'It's about time': Central Park's first historical female monument to arrive in 2020

In 1995, the artist Meredith Bergmann was working on a film set in Central Park when she noticed something was off.

“I noticed then there were no statues of women,” said Bergmann. “There was a wonderful Alice in Wonderland sculpture, but there were no sculptures of actual women of note and accomplishment.”

Now, 23 years later, Bergmann has created the winning design for a bronze statue of New York suffragists Elizabeth C Stanton and Susan B Anthony, who fought for women’s right to vote. Bergmann’s creation will be erected in Central Park on 26 August 2020, coinciding with the centennial of the ratification of the 19th amendment “Votes for Women”.

“The more images of women there are to look up to, the more inspired young women will be to aim higher and be more ambitious,” said Bergmann. “It’s really telling you: ‘don’t waste what these women did, go and vote’.”

There are only five public statues of real women in New York City (excluding fictional characters like Alice in Wonderland and Mother Goose), while there are 145 sculptures of men, including statues of William Shakespeare and Ludwig van Beethoven, who are both in Central Park.

“We are happy to have broken the bronze ceiling to create the first statue of real women in the 164-year history of Central Park,” said Pam Elam, the president of the Monumental Women campaign, which is backing the statue. “It’s about time that real women were represented in a monument.”

Bergmann created this monument – its bronze maquette is on view at the New York Historical Society until 26 August – based on numerous photos of the two women, who are hovering over a paper document. “It showed the persistence of their working relationship as writers who worked on petitions, lectures and documents,” said Bergmann.

One of the most famous quotes from Stanton and Anthony dates back to their newspaper, The Revolution, where they wrote: “Men, their rights and nothing more; women, their rights and nothing less.”

The statue has a long scroll that snakes from a desk down to a ballot box, which is meant to represent the change they made to the 19th amendment – but it doesn’t stop there. The scroll will detail the voices of over 20 other women, including Ida B Wells-Barnett and Sojourner Truth, with quotes written chronologically from 1848 to 2020.

“The quotes are a concrete metaphor of what has come down to us,” said Bergmann. “The ballot box is there at the end point.”

While the quotes are currently kept under wraps, a few potential teasers have been posted on the group’s Instagram account. For example, Shirley Chisholm, the first black congresswoman, once said: “You don’t make progress by standing on the sidelines, whimpering and complaining, you make progress by implementing ideas,” while Maya Angelou once said: “We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated.”

But while other voices will be included in this sculpture, it will be difficult to include them all and some might be left out. “No one statue can meet all the needs and desires of so many who have been waiting so long for it,” said Elam. “We have to all do what we can to increase the visibility of women because it’s important on so many levels and it’s so long overdue.”

Just as the controversial J Marion Sims statue was taken down from Central Park earlier this year, other initiatives to honor women in public artworks are popping up in New York City. The city commission She Built NYC, spearheaded by Chirlane McCray, will honor women over the next decade with a budget of $10m, with funding coming from the department of cultural affairs.

However, the Monumental Women group did not get city funding. They aimed to fundraise $1.5m for the project and have almost met their goal. “We want to be a resource for groups on how to do this in your own community,” said Elam. “If you want to honor women in any way – a plaque, a street sign, there are a lot of ways to bring attention to the way to the enormous contribution of women.”

This sculpture will take seven years to execute (work started in 2013) but it goes back farther for Elam. She first discovered the suffragists leafing through a book at her junior high library when she was 13 years old. “From that moment on, I wanted to use them as a model for my own feminist organizing,” recalls Elam. “Women’s history is such a treasure chest of inspirational stories, it gives us courage to keep fighting for women’s rights and achieve equality in our lives. We want to get their stories out there for people to be energized by their contributions.”