Frances Perkins was a sociologist and labor activist in New York, and was the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet.Credit...Anthony Camerano/Associated Press

More Women Deserve Statues in New York. Here Are 10.

Few women are lionized with public monuments in New York, and as the city prepares to redress that, we asked readers who should be memorialized. Here is what they told us.

In an effort to correct the civic record left in public art, New York City officials announced in June that we would soon be seeing more statues of women on our streets and in our parks. Right now there are very few — a bronze of Gertrude Stein in Bryant Park, a sculpture of Eleanor Roosevelt in Riverside Park. About a mile north of her you can find Joan of Arc riding a horse, but really, what is Joan of Arc — who fought for many things, not one of them rent control — doing on the Upper West Side of Manhattan?

The city’s new initiative rightly focuses on honoring women with a significant connection to New York, and it has called upon the public to make suggestions. While those votes are being counted, we conducted our own survey, to which more than 400 people responded. Many of them said they would like to see statues of Jane Jacobs and Margaret Sanger — women whose influence is still so alive in urban and social policy that it feels as if we commemorate them every day. We would like to see those statues, too, but the list below, though it includes some celebrated names, leans heavily on some of the less well-known ones mentioned.

The list is by no means comprehensive — we did not consider candidates who are still living (sorry, Meryl Streep and Madonna). And the conversation will keep going, here and in cities and communities around the country. A recent crowdfunding effort to help erect a statue of the celebrated African-American journalist Ida B. Wells in Chicago, for instance, quickly raised the last $40,000 necessary to make it happen.

Image
Rep. Shirley Chisholm dedicated a playground named after her at the Willoughby Houses in Brooklyn. Credit...Hyman Rothman/New York Daily News Archive, via Getty Images

Born in Brooklyn in 1924, Chisholm was the daughter of a factory worker from Guyana and a seamstress from Barbados. She worked in elementary education and was active in Democratic Party politics before running for the New York State Legislature in 1964. Four years later, in a newly reconfigured congressional district that included her neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant, she ran for the House and won.

“I have a way of talking that does something to people,” she said later, of her political style. “I have a theory about campaigning. You have to let them feel you.” She won the primary by only 800 votes and then went on to face James Farmer, a major civil rights leader and an organizer of the Freedom Rides, who ran as a Liberal with Republican backing and who denigrated her as “a little schoolteacher.”

Chisholm used his sexism against him as a path to victory. In Congress, where she remained until she grew disillusioned with Reaganism in the early 1980s, she became the first black woman, and the second woman ever, to serve on the powerful Rules Committee. She focused on issues of urban poverty — she was a chief supporter of a national school-lunch bill, for example, galvanizing other representatives in overriding President Gerald Ford’s veto of it.

Image
A flier for Chisolm's 1972 presidential campaign.Credit...Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History

In 1972 she sought the Democratic presidential nomination. Two years after she lost, a Gallup poll cited her as one of the 10 most admired women in America.

Image
Lillian Wald in New York where, among other things, she founded the Henry Street Settlement House. Credit...Bettmann Archive, via Getty Images

Although there is a playground named for Wald on the Lower East Side, where she ministered to struggling immigrants, her impact on the city warrants a more formal tribute, in a more central location, where her message might be widely heard at a time of soaring inequality. Amid the social reform movements of the late 19th century, it was not uncommon for privileged young women to move in or “settle’’ with poor immigrants in their own communities to help them. Wald, from an affluent German-Jewish family upstate, was one of them, coming to New York to study nursing in 1889.

Among the most enduring and successful of the settlement houses was Henry Street, which continues to thrive more than 125 years later. Wald opened it in 1895 with the aid of wealthy benefactors, providing health care on a sliding fee, as well as social services, English-language instruction and a visiting-nurse program, which by 1913 had 92 nurses making 200,000 visits a year.

Beyond that, she pressured the New York City school system both to put nurses in schools and to establish special-education programs. She became a national voice on immigrant rights, housing, labor rights and other causes, becoming a mentor to Margaret Sanger and helping to found the Women’s Trade Union League, which investigated women’s working conditions and promoted the development of female unions.

Image
Inez Milholland at a women's suffrage parade in New York City in 1913.Credit...Bain News Service, via Library of Congress

Milholland’s life, though it lasted only 30 years, was cinematic: She was a campus activist at Vassar College, fighting for suffrage as the school tried to silence all discussion; was arrested after striking with women shirtwaist workers; received a New York University Law School degree (in 1912, after a series of rejections from the Ivy League because she was a woman); wrote a harsh report on prison conditions at Sing Sing; led a huge women’s suffrage parade in Washington in 1913 on the eve of Woodrow Wilson’s inauguration; covered World War I as a journalist, before getting thrown out of Europe; proposed marriage to a Dutch coffee importer; and was committed to free love.

Milholland delivered her first major speech on getting women the right to vote in 1909, interrupting a campaign parade for President William Howard Taft, in New York. The crowd turned to listen, and her celebrity as one of the most striking and powerful orators of the early women’s movement was quickly established. Seven years later, she set out on a tour of the country to speak about the necessity of suffrage. Her status as a martyr was secured when she collapsed in Los Angeles from anemia during one of those talks, dying 10 weeks later.

Image
Zora Neale Hurston earned a degree in anthropology from Barnard College and was a leading figure in the Harlem Renaissance.Credit...Corbis, via Getty Images

When it was published in 1937, “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” Hurston’s most famous book, was dismissed by male critics and more or less went unread for decades. The story of a fair-skinned black woman coming of age through three marriages and various challenges, the novel was rereleased in the 1970s after Alice Walker, writing in Ms. magazine, revived interest in Hurston. It is now considered one of the most important works in African-American literature.

Arriving in New York in 1925, Hurston quickly became a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, starting a literary magazine with Langston Hughes and others. She produced work as an ethnographer as well — she studied anthropology at Barnard — writing about life in timber camps in Florida, for instance. As it happens, Hurston has a best-seller currently, “Barracoon,” a book published this spring, 58 years after her death, about Cudjo Lewis, who was the last living African brought to America aboard a slave ship when she interviewed him at the coaxing of her mentor Franz Boas in 1927.

Image
Dorothy Day addressed a demonstration against the Vietnam War in Union Square in 1969.Credit...Getty Images

On May 1, 1933, during the height of the Great Depression, Day stood in Union Square handing out the first copies of her newspaper, The Catholic Worker, aimed at spreading the message of the movement she was starting to build, a movement that sought “a new society in the shell of the old.”

Day had several lives — one of them spent as a Greenwich Village bohemian, drinking whiskey with friends like Eugene O’Neill. But it was her turn to radical empathy, as an expression of devout faith, that remains her legacy, the reason many have argued she ought to be canonized.

Image
Dorothy Day protested against nuclear testing at the United States Atomic Energy Commission in 1958.Credit...Neal Boenzi/The New York Times

Day’s example sparked the growth of Catholic Worker communities around the world — communities in which residents take vows of poverty and live among the poor and homeless, feeding and caring for them. The oldest of these communities is the one that Day founded and lived in on East Third Street in Manhattan.

Image
Frances Perkins, as Secretary of Labor, during a ceremony marking the establishment of the National Recovery Administration code for women's dresses.Credit...Associated Press

In the early years of the 20th century, Perkins worked for social reform groups in New York (moving into a settlement house in Greenwich Village) as she completed dual master’s degrees, in economics and sociology, at Columbia University. As the secretary of the New York Consumer League, a position she assumed in 1910, she investigated unsafe labor conditions and persuaded the state legislature to pass a law restricting the number of hours women could work to 54 a week.

On March 25 of the following year, she was having tea with friends in Washington Square when she heard fire engines. Following the noise, she found dozens of workers, most of them young women, jumping to their deaths from high floors of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory. She later said that the fire was “the day the New Deal was born.” Her subsequent work led to the most comprehensive set of laws governing workplace health and safety in the country.

Image
Secretary Perkins at an inspection tour of the Golden Gate Bridge.Credit...Associated Press

Eventually, in 1933, she was named Franklin D. Roosevelt’s secretary of labor, becoming the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet. At the time, between 13 million and 18 million Americans were out of work. As an architect of the New Deal, Perkins was hugely influential in the development of massive public works projects, the drafting of the Social Security Act and the establishment of the Fair Labor Standards Act. By the time she left the administration, she had accomplished all but one of the items on her agenda: access to universal health care.

Image
Beverly Sills, an operatic soprano, performed as Sonia in “The Merry Widow” in 1977.Credit...Jack Mitchell/Getty Images

Her big New York life — marked by early difficulties, outsize talent and ambition, great fortune and tragedy — essentially began when Sills was crowned Brooklyn’s “Miss Beautiful Baby 1932,’’ at the age of 3. Early on, Sills sang at resorts in the Catskills, but she got her big break when City Opera signed her in 1955. A coloratura soprano who did not perform in Europe until she was 36, she eschewed the rarefied image of an opera diva. Instead she appeared as a guest host on “The Tonight Show” and even turned up on “The Muppet Show.”

She married and had two children, both of whom were diagnosed with disabilities within a six-week period. Her son was placed in an institution.

Image
Sills made her debut with the Metropolitan Opera in 1975.Credit...Jack Mitchell/Getty Images

She continued to work — critical praise mounted, and so did her appeal. In 1979, having become one of the most popular opera singers of all time, Sills began a new chapter, serving as the director of City Opera and revitalizing it during the city’s fiscal crisis. She even managed to reduce ticket prices. Sills was such a skilled fund-raiser that she went to serve as the board chair for both Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts and the Metropolitan Opera, acting as a feverish booster for those organizations.

Image
Antonia Pantoja is largely responsible for bringing bilingual education to New York City public schools.Credit...The Antonia Pantoja Papers, via Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College

Pantoja arrived in New York from Puerto Rico in 1944 to a job as a welder in a lamp factory and the realization that Puerto Ricans were battling devastating racism and discrimination in the city.

After going to college and graduate school on scholarships, Pantoja spent most of her time in the 1950s and ’60s working to improve the performance of Puerto Rican children in New York City’s schools: in 1963, when there were 179,000 Puerto Rican students in the public school system, only 331 received academic diplomas from high school and only 28 went on to college. In response to this crisis, Pantoja formed an organization called Aspira, devoted to furthering education and leadership skills among Puerto Rican children. It had students pledge themselves to excellence in induction ceremonies that were meant to appeal to young people who might otherwise be drawn to gang life.

Image
Pantoja in Coney Island.Credit...The Antonia Pantoja Papers, via Center for Puerto Rican Studies at Hunter College

The organization went on to national prominence and in the ’70s won a landmark lawsuit that brought bilingual education to New York City schools. Pantoja was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Bill Clinton in 1996.

Image
Alice Austen was born to wealth on Staten Island, but ended her life in poverty.Credit...Friends of Alice Austen House, via New York Public Library

Before Diane Arbus and Helen Levitt, there was Austen, one of the earliest female photographers in the country, who produced more than 8,000 images over the course of a long life that began in 1866.

She was, additionally, a landscape designer, a cyclist, an expert tennis player and the first woman on her native Staten Island to own a car. She took her camera everywhere — documenting immigrant communities in New York, street life, lawn tennis matches, her friends, parties, interiors. She often lugged around equipment weighing as much as 50 pounds.

Image
Alice Austen and a friend from Staten Island, Gertrude Eccleston, the daughter of an Episcopalian minister, posed with cigarettes in 1891. Credit...Alice Austen, via Collection of Historic Richmond Town

Though she ultimately fell into poverty, Austen was born to great privilege and brought a sardonic eye to her own social world and a revelatory one to how the lives of women were changing at the turn of the century.

On a summer vacation in the Catskills in 1899, Austen met Gertrude Tate, who was recovering from typhoid fever — Tate would become her partner of more than 50 years. The pictures Austen took of the two of them together and the other women friends in their lives are iconic representations of lesbian life in the decades before gay liberation.

Image
A March 3, 1912, edition of The New York Times featured newly appointed Detective Isabella Goodwin.Credit...The New York Times

It is curious that in recent years there has not been a feature film made of Goodwin’s life (there is a book, “The Fearless Mrs. Goodwin,” by Elizabeth Mitchell). The city’s police department began hiring its first “matrons,’’ women entrusted with looking after female prisoners, in 1881. Assigned to this duty by the police commissioner, Theodore Roosevelt, Goodwin served for 15 years before moving on to investigations that had her hunting down clairvoyants and other swindlers.

A widow with four children, Goodwin was named the city’s first female detective in 1912 after she cracked a case that gained national attention, finding the men who had conducted a midday robbery in downtown Manhattan, beating up two clerks and running away with $25,000.

“My experience among the criminal classes has been that they are a very stupid lot,” she told The Times after her promotion. “They do shrewd things sometimes and then nullify their efforts with the sheerest nonsense.”

Ginia Bellafante has served as a reporter, critic and, since 2011, as the Big City columnist. She began her career at The Times as a fashion critic, and has also been a television critic. She previously worked at Time magazine. More about Ginia Bellafante

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section MB, Page 1 of the New York edition with the headline: These Women Deserve a Statue. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT