The end of a presidency tends to bring a rush of last-minute monument making, and Joe Biden’s was no different. In his final week in office, he designated nearly 850,000 acres of federal land in California as two new national monuments.
Biden, headlines noted, had protected more land than any president in history — some 674 million acres. But amid all the fanfare, another piece of news out of the White House passed with little notice: the signing of legislation allowing a monument dedicated to American women to be built on the National Mall.
When completed, the Women’s Suffrage National Monument will be the first on the Mall honoring women and their history. But it could also very well be the last, given a 2003 law banning new monuments there.
The site of the suffrage memorial has yet to be determined. And there is no design yet. But that its backers won a rare exception illustrates the complexities of navigating the intricate politics surrounding the most symbolically freighted patch of civic real estate in America.
Despite support from two presidents, all six living first ladies and a bipartisan array of legislators, the project met with roadblocks and behind-the-scenes opposition. Success came only in the final hours of the 118th Congress — when failure would have meant having to start all over again.
It wasn’t quite as dramatic as the photo-finish of the 19th Amendment, which cleared the final hurdle in 1920 after a 24-year-old Tennessee state legislator had a last-minute change of heart after receiving a letter from his mother urging him to “be a good boy” and support women’s suffrage.
But Anna Laymon, the president and CEO of the Women’s Suffrage National Monument Foundation, said that even when the gavel came down in the Senate, approving placement on the Mall, she couldn’t quite believe it.
“I was told more times than I can count, including by very important people, that there is no space on the Mall for women,” she said. “I was asking for one acre, but I was told I was asking for too much over and over and over again by people with the power to say no.”
The Mall, which is overseen by the National Park Service, draws roughly 36 million visitors a year, more than Yosemite, Yellowstone and the Grand Canyon combined. Of the 40 commemorative works and historical sites in the core area, there are 22 dedicated to male historical figures, 10 to military history and veterans, three to foreign relations, two to private organizations (including the Boy Scouts), one to postal history, one to canals, one to horses and zero dedicated to women.
Not that women have been indifferent to memorials in Washington’s sacred civic spaces. They were instrumental in organizing support (and raising money) for the Washington Monument, the first memorial on the Mall, whose cornerstone was laid in 1848.
And in 1921, to honor the 19th Amendment, suffragists unveiled a grand marble sculpture honoring Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott. It was on display in the United States Capitol for one day — and then banished to a service closet under the Rotunda for the next 75 years. (It was moved back upstairs in 1997.)
Today, Laymon said, there are only about 10 monuments to women’s suffrage across the country, including one installed in 2020 in New York’s Central Park. That statue was the first — and still the only — statue of real-life women in the park. But it also stirred fierce debate, after the original design was criticized for seeming to erase the contributions of Black women.
Laymon said the suffrage monument on the Mall will draw on the diverse perspectives of its board and scholarly advisers, as well as the public.
“It can’t be one monolithic structure,” she said. “It has to be as multifaceted as women were then and continue to be.”
The planned monument on the Mall grew out of an earlier effort to have a design originally submitted for Central Park built somewhere in Washington as a national monument. Legislation, introduced by U.S. Representative Joe Neguse, Democrat of Colorado, passed the House in February 2020. But that August, when the centennial of the 19th Amendment rolled around, it was stuck in the Senate.
Before a commemorative event at the White House, Laymon and Colleen J. Shogan, then vice chair of the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission, strategized about how to enlist President Donald J. Trump’s help.
A few days earlier, Trump had posted on Twitter his full-throated support for a national suffrage monument, adding that he has “done more for WOMEN than just about any President in HISTORY!” At the event, he also announced that he would pardon Susan B. Anthony, who was convicted in New York State for illegally casting a ballot in 1872.
As he was leaving, Laymon and Shogan explained to him that the monument bill was blocked in the Senate, through what they had learned was the hold of a Republican member. They asked if he might discuss it with Mitch McConnell, the minority leader.
Shogan, who was appointed archivist of the United States by President Biden in 2022, recalled that Trump was enthusiastic, saying, “We’re going to get this done.”
“We do think he was very instrumental in lifting that hold,” Shogan said.
The bill passed the Senate in December, and was signed by Trump. But winning permission to build on the Mall required a second piece of legislation, and a trickier fight.
In the Senate, the lead sponsors of the Women’s Suffrage National Monument Location Act were Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, and Tammy Baldwin, Democrat of Wisconsin. It was a bipartisan team loaded with historical symbolism: Wisconsin was the first state to ratify the 19th Amendment, while Tennessee carried it over the line.
In July 2023, a subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, which oversees the National Park Service, held a hearing. Monument advocates were not allowed to give testimony. The three people who did speak, including an associate director of the park service who reiterated the agency’s blanket opposition to new construction on the Mall, were men.
The bill never made it out of committee.
In November, after the House unanimously approved its version of the bill, there were attempts to “hotline” it in the Senate — a strategic maneuver used to pass legislation without a floor vote, if support is unanimous. Each time, it was anonymously blocked.
Last March, Blackburn and three other female Republican senators published an opinion article in The Washington Post urging colleagues to grant the monument its “rightful place” on the Mall. Even the National Park Service, they noted, had dropped its opposition — the first time it has supported an exception to the ban on new monuments on the Mall.
(In a letter to Senator Joe Manchin, chair of the energy and natural resources committee, a park service official wrote that supporters had “demonstrated the exceptional nature of the subject matter that warrants consideration for placement there.” Separately, the Smithsonian Institution is also seeking to have its new museums dedicated to women and to Latinos built on the Mall.)
Still, the legislation languished. Laymon said there may have been some lingering feelings that the effort was partisan. “It’s often assumed that women’s history must inherently lean one way or the other politically,” she said.
And even after the project won support from the park service, Laymon said, two senators she declined to name — one Republican, one Democratic, both men — remained opposed, on the grounds that there should be absolutely nothing added to the Mall.
“They were simply not concerned that there are no monuments dedicated to women,” Laymon said.
On Dec. 16, with the end of the 118th Congress looming, time was running out. President Biden appeared at an event honoring Francis Perkins, Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s labor secretary, and the first woman to serve in a presidential cabinet. Earlier in the year, Biden had issued an executive order calling for greater federal recognition of women’s history. Now, he made what Laymon said were his first public comments supporting placing the planned suffrage monument on the Mall.
On the afternoon of Dec. 20 — Congress’s last day of business — supporters learned that the way had been cleared to get floor time in the Senate. The Republican senator, supporters were told, was still opposed.
Laymon and her team were watching C-SPAN, trying to figure out if the holdout was on the floor. Around 5 p.m., the proceedings — which lasted nine minutes — began.
“As Senator Baldwin starts to speak and asks for yeas and nays, we still didn’t know what was going to happen,” Laymon said.
The yeas were unanimous. As it happens, another female senator, Tina Smith, Democrat of Minnesota, was holding the gavel, which she struck, declaring “This bill has passed.”
In brief speeches, Baldwin and Blackburn paid tributes to famous suffragists both Black and white, along with what Baldwin called “the countless other women who fought and continued to fight for true equality for women in this country.”
What true equality means remains a matter of contentious debate. But in a statement, Blackburn (rated one of the Senate’s most conservative members) noted her across-the-aisle collaboration with Baldwin (one of the most liberal).
“The Women’s Suffrage National Monument will give the women who pioneered the way for future generations the recognition they deserve on the National Mall,” she said.
The project, Laymon estimates, will be ready for unveiling in 2030 or 2031. But first comes more fund-raising (Laymon said the commission has set a goal of $80 million), site selection and then a national design competition.
Laymon hopes the monument will be placed in an area known as Constitution Gardens, near one honoring the 56 (male) signers of the Declaration of Independence. But she also wants it to get people thinking about the monuments, or lack thereof, in their own hometowns.
“I hope that when women finally see themselves represented in America’s front yard, its most visited national park site, we’ll all walk around and start asking ourselves, ‘Where are the women?’”