Living in New York my entire life has always given me the opportunity to visit pretty cool places that people only ever dream of. However, I haven’t always taken advantage of the museums, exhibits, and tourist attractions right outside my window. Over the summer my family and I walked around central park, something I surprisingly hadn’t done in years. In one section of the park there is a lineup of statues paying homage to activists, poets, and other influential figures. In central park there is a World War 1 memorial, Hans Christian Anderson, Statue of Balto, Ludwig Van Beethoven, Cleopatras Needle, Fedrick Douglas Memorial, Statue of Fitz-Greene Halleck, and even a Statue of Alexander Hamilton. One that stuck out to me was the statue dedicated to three women’s rights pioneers, Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.
Sojourner Truth was a women’s rights activist as well as an American abolitionist of New York Dutch heritage. Truth was actually born into slavery in Swartekill, New York, however she escaped with her young daughter in 1826. Two years later, she went to court to recover her son. becoming the first black woman to win such a case against a white man. In 1851 Truth attended the Womens Rights Convention held in Akron, Ohio where she delivered what is now knows as one of the most famous abolitionist/women’s rights speeches in American History. Susan B. Anthony is the most well-known suffragist of her generation and is described as an icon, or legend of the women’s suffrage movement. She traveled all over America giving speeches, circulating petitions, and organizing local women’s rights organizations. In 1848 she had been working as a teacher in New York when she became involved in the teacher’s union because she had realized that while men earned a monthly salary of $10, women only earned a mere $2.50 a month. Both her parents and sister attended the Rochester Womens Rights Convention that year. She continued to campaign for women’s property rights in the state of New York, was the first real woman depicted on U.S. currency, voted in the 1872 presidential election, the law granting women the right to vote was named after her, and although during her time abortion was “child murder” she was part of an editorial asserting that laws attempting to punish women for having abortions would just cause unsafe abortions as well as being against “forced maternity” within legal marriage because a womans body is her own, nobody else’s. Lastly, Elizabeth Cady Stanton was an American writer and activist/leader of the women’s rights movement in the U.S. during mid/late 19th century. She had actually been the main force behind the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848. For 20 years she was the president of the National Woman Suffrage Association and even worked close with Susan B. Anthony. She committed to the efforts in gaining property rights for married women and ending slavery. She was the principal author of the Declaration of Rights for Women which was presented in 1876 at Philadelphia’s Centennial Exposition. During 1878 she even drafted a federal suffrage amendment, introduced in each U.S. congress thereafter up until women were rightfully given the right to vote in 1920.