Susan B. in Duffy Square

While I was writing yesterday’s post about the Women’s Strike for Equality, I tried to find out more about what had actually gone on in Duffy Square, the site of the mock ceremony for a future statue of Susan B. Anthony.

The only thing I could come up with was this poem, posted on the website of a group called Veteran Feminists of America, which seemed to offer a few more concrete details about the event. (It’s also the page where I found the photo I used in yesterday’s post.)

Statues for Women
by Elayne Snyder

What we did, we did
at Duffy Square
on that island in the
middle of
Broadway
between blinking porno
pictures -
a robber’s run from
Forty-second Street.

We …
we did a dastardly thing
a hundred of us -
maybe more than a hundred …
having marched there -
burdened, but singing
with sparklers in our hands.

We came with purpose
and permit and police.
We walked there from
Seneca Falls
from suffrage
and
from out of the skin
of our private experience
to raise the statue of
a feminist
high above our heads,
A symbol.

We watched silently
as the sculptor,
her arms around the
paper mache skirt,
shimmied up over
old Duffy’s bronze body
and gently … breathlessly
placed
the hollow statue
at the crossroads of
the world.

Triumphantly stepping down,
she was arrested.

Minutes later, the statue …
Susan B. Anthony
was recklessly toppled to the ground
- stomped, kicked, crushed
and
completely destroyed
by chuckling pigs.

There are, however, four, perhaps five
statues of women
still standing in the city of New York:
Mother Goose
Joan of Arc
Mother Cabrini
Mary Poppins
and Alice in Wonderland.

February 12, 1972

This morning I found an item in the August VFA newsletter that suggests the papier-mâché statue wasn’t part of the 1970 event but happened a couple years later in 1972. The article in the newsletter is in the first person but isn’t by-lined. It’s not individually linked, so I’ll just give you the whole below. I’ll try to track down the author’s identity and report back later. The anecdote’s a good one, though:

In 1972, as president of NYC NOW I was planning the Eastern Regional Conference to take place at the old Commodore
Hotel near Grand Central. And I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a march after the end of the conference?
And we could place a statue of Susan B Anthony near Father Duffy’s on Times Square!”

So I called artist Suzanne Benton and asked her to make us a papier maché of Susan B for the event, but
Suzanne was in midst of planning an exhibition so couldn’t do it. However, she was so inspired that she later sculpted
a beautiful cast bronze statue of our foremother which she brought along to feminist events for years. Later, the
original welded steel Susan B. from which the cast was made was sold to David Miskin, who later moved to Paris
and recently donated it to the American Embassy there. Vivien Leone bought the second cast and it is now at the
Susan B. Anthony house in Rochester, NY.

Meanwhile Kate Millett, whom I’d also asked to make us a statue, got young architect Lorna McNeur in on it. Lorna
not only made a huge one of the great Susan B, but at the demonstration suddenly scuffled up Father Duffy and placed
our statue on his head. The policemen who were “protecting” our demonstration watched her, and when she
slid down they arrested her. JoAnn Evansgardner, in from Pittsburgh, rushed up. Stretching her 5-foot 2-inch frame,
addressed the officers, “What’s
wrong here? I’m Dr JoAnn Evansgardner. May I help?” But they ordered her into the patrol car to take her to the station with Lorna. By this
time JoAnn’s husband Gerry rushed up to help her, and he too was carted along.

Among the witnesses to this brouhaha was 90-something Jeannette Rankin and our own Emily Goodman, a deceptively
quiet young pioneer feminist lawyer.

A few weeks later we met at the courthouse downtown, Emily, JoAnn, Lorna (shaking with fear) and me. I’ll always
remember tiny Emily standing before the judge seated several feet above her. He listened to the story and talked
to her in a gently patronizing manner. When he set a date. Emily said, “We want the hearing on August 26, your Honor.” “OK,
August 26,” he agreed.“And we’d like a woman judge, your Honor,” Emily continued. “What!” came
the thundered angry reply, “I’ll
tell you, young woman, you’d have a better chance with me!” (There was only one woman judge then, and a rather unsympathetic one, as were most successful
women in the man’s world as it was then). Quietly and firmly, Emily said, “You’ve just disqualified yourself, your honor.” The judge rose in fury and stalked out and the case was dismissed. (In that wonderful era
of feminist activism, our mayor John V. Lindsey and most New Yorkers were sympathetic to almost anything feminists
did.)

And, by the way, this was just one of the cases young Emily, now Judge Emily Jane Goodman, handled so beautifully
and so successfully for feminists.

According to the newsletter, which credits Bettye Lane with the photo, Lorna McNeur is now an affiliated lecturer on architecture at Cambridge University.

I’m kind of becoming obsessed by this Susan B. Anthony story. Wouldn’t it be cool if an actual statue were placed there? Next time I’m near Times Square (who goes there on purpose? zoiks!) I want to try to find the statue of Father Duffy.