Playing at Lives: Biography and Contemporary Feminist Drama

Abstract

In the National Statuary Hall Collection in the U.S. Capitol, a visitor can stroll the along the parade of great men, admiring the busts, standing figures, and horsed figures carved in Italian marble and other polished chunks of stone. The parade marches on in traditional style until it comes across the suffragists, a memorial to Lucretia Molt, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. Immediately, the visitor notices the stylistic and ideological incongruities of the suffragist memorial amidst the phalanx of polished soldiers that surrounds it: Matt, Stanton, and Anthony are incompletely carved, their bodies seemingly rising from a partially formed, seven-ton slab of marble, and rising behind them, taller than the three, is an unformed figure, the beginnings of a fourth feminist, yet to be realized. I was introduced to the statue, a gift of the National Woman's Party, by a friend of mine, herself introduced to it by a friend who insists that every young feminist she knows take a photo in front of the statue, as an image of her potential to become that as-yet-unformed fourth figure.