susan Motz Sanderson of Norfolk called hoping we'd write something about the statue. She's always looking for ways to pass on women's history to her daughters.
Sometimes she has to look pretty hard. The story of the suffragists' statue shows why. The National Women's Party unveiled the statue in 1921. But the marble ladies didn't go over well with lawmakers, who at first refused to accept the monument. Women's right to vote still rankled the lawmakers a bit, even a year after they had passed the amendment.
The women presenters had the statue delivered to the Capitol anyway.
The statue was finally accepted in a secret ceremony, then banished to ``the crypt,'' a space under the Rotunda.
And there it has sat. And sat. Seven decades have come and gone. A war here and there. African Americans' battle for civil rights. The space age.
The first couple of years the statue collected dirt sitting among discarded furniture. A brigade of women scoured the statue with scrub brushes and cakes of soap.
Now, another group of women is taking up the scrub brush. The 75th Anniversary of Woman Suffrage Task Force has asked Congress to move the statue to the Rotunda, to sit next to the likes of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King.
Equality and all that, you know. Surely, guys, you've had enough time to get over that women's vote thing.
Seventy-five years after they got the vote, women are still fighting for clout. Most voters in this country are women. Yet they make up only 8 percent of the U.S. Senate and 10 percent of the House of Representatives.
Maybe it's because there's a lack of role models. And little focus on women's history. We all know about George Washington. And Thomas Jefferson. And Martin Luther King.
But how many people know that Stanton was author of the Woman's Bill of Rights? Or that Mott organized a 1848 convention to launch the women's rights movement? Or that Anthony proposed the women's voting rights amendment?
Not many.
Opponents of moving the suffragists upstairs say that the Rotunda's floor supports are too weak to hold the heavy statue. And that the statue gets more than its share of viewers today since it sits in a well-traveled exhibit area.
But the ``Bathtub'' ladies deserve more respect than that. After all, the 10 statues in the Rotunda are all men. And of the 100 statues in the Capitol, only six are women.
The inscription on the suffragists' statue, which was quickly whitewashed after its presentation, might even be uncovered: ``Woman, first denied a soul, then called mindless, now arisen declared herself an entity to be reckoned.''
And, indeed, she is. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Seventy-five years after they got the vote, women are still fighting
for clout.
by CNB