(The Phoenix Gazette) CommentaryKaren Stacer, wife of a United States senator's aide, was headed for the bathroom in the basement of the U.S. CAPITOL several weeks ago when she stumbled across three tons of marble. It was a statue of three women, their names facing the wall as if in shame.
When she looked closer, she discovered they were three of the most famous women in American history: SUSAN B. ANTHONY, ELIZABETH CADY STANTON AND LUCRETIA MOTT, suffragists who had helped women win the right to vote.
Upstairs in the Capitol rotunda, a place of honor, are monuments to America's great men - Jefferson, Washington, Madison, Spiro Agnew. But the women who had secured the most basic of democratic rights for half the American population are consigned to the bowels of the building, once used as storage.
In the 74 years since the statue was presented to Congress in an elaborate but apparently hypocritical ceremony, the marble women have languished in the basement despite five resolutions to move them upstairs next to the boys. No other women stand in the rotunda, giving visitors the impression that women have done little for this country besides sew flags and marry presidents.
Moving the statue requires a vote in both the Senate and the House. Led by Republican Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska, whose grandmother was an activist for women's rights, the Senate recently passed yet another resolution. The House seemed on the verge of agreement.
But last week they ran into something more immovable, it would seem than three tons of marble. Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. "Why the Speaker is doing this I have no idea," says Joan Meacham, president of the 75th Anniversary of Woman Suffrage Task Force in Washington, D.C.
Countless appeals have fallen on deaf ears, Meacham says. Gingrich, who could bring up the resolution for a vote in the House, reportedly commented that he didn't want to be associated with "a bunch of liberal women."
Liberal women? Meacham, a Republican, names some of the groups involved in the effort: The League of Women Voters, Concerned Women for American - an extremely conservative group, and Republican women's organizations.
The mood is grim at Meacham's office, operating under the auspices ofthe National Women's Party, whose founder commissioned the statue in1920 after the constitutional amendment was passed giving women the right to vote. "We're totally deflated," Meacham says. "I'm totally shocked... There's no reason this could not have been done."
Gingrich's office responded with a long-distance shrug. "We have no update," the press officer said. "In the long run, I don't know where he's going to come down" on the issue. But, the aide added reassuringly, "He's in favor of suffrage."
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