There is controversy stirring in the basement of the U.S. Capitol. Literally. It has to do with an eight-ton marble statue commemorating three pioneers of the women’s movement—Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott.
After women were finally granted the right to vote in August 1920, the National Women’s Party, in a celebratory mood, donated the statue to Congress with the intention that it be displayed in the Capitol Rotunda, alongside the busts of the country’s Founding Fathers.
In what many women regard as a remarkable show of patriarchal ingratitude, Congress decided instead to stash the statue in the basement, where it has rested unceremoniously to this day.
This summer, however, to mark the 75th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, women’s organizations have been lobbying Congress to correct this historical injustice and move the statue upstairs where they say it belongs.
Even the White House is concerned. Betsy Myers, the president’s newly appointed “deputy assistant for women’s initiatives and outreach” complained recently, “What would our foremothers say today about their statue still being in the crypt?”
Indeed. But what probably really makes these founding mothers turn over in their graves is the flip-flop the women’s movement has done on abortion.
Today, the daughters of the suffragists declare the emancipation of women to be equal to the “right” to have an abortion at any time and for any reason. Back then, before intellectual dishonesty seized the movement, Susan B. Anthony could call abortion what it really is—“the horrible crime of child murder.”
Mott, Stanton and Anthony, like most 19th-century feminist leaders, believed abortion to be a “crying evil,” as Stanton put it—a sign of woman’s degradation by men and by a culture that gives pride of place to men’s sexual appetites.
“Yes, no matter what the motive—love of ease or a desire to save from suffering the unborn innocent—the woman is awfully guilty who commits the deed,” Anthony wrote. “It will burden her conscience in life, it will burden her soul in death. But oh! thrice guilty is he who, for selfish gratification, heedless of her prayers, indifferent to her fate, drove her to the desperation which impels her to the crime. … Let maternity come to her from a desire to cherish, love and train for high purposes an immortal soul and you will have begun to eradicate this most monstrous crime.”
Like Abraham Lincoln, these three women understood and defended the bedrock American values of freedom and the right to life. So we add our voice to the chorus of those calling to raise the suffragist statue from the crypt and into the Rotunda.
To let all who pass through the Capitol’s hallowed halls know of women’s contribution to this country’s history, we think Congress should also order a plaque to be struck and be affixed to the monument: “Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Lucretia Mott – Defenders of Women, Defenders of Life.”
Originally published in Our Sunday Visitor (September 10, 1995)
© David Scott, 2009. All rights reserved.
