Woman's Temple, Women's Fountains: The Erasure of Public Memory

Abstract

In 1996 a statue of three women who had worked for woman's suffrage, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, was moved from the first-floor crypt of the nation's capitol into the second-floor rotunda. Much was made of this acknowledgment of women's work in the stately seat of power; no mention was made of a similar tribute, one floor above, that had occurred nearly one hundred years earlier. Frances Elizabeth Willard, orator and reformer who had led the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) for most of its nineteenth-century history, had become the first woman commemorated in the capitol, and the only woman so honored for more than fifty years. 1 By 1905, the year of the statue's installation, the WCTU had become the largest and most influential activist movement of women in the country, extending that power into the twentieth century, taking an active and powerful role in the passage of the eighteenth and nineteenth amendments to the U.S. Constitution, as well as hundreds of other laws affecting women and children. 2 The significance of the Willard memorialization extends beyond the representation in Statuary Hall, however, as Willard's organization made tributes to women one of its primary objectives. Despite the power and efforts of the WCTU at the turn of the twentieth century, this massive effort to recognize women and their accomplishments has been largely forgotten at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Here, I will examine efforts at the turn of the twentieth century to build monuments and to