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The Woman Suffrage Statue: a History of Adelaide Johnson's “Portrait The Woman Suffrage Statue: A History of Adelaide Johnson’s “Portrait Monument” at the United States Capitol by Sandra Weber (review) Allison Lange The Public Historian, Volume 40, Number 1, February 2018, pp. 155-157 (Review) Published by University of California Press For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/737494 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] the first such stamp to portray an AmericanIndianasanactor,ratherthana bystander. On page 111 you learn that during World War I, the US Marines turned the profile of a Native American in feather headdress into a shoulder patch and put it on field uniforms. That image wound up on helmets too. Flip ahead thirty or so pages and read about the Apache helicopter. I have always felt that it was a bit sinister, if not outright insulting, to name this high-tech piece of military hardware after a tribe the federal government spent so much effort trying to subdue. Here I learn that White Mountain Apache leaders ‘‘have repeatedly expressed their pride in having the most powerful attack helicopters named after their people’’ and that those leaders have performed blessing ceremonies when new Apaches go into service (146). And so it goes throughout Officially Indian. The story of each image or object stands on its own, and the wide-ranging selection of those symbols, along with the equally wide-ranging narrative that accompanies them, offer all sorts of interesting surprises, even for those who think they know these images. I have done a bit of my own research on the nineteenth-century portrayal of William Penn’s treaty with the Lenape, but I did not know that the scene had been carved into a sandstone panel in the Capitol Rotunda. If I have any quibble with Officially Indian, it is with how the larger interpre- tative argument is framed through these symbols. I have no doubt that ‘‘the United States government has ...employed representations of Indian people and Indian- ness as emblems of national identity,’’ as Calloway puts it in his forward (13). But the first ten symbols discussed here were created before independence was declared and before there was a United States, and thus the question of which national identity is being constructed and how that identity changes over time is elided to some extent. Still, this is a small complaint and it doesn’t interfere with the pleasure of reading this book or with the unexpected things almost any reader will find in it. Steven Conn, Miami University The Woman Suffrage Statue: A History of Adelaide Johnson’s ‘‘Portrait Monument’’ at the United States Capitol by Sandra Weber. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2016. v þ 232 pp.; illustrations, notes, bibliography, index; paperbound, $39.95. InTheWoman Suffrage Statue, Sandra Weber tells the story of Adelaide Johnson and her white marble monument that features three activists: Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. The busts of the women emerge from the rectangular base, totaling seven and a half feet tall. An unfinished section of the white Carrara marble forms a backdrop to the trio and symbolizes the unfinished nature of the feminist movement. InWeber’s book, Johnson emerges as a fascinating sculptor who felt called to mold this representation of the nineteenth-century Book Reviews 155 American women’s rights movement for future generations. Weber details the commission of the first individual busts, displayed at the 1893 World’s Fair, through the finished sculpture, currently placed in the Rotunda of the United States Capitol Building. As we organize programming for the centennial of the Nineteenth Amendment in 2020, public historians need to consider how we commemorate suffrage activism. Weber offers instructive new insights into the Portrait Monument, however, the book would benefit from more critical analysis of the ways the statue continues to define the movement’s public memory. Using a wealth of Johnson’s personal papers, Weber starts by introducing read- ers to the sculptor. She traces Johnson’s unlikely path to the male-dominated profession. Johnson, who paid for her education in Rome using funds she won from a lawsuit after a serious fall down a twenty-foot elevator shaft, emerges as a determined woman who challenged gender norms as much as the women whose famous faces she sculpted. The artist became part of the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA), which first commissioned her to make the busts. Weber describes Johnson’s sessions with Stanton and Anthony. She also details how the sculptor produced the marble statue, offering a valuable glimpse into the process during that era. Johnson wanted the busts placed in the Capitol Building. NAWSA never made this its goal. After two-plus decades of debate about the future of these likenesses, the National Woman’s Party (NWP) commissioned the Portrait Monument, based on the older busts, which is on view today. Weber explains the monument’s history after its creation as well. After the Nineteenth Amendment passed, the NWP unveiled the statue in the Rotunda in 1921. Soon after, the monument was moved to the building’s first floor Crypt, where it remained for over seven decades. As a symbol of the Equal Rights Amendment, proposed and supported by the NWP, it served as a centerpiece for the group’s celebrations and gatherings. After years of negotiations and debate, activists successfully lobbied Congress to return the mon- ument to the Rotunda in 1997. Because of the conflicts prompted from the monument’s original commission through the present, Weber labels this statue ‘‘perhaps the most controversial piece of sculpture ever placed in the United States Capitol’’ (3). Some praised Anthony’s likeness, others nicknamed it ‘‘Three Old Ladies in a Bathtub’’ (123). Weber outlines the suffragists’ disagreements about the statue in the past and documents the evolution of opinions of the movement through the present. The book highlights the debates about the meaning of the piece, its significance, and its merit as a work of art. Johnson ‘‘relied heavily on the history that she learned from Anthony and Stanton’’ (23). Weber does the same. She counters recent scholarship like Lisa Tetrault’s The Myth of Seneca Falls (2014), which argues against accepting the narrative handed down by Anthony and Stanton. Ignoring the numerous other leaders and women of color, the pair portrayed the movement as a privileged white women’s crusade with them at the helm. Weber argues that women of color 156 The Public Historian / Vol. 40 / February 2018 / No. 1 must have approved of the statue, since the National Association of Colored Women participated in the unveiling ceremony. Though members supported the statue, their appearance should not signify that they thought the sculpture fully represented the movement. At least in part, the association attended to win respect from women’s organizations that had rarely recognized them in the past. Indeed, in Weber’s suffrage narrative, the pro-suffrage National Association of Colored Women only shows up when she is justifying the three white women on the monument. Rather than offering a critical analysis of the ways the sculpture defines the public memory of the women’s rights movement, Weber defends Johnson’s choice to portray the trio by arguing that these privileged white women ‘‘symbolized all women of the movement’’ (189). The heavily illustrated book makes it appealing for the classroom and a general audience. Weber provides a brief overview of the suffrage movement, making it useful for readers unfamiliar with key moments. US Capitol tour guides certainly should add this blow-by-blow history of the statue to their list as well. A public history class would have a vibrant discussion of the Portrait Monument’s story and the ways the statue continues to shape the public memory of the movement. Allison Lange, Wentworth Institute of Technology Making Slow Food Fast in California Cuisine by Victor W. Geraci. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. vii þ 225 pp.; notes, bibliography, index; clothbound, $99.99; eBook, $79.99. In 2014 Michelle Moon and Cathy Stanton published an article in The Public Historian calling on public historians to use museum exhibits, oral history collec- tions, and historic sites to contribute to the ‘‘food movement’’ and its crusade for a healthy and environmentally sustainable food supply. They argued that public historians were in a unique position to ‘‘link food and farming interpretation to real world interests and problems.’’1 Making Slow Food Fast in California Cuisine is one public historian’s scholarly attempt to do just that. Victor Geraci unites the extensive historical literature on the growth of California’s preeminent agribusi- ness sector with the many popular accounts documenting the rise of a commu- nity-based and environmentally concerned ‘‘counter cuisine’’ emerging primarily from the San Francisco Bay Area, while also drawing extensively on interviews gathered under the auspices of the University of California, Berkeley’s Oral History Center. The result is a brisk overview of California’s contribution to the nation’s diet that concludes with a call for compromise between industrial agricul- ture’s mass production and efficiency and food activists’ concern for sustainability, 1 Michelle Moon and Cathy Staunton, ‘‘The First Course: A Case for Locating Public History within the Food Movement,’’ The Public Historian 36, no. 3 (August 2014): 109–29. Book Reviews 157.
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