House Democrat unveils measure to restore inscription on Capitol suffragist monument
House Oversight and Reform Committee Chairwoman Carolyn Maloney (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation on Tuesday that would restore the original inscription that had been erased from a statue on display in the Capitol Rotunda that honors female suffragists who fought for women’s right to vote.
The introduction of the resolution comes 101 years to the day after the statue, which depicts Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott, was officially unveiled in the Capitol on Feb. 15, 1921.
But shortly after the ceremony in the Capitol Rotunda, lawmakers moved the statue a floor below to a room known as the Capitol crypt. And an inscription that had made statements such as “woman, first denied a soul, then called mindless, now arisen declared herself an entity to be reckoned” was scraped off.
It wasn’t until 1996 that Congress approved a resolution to relocate the statue to a prominent location in the Capitol Rotunda. Past efforts to move the statue had stalled when some GOP lawmakers objected to spending money required to relocate it.
Maloney’s resolution would direct the Joint Committee on the Library, which oversees operations of the Capitol complex, to restore the original inscription that had been deemed overly controversial when the statue was unveiled in early 1921. At the time, there were no women serving in Congress, and the Constitution’s 19th Amendment granting women the right to vote had only been ratified about six months earlier.
“Just like the suffrage movement and the women who led it, the inscription is part of our history and should be restored. It is past time to correct that historic wrong and again place an appropriate inscription on this monument which honors one of the most significant events in our nation’s history,” Maloney said in a statement.
The resolution currently has 22 Democratic co-sponsors.
To date, the suffragist monument remains the only statue in the Capitol Rotunda that depicts women. All of the other statues and busts in the symbolic center of the Capitol depict former male presidents, Alexander Hamilton and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Numerous statues and other artwork in the Capitol honoring public figures have long been subject to the nation’s culture wars.
House Democrats have passed legislation twice in the last two years to remove artwork from the Capitol that honors people with legacies of defending slavery or serving the Confederacy.
But that legislation has stalled since Senate Republicans have largely opposed it, meaning it’s lacked the minimum of 60 votes in the upper chamber to advance. Republicans have argued that it should be up to individual states to replace statues that they’ve contributed to the Capitol’s collection.
Some states, such as Florida, Virginia, North Carolina and Arkansas, have already moved to replace Confederate statues that had been on display in the Capitol.
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