More than 95 years after Tennessee’s ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, public art celebrating this achievement will be unveiled during a ceremony on Women’s Equality Day, August 26, 2016, from 11 am to 1 pm. Alan LeQuire has created the sculpture that features five women involved in the final ratification battle in Nashville in August 1920. Tennessee Woman Suffrage Monument, Inc. commissioned the art and it will be prominently displayed in Centennial Park near The Parthenon. “We are grateful to former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean and current Mayor Megan Barry as well as the Metro Parks Department for their strong support,” said Paula F. Casey of Memphis, TWSM president. “Our volunteer statewide board is donating this $900,000 historically significant sculpture to Metro so that this history will be preserved.”
Artist LeQuire, who completed the bas relief in 1998 that hangs inside the state capitol as well as the Knoxville woman suffrage sculpture in 2006, said: “This is what I want to do with the rest of my career –memorialize these women.” The five women, who are honored in monumental bronze, participated in the final ratification battle in 1920: Anne Dallas Dudley of Nashville; Abby Crawford Milton of Chattanooga; J. Frankie Pierce of Nashville; Sue Shelton White of Jackson; and Carrie Chapman Catt, national suffrage leader who came to Tennessee to direct the pro-suffrage forces from the Hermitage Hotel.
The TWSM board members include Jacque Hillman of Jackson; Linda Knight, Esq., Nashville; Adrienne Pakis-Gillon, Vice-President, Germantown; Rosetta Miller-Perry, Nashville; The Hon. Patricia A. Pierce, Treasurer, Harriman; Alma Sanford, J.D., Nashville; The Hon. Janis Sontany, Nashville; and The Hon. Yvonne Wood, Secretary, Lebanon.Funds are still being raised. To learn more, go to tnsuffragemonument.org.
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