“The Statue Case”: The Typical Women (1889–91) of the Ladies’ Art Association, Female Monuments, and the Right to Privacy

This paper examines plans by the Ladies’ Art Association to erect two monuments to American women at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In 1891, the association formed a fund to solicit contributions from women across the nation towards the completion of a bust honoring Susan B. Anthony, titled The Typical Reformer, and a pendant statue of deceased philanthropist Mary M. Hamilton, titled The Typical Philanthropist. However, the scheme was squashed when Hamilton’s family sued to prevent the erection of the sculptures, claiming they violated her posthumous right to privacy. The paper tracks how the so-called “statue case” unfolded in a New York courtroom, and exploded into the court of public opinion, as a battle over social norms and political power in relation to the lives of women. The sensational trial pitted a traditional notion of female privacy, which was antithetical to the public nature of honorific sculpture, against emerging reformist ideals that emphasized women’s civic participation. Although the pair, called The Typical Women, never became a concrete reality, and consequently has been forgotten by art historians, few artworks of the era galvanized more bristling controversy. Mining the “statue case” revises accounts of the Beaux-Arts statuary craze as an exclusively male phenomenon and enriches debates about how public statues perpetuate social hierarchies based on gender and race, when today women still represent less than 8% of public statues in America. The “statue case” also mounts a methodological argument for why scholars should attend to examples of historic failure.