Where the Girls Aren’t

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/29/opinion/women-statues.html

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It is possible that you didn’t know a 24-year-old black woman started the integration of the New York City mass transit system in 1854. It’s a very good story that involves some kicking and screaming, a ruined hat and a future president of the United States.

And now she’s getting a statue next to Grand Central Station. About time.

We’re coming to the end of Women’s History Month, and all in all, it’s been a pretty good celebration. Perhaps a little superior to the one when Donald Trump dropped in on a women’s empowerment panel and asked the assembled high achievers whether any of them had ever heard of Susan B. Anthony.

So about Elizabeth Jennings, a Manhattan schoolteacher in the years before the Civil War. She was rushing to church services, where she was supposed to play the organ, when a trolley conductor told her that his car was only for white people and she’d have to get off and wait for another ride.

Jennings was fearless. She grabbed onto an open window frame, screaming “Murder!” when the conductor tried to pull her off. She hung on for dear life until a police officer shoved her onto the sidewalk, soiling her going-to-church dress and smashing her bonnet.

Her family hired a young lawyer, Chester Alan Arthur, to file suit against the streetcar company for discrimination. Jennings won 100 years before Rosa Parks. And several follow-up suits later, segregation in New York mass transit came to an end.

Arthur, a machine politician of no remarkable talent, later became president of the United States. Jennings was forgotten.

For years I’d spend Women’s History Month muttering that there ought to be a statue of her at Grand Central Station. Now it’s happening! New York is trying to do something about its wildly man-centric population of public monuments, and City Hall has commissioned five female statues, one for each borough.

Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to serve in Congress, will be greeting visitors to Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Queens gets singer Billie Holiday and the Bronx gets Dr. Helen Rodríguez Trías, a pioneer in treating families affected by H.I.V.

Staten Island gets Katherine Walker. She was a tiny widow who ran a lighthouse outside the New York harbor in the early 1900s until she was 73. When the waters got bad and boats started to sink, she rowed to the rescue, saving at least 50 lives over the years.

See? This is the sort of thing you learn when you get to see monuments that don’t involve generals on horseback. There needs to be a statute of limitations on statues of guys in stirrups.

The nation’s nonmilitary statue population is very heavy into politicians. For instance, down on Madison Square there’s a tribute to Roscoe Conkling, a 19th-century boss who gave Chester Alan Arthur his big career break running the deeply corrupt port of New York.

Meanwhile we’re still working on Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

Could be worse. Georgia’s legislature has been busy voting to make it virtually impossible to remove any existing statue from a public place. It’s intended to protect statues of generals who are on horses and wearing Confederate uniforms.

On the plus side, Tennessee is working on a Woman Suffrage Heritage Trail, which celebrates its role as the critical 36th state to ratify the 19th Amendment. That was a very dramatic moment. The House was one vote short of passage. Then 24-year-old Harry Burn — who had always been seen as a “no” — switched sides at the final second.

He later said he had gotten a letter from his mother urging him to change his mind and “I know that a mother’s advice is always safest for her boy to follow.”

Now there’s a new statue of Burn in Knoxville. He’s sitting down while his mother, Febb, stands behind him with a hand on his shoulder. She’s probably saying, “Harry, shape up.”

Besides all the famous heroines we need to honor, it’d be nice to see tributes to some of the more obscure yet exciting figures. I’ve always yearned for a monument to the Woman Who Burned Down Manhattan.

In 1776, the British troops were hot on the trail of George Washington, hoping for a quick end to the Colonial rebellion, when their path was blocked by a sudden blaze that broke out in Manhattan. Back in England, a frustrated Edmund Burke told the House of Commons it was all the fault of “one miserable woman” who had been found in a cellar, covered with soot and proudly declaring that she was the one who did the deed.

She was apparently executed for her heroics. Never did get her name. Historian Linda Kerber, who first brought Burke’s remarks to attention, says she hasn’t been able to find any details.

Kerber, however, had another nominee on the Revolutionary War front — Deborah Sampson of Massachusetts, who disguised herself as a man so she could fight the British.

Sampson was a scout and a fierce fighter. To stay in combat and keep her secret, she dug a pellet out of her leg when she was wounded rather than let a doctor check her out.

There’s a statue of Sampson in Massachusetts, but nothing really spectacular. If only she’d had a really impressive horse.

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