The Suffragist in the Basement

When I was growing up in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and was maybe 17, I spent a lot With three women. Actually, statues of three women. The Hamiltons. One sister was a physician, the other a scholar. A social worker. A plaque spelled out how they'd each had a string of accomplishments. I must have read. Looking back How much it expanded my sense of what I was doing. could accomplish. Which is part of the work I hope my

You could build a hundred thousand monuments tomorrow to women. And if doing that doesn't change the fact that the Dobbs decision came down. If doing that isn't part of building towards not having a hand-picked judge in Texas, strip the right to medical abortion to every pregnant person in this country, then it's not actually a monument. It's not actually doing the work that building a monument does. That's

Director of Research at Monument Lab. The work that a monument does is consolidating and stamping the act of. Defining that society, defining the bounds of who's in and who's out, defining who gets to be in public. It is about power. In 2021, Sue Mobley and Monument Lab conducted an audit of monuments across the The top fifty most commonly commemorated, only three were women who actually existed. We seem to prefer mythical or allegorical women.

Think a lady in robes holding the scales of justice in front of a courthouse. I see now how rare it was for me to have the Hamilton sisters to look up to. Real women being honored for what they actually did in the world. All of which sets the stage for the story you're about to hear.

This is Monumental, a podcast series produced by PRX. I'm your host, Ashley. Wyoming is known as the equality state because it was the first in the nation And for decades, it's proudly recognized that The statue of Esther Hobart Morris, Wyoming's first justice. But that statue is no longer standing in front of the Wyoming City.

Producer Irina Zuroff examines what that says about the status of On the third floor of the Wyoming Capitol in Cheyenne, there are four sculptures arranged under the building's golden cupola. Their patina gives them an aged look, but they were only commissioned in twenty eighteen. They're called the Four Sisters, and Tony Ross, a retired legislator, loves them. They're kind of his legacy. Pretty cool star. So how do you feel standing in front of him? Um well, I'm trying to be really cool.

The first sister is truth, lighting the way with a lamp. Then justice, who holds the Wyoming Constitution. Next is courage, hand gripped around the serpent's neck. Finally is hope, a golden wreath in each hand. I well up. Um I I'm welling up right now. Ross served as a state representative here, then senator, and finally a Senate president. His biggest project in that position was overseeing an immense capital renovation. It cost more than$300 million.

And starting in 2015 took four years. I was here every day. I looked through every swatch of carpeting to painting to everything. The four statues we're looking at now were the project's finale. They fill four niches in the building's rotunda that have stood empty since the Capitol's construction. Their bodies are draped in gauzey fabric, belly buttons shining through. The women look self-assured, muscular, also feminine. Its highest principles.

The reason it was allegorical was to represent values of the people of the state of Wyoming are And that doesn't necessarily equate to just an individual. We all have our own flaws. Instead, their ideas figures embodying ideals. They are absolutely fascinating.

You can say hope, courage, justice, But that's an intangible This is Peg Osland. She's a Wyoming native, 70 years old, and she doesn't love the allegorical statues as much as Tony Ross does. It takes a human being who had a story to tell. These don't have stories to tell. It's just a feel good like a fantasy. Oslin grew up in the land in Wyoming, and the more she looked at the sisters, the more

the more out of place they seem to her. For her, the aesthetics didn't fit the state's founding or history. You got rattlesnakes. Out at our ranch we had mountain lions. You got bears. You you got Bandits. You know, uh a token of bare feet and themes, that wouldn't work with that. That was grit. That was dust. That was bathrooms on the side of the road, broken down carriages. Their different opinions get at this tension around female figures and monuments.

They're usually allegorical. Real women and their accomplishments are represented so rarely.

Lately, though, people have been demanding more representation of important women. Wyoming actually did have a prominent statue of a real woman at the Capitol. It's a big reason Oslan has such strong feelings about the four sisters. Because around the time they were commissioned, that statue of a woman named Esther Hobart Morris disappeared from where she stood, right in front of the Capitol. There's a group of us that are walkers. Uh so when she was outside, you talked to her in the morning.

I'd ask her for a lot of strength. Strength. Courage. The statue was eight feet tall, plus a pedestal. In her hand she held what looked like a bouquet of flowers. I would have been about ten when she was put out front here. And that's how I just remember her, is just this. a powerful figure of a woman. Nester Hobart Morris was a suffragette who moved to Wyoming to the eighteen sixty nine. By most accounts, she was instrumental in the passage of Wyoming's suffrage law that same year.

It was the first such law in the whole country. signed 50 years before the Nineteenth Amendment enfranchised all American women. Morris herself was appointed the first female Justice of the Peace. Wyoming became known as the Aqua. We were the first government in the world. In the world. To grant women the right to vote.

And so coming from a rural area, that really had an impact on me. One small example. In high school, Oslan ran to be the first woman student body president. She channeled Esther in her pamphlet. It was, you know, dear everybody, these little letters. Peg is a girl. Esther Hobart Morris. She won.

In 2015, when the Capitol renovation started, Oslin watched through a fence as workers packed the statue into a wood crate and removed her. A crane needed to park in her spot. Plus, Esther needed some restoration of her own. She'd been hit by a car, twice, and had been battered by the Wyoming weather for more than half a century. In 2019, the 150th anniversary of women getting the vote in Wyoming, the Capitol reopened to great fanfare. Wyoming citizens, this is your house.

This is for you. This is where your business is done. Oslan vuan look for Esther, but Esther non reappeared outside. It's just astounding to me that that magnificent forward looking statue is gone. When the renovation started, in addition to doing necessary structural work, the driving ethos was to restore the building to historic accuracy.

Tony Ross again. We wanted to make sure that we returned it back to the way it should be. Workers uncovered glass skylights, repainted Tromp Lloyd designs on the walls, restored paint colors, chandeliers, and art. Esther and another statue that stood outside of a nineteenth century leader of the Eastern Shoshone tribe, Chief Washiki, weren't original to the building, but they'd been there a while. Everyone assumed they'd just go back to their spots once work wrapped up.

But there was this underground connector between the Capitol and another government building that became more important as the renovation dragged on. It had meeting rooms, an auditorium, skylights that frame the Capitol's restored dome. And Ross says this question came up about the statues. Legislators reason that in this expanded basement space

School groups could gather around the statues without standing in the frigid Wyoming weather. Esther and Chief Washiki could have a richer interpretive life indoors. The committee voted to move them. It didn't seem like a big deal. But when Peg Osland and others realized what happened, it was. I think it was one sort of a shock.

Because they went to every damn detail to restore, restore, restore history around here. How could you overlook something that had been in front of the Capitol for sixty years? That's a pretty long time, sixty years.

As workers lifted the four sisters to a golden dome, and Esther descended underground, these statues became inextricably linked. For Auslin, the statues and their placement in the Capitol said a lot about the state's commitment to its women. The new statues felt hypothetical, promising nothing specific. Esther, on the other hand, had been a real woman who stood for Wyoming's radical history of suffrage and women's contributions. For women's equality. To Osland, her move felt like a demotion.

One reflected in other facets of Wyoming life. I think we're regressing. Wyoming has the highest wage gap in the nation. It's among the worst for the proportion of women serving in state legislatures. Maternal mortality rates are higher than average. Participation by women in business is lower than average. The list goes on.

In 2022, US News World Report ranked Wyoming number 45 out of 50 for best states for gender equality. There's there's something wrong with that picture. And that statue of Esther? To Oslin, she was a reminder of the state's promises and potential, of the story it told about itself to the world. We are the equality state. The statue had a message Wyomingites needed to hear. Women count. Women count. They don't just take a back seat to their husbands, that they have equal say. Equal say.

Equal rights, and we can't let that go. We we cannot let our guard down. We can't get complacent about it.

But as I dug deeper into the statue and the story behind it, I found that simple story was not so simple. The equality state was founded on some problematic principles, and even the statue itself has some baggage around what it means to be a woman in the West. But before we explore all that, let's start with the woman in the monument herself, Esther Hobart Morris.

Aster Hobart Morris is born in upstate New York in 1814. She's part of a large family and a politically engaged community. There's a whole religious revival movement happening. There's a lot of abolition and temperance activity happening. So she's kind of growing up in that climate. This is Jennifer Helton. She's from Wyoming, though. Now she's an assistant professor of history at Ohlone College in California. She studies women's suffrage in the West.

There are differing accounts of ages, but according to Helton, Esther's mother passes away when she's about 12. Her father dies when she's nineteen. And so what you would expect is that a young woman kind of without a lot of economic resources at that point would probably get married and start a family of her own. Esther puts that off. She starts a millinery business, making women's hats. For a while she's on her own.

Eventually she does marry at what would have been considered an advanced age for that time, twenty-seven. She has a son, but her husband soon dies too. So then she's left alone with an infant child to raise by herself. These hardships in her life, the death of her parents and then her husband, are formative, but maybe not in the ways you'd think.

So one of the things that comes across in Esther's letters that I think is really interesting is she writes about how because her father died and because her husband died, she didn't have a man telling her what to do. And so she had a lot of freedom in terms of figuring out where she was going to live and how she was going to raise her kids. And she had a lot of more opportunity to kind of make decisions than a lot of women did. And she liked it.

In this letter to her niece, Mr. She writes about her oldest son, Archie. I have acted more independent with Archie than I could have done if his father had been living, and it has given me strength, and no doubt that is what made me strong in early life. I had no parent to control, or what is worse, to do just enough to keep me from doing for myself.

After her first husband's death, she packs up and moves to Illinois, where he owns some land. She marries again, has three more kids. But then more tragedy. One of her sons dies and her husband begins a downward spiral. He drinks a lot and their marriage becomes tense.

Leaving it isn't much of an option in those times, but Esther does her own thing in the confines of a hard marriage. She's interested in radical causes. She reads suffragist literature, has close relationships with other suffragists. She attends abolitionist lectures and subscribes to The Atlantic, which started as an abolitionist newspaper. She writes a lot of letters, especially to nieces she's close with. Also suffragists, like this excerpt from 1864, at the height of the Civil War.

I sometimes think I feel a little like the Democrats, that I had no hand in making this war, and that I shall not be drafted. And as she's writing her letters during the Civil War, she's getting grouchier and grouchier about the fact that the world has just, you know, is burning down, and here she has to put up with it, but she didn't have any voice in creating this mess.

And so she clearly is expressing that, you know, if she if she was able to vote, like she would at least have some kind of say, but she doesn't.

And then in 1868, an article appears in the Chicago Tribune that changes the course of her life. It's about a new gold rush. In 1867, some soldiers on leave found a gold vein in the rocks around an important immigration route in what is now central Wyoming. They showed off the gold and news of their find got into the Chicago paper. Esther's husband and her oldest son are instantly interested. They pack their bags and head out. One year later, Esther follows them. On an August morning.

Mining town called South Pass City. I wanted to see where Esther made history. By car, it's about 40 minutes from the nearest town, Lander. Turned off the asphalt road. And it's another two miles to South Pass City on this. Yeah. I rattled along for a few minutes, looking for signs of a town, and The plains were green with sage and yellow with flowers. The sky immense.

Finally, I spotted an old mineral processing facility. And a little further, here I am, South Pass City historic site. These days, five people live here full-time. One of them is Joe Ellis. superintendent of the historic site. That's what he calls it. He doesn't like the term ghost town. There was always somebody living here. And in different time periods it was um a fairly substantial community.

In the late 1800s, there were some 300 buildings, 2500 people. You know, it was probably a busy place, probably filthy too. Three stamp mills to crush and process ore operated just above town. They're incredibly noisy. Just this relentless beating um sound. There were horses, woodfires. You know, there were a lot of saloons. balloons to be exact. So a lot of chaos, but also a bit of luxury.

Get anything. Oysters you could order off of the Union Pacific and they'd be here within three to four days. Oysters. You can barely get oysters in Wyoming today. Yeah. Yeah. Um they loved that. Um that was one of the things. Um the saloons served incredible amounts of champagne,'cause it was the drink of the day.

The social makeup of the town included a small black population, a small Chinese population, the white settlers, and Native American tribes on the settlement's periphery. In 1858, men outnumbered women five to one. So while settlers brought their strict social mores around race and gender, a lot of the normal lines would have been blurred. The frontier town, it's a necessity. Um, you don't have enough population to do all of the roles in the classic women's work and men's work. You need it.

a lot of people to operate a lot of saloons and that wasn't necessarily always gonna be a man. So yes, women own the saloons too, but they weren't allowed to drink in them. It was an expanded, yet still restrained kind of freedom. Yeah, The political atmosphere was also unique. The vibe was definitely of a boom town. Wyoming only became a state in 1890. So back then the area was a territory, and a remote one at that.

But the settlers who came brought a hopefulness to South Pass City and the territory beyond. A hopefulness to strike it rich, yes, but also to create something. The idea of starting fresh and building an idealized place. was appealing to people just starting to reckon with the civil war. There are people who are coming west with some kind of vision.

We've kind of been through this very traumatic experience and now we're gonna build a new country. You know, we've abolished slavery and it's gonna be a new world. This is suffrage historian Jennifer Helton again. Helton says people are arriving with pretty distinct visions for this new world. The progressives of the time are the Republicans.

Their policies towards Native Americans in Wyoming, which include crowding warring tribes onto a newly created reservation, are catastrophic. But for settlers, they envision a more equal society. The Conservatives of the time are the Democrats, mostly from the South. Many are white supremacists who want to reestablish some semblance of the social order they thought they lost in the Civil War.

Between the two main parties, there's a tension, but also a truce grounded in optimism. So this is the climate in South Pass City when Esther Hobart Morris arrives in 1869. She's 55 at this point, self-assured in her values, a dominating presence, and strong personality. And though her family comes seeking financial opportunity. She's also likely aware that the West could present other opportunities too, like, says Jennifer Halton, around an issue that's very dear to her heart, women's suffrage.

There was a general sense of, you know, in the East we have all these vested interests and those legislatures have been around a long time. They're kind of hidebound, doing things the way they've always been doing them. So if we're gonna have a breakthrough, it's more likely to happen in the West. Esther brings suffragist literature along. Suffragist friends come to visit her. And soon she starts meeting locals, too. She has a pretty active social life.

One important friendship she develops is with a couple, William and Julia Bright. Julia also wants the vote. William is a Democrat from Virginia and he's running to be a legislator for South Pass City. Esther starts to talk to the Brights about suffrage. Then she reaches out more. Esther, one story goes, holds a gathering. Some people say it was a dinner party, some people say it was a tea party. She invites all the local candidates for the legislature, including William Bright.

In an era when women did not have political power and you wanted to shape the course of political events, what you had to do was talk to the men who were in power. She sits these men down and asks them all to support suffrage. This party story is central to Esther's legend today. True or not, it's come to represent her work to win key people to this cause.

William Bright himself gives her credit for educating him. Decades later, in nineteen oh two, in a speech, he'll say, quote, misses Esther Morris had loaded me down with women's suffrage before I went to the legislature. I had never thought much about it before, knowing her.

That September, in eighteen sixty nine, William Bright wins his seat. By October he's in Cheyenne for Wyoming's first territorial legislative session. And something strange happens. Even though women's rights are not a priority for Democrats nationally, and all of the legislators in that first session are conservatives from the Democratic Party, The lawmakers from South Pass City start sponsoring a bunch of bills related to women's rights.

divorce laws, inheritance laws, um, and equal pay law, uh saying that women teachers have to be paid the same as men. And these bills make it through the legislature pretty quickly. And then towards the end of the session, William Bright proposes the suffrage bill. And at that point, even the other guys from South Pass are like, whoa, that might be a bridge too far, are you sure? Remember, the legislators are all conservative Democrats.

All men. In theory, they shouldn't be interested in this bill, but they are. Hilton says some of the men, like William Bright, have a genuine belief in suffrage. They're also motivated by racism. Bright thinks that enfranchising women could help secure white supremacy in the territory and keep the Democrats in power. The thinking goes

White female voters will cancel out black voters, men and women. So it's a mixture of what today we might call progressive motives towards equality and racist motives that are against equality. There's some resistance to the bill, but it does make it through both chambers. It ends up on the desk of the progressive Republican governor, John Campbell. And so um he kind of sits on it basically until the last minute. And then he decides, yeah, I'm good, we're gonna do it. He signs it.

That night the story goes, in the bars of Cheyenne, men recite a toast. To the ladies, once our superiors, now our equals. It's December 10th, 1869, and all of a sudden Wyoming women can vote. And not just that, they can hold office too. That basically puts women on the exact same political plane as men. So it's it's actually quite radical.

Two months after the governor signs the bill granting suffrage in eighteen sixty nine, Esther Hobart Morris is appointed Justice of the Peace in South Pass City. The position as a minor judge does not require specific credentials. Usually it was held by a prominent man in town. Esther is the first woman to ever hold this public office. Helton says this may have been a nod to how involved she was with suffrage.

I think that appointing Esther Morris was kind of a Republican statement of okay, now we've got suffrage, we're gonna enforce it and um we're gonna put this woman in charge. And Esther Morris was A no nonsense kind of woman. In a letter to her niece soon after her appointment, Esther writes If it does belong to man to take care of women, I have ever been engaged in the men's work, so will be nothing new to me.

The Democrats passed the bill and the Republicans made appointments, so that some in both parties are for it, it seems, in both parties accept it. I shall take things as they come, even if I should be made president of the United States, but really do have too much to do to do things well. She signs the letter misses and Justice E. Morris. A lot of her cases that she tried were public drunkenness. This is Joe Ellis again, superintendent of the South Pass City Historic Site.

He says she tried tax issues, legal disputes between individuals, physical altercations, that kind of thing. She held court sometimes in the three room jail, sometimes in a saloon, basically anywhere people could gather. None of her rulings were ever overturned. It's probably a testimony that there wasn't a massive controversy about her.

That's probably a testimony to how good of a judge she was, is she was very based in the law. Her historic role makes her famous nationally, and she gets invited to various suffrage meetings and conventions. In a public letter responding to one such invitation, she reflects on her role in pushing forward equality for women. Circumstances have transpired to make my position as Justice of the Peace a test of women's ability to hold public office.

and I feel that my work has been satisfactory, although I have often regretted I was not better qualified to fill the position. Like all pioneers, I have labored more in faith and hope. and in performing all these duties, I do not know as I have neglected my family any more than in ordinary shopping, and I must admit that I have been better paid for the services rendered than for any I have ever performed.

Esther loves getting paid for her work, by the way. It provides her the independence she always craved, and which was so novel for women at the time. She does this job for nine months. On the last day of retention. Mr. Son writes to his cousin. It is surprising to note how public sentiment has changed in this little country. In regard to women. No open sneering. At first, and many have become open and declared advocates. In eighteen seventy two.

City. She tries out a couple of other places but settles in Cheyenne. She dies there in 1902.

When we come back, producer Irina Zuroff explains how after her death, Esther Morris' story takes on a life of its own. That's next on Monumental from PRX. in a moment. This is Monumental from PRX. I'm your host, Ashley C. Ford. Let's get back to our story. Even before Esther Hobart Morris dies in 1902, early Wyoming historians are already penning the story of suffrage in the state.

So when they're writing up the story of women's suffrage, they give Esther Morris a central role and they celebrate her as the mother of women's suffrage. Historian Jennifer Helton says most of these early historians are women. At the University of Wyoming, the state's sole university in the entire state to this day, the history department is all women. It's a place of opportunity for people who can't break into the more rigid and connected legacy institutions in the East.

And so there's a lot of educated women professionals who come west and they become things like professors and doctors and lawyers because they can't do that in other parts of the country. And the way these historians tell it, Esther isn't just important to suffrage, and suffrage isn't just important to women, they're both fundamental to the state story.

Suffrage and Esther specifically are at the center of the narrative Wyoming constructs about itself in the late 1800s and first decades of the 1900s. It is an important part of Wyoming's identity.

and its history and it's how Wyoming explains itself to the world. In the 1950s, a US senator for Wyoming suggests the state build a monument to Esther to go in the National Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C. Each state is allowed two statues there to represent its people. In a referendum, Wyomingites agree this is a good idea.

Ednes Kimball Wilkins, who serves in the state's House of Representatives at the time, along with one other woman, introduces a bill to commission the statue. In the House, it passes without a hit. but over in the Senate it was a different picture. This is Kimball Wilkins in an interview in nineteen sixty. She says a senator proposes Chief Washiki instead. Then other senators start proposing kind of ridiculous alternatives. They propose a train robber and a humorist. It devolves pretty quickly.

They uh suggested the bucking bronco. And then someone wanted to put uh Esther Morris on top of the bucking bronco. Well, the final thing was that one of the men said, Well, is this to be a y a full length statue or just a bus? And then they talked about Esther's bust. And the result right then was that the statue was laughed to death.

The next day though, the senator who originally proposed Chief Washiki Well he said in fact he had had telegrams all night and a telephone calls and people knocking on his door and he wanted him to take the women off his back. He caves to public pressure. He puts the bill before the Senate once again, and it passes almost unanimously. To raise the$30,000 needed for the sculpture, the Esther Morris Memorial Commission launches a statewide fundraising effort.

Peg Oslin, the Wyoming native who used to talk to the Esther statue, says people chip in what they can. Beauty shops, school kids, church organizations, newspapers. the whole gamut collected dollars. Dollars in were a big deal. There's a statement of contributions that lists reams of donors. Mrs. Alice Felton of Green River gives one dollar.

Josephine M. Bryce of Wheatland gives five. The Jackson Hole Business and Professional Women's Club contributes two hundred nineteen dollars and sixty-three cents. Green River High School gives 25 cents. It's moving. The statues installed in DC in 1960. Then a replica is commissioned to put in front of the Capitol back home.

But the senator's mocking of the statue hints at how the narrative around Esther is starting to change by the 1950s. By the time of the vote, she's starting to lose her prominence in Wyoming's story. Jennifer Helton, a historian, says that's thanks to one man. So we have to talk about T.A. Larson. In 1938, the University of Wyoming hires T.A. Larson to join the history department.

A decade in, he's the head of the department. And in the 1950s, right around the time the Esther statue is proposed, he starts to challenge her importance. And if you go look up newspaper articles from the time, it's pretty clear that T.A. Larson does not think that Esther Morris should get a statue.

T.A. Larson has a lot of beef with Esther. Remember the Tea Party story? How Esther gathered all the important men in South Pass City and lobbied them to pass suffrage? T.A. Larson says the Tea Party never happened. He rejects the idea that Esther was actively agitating for suffrage. He just seems to be stuck on this idea that it's ridiculous that women might have had something to do with their own enfranchisement. It's not just that T.A. Larson downplays Esther's role in suffrage.

He says suffrage altogether wasn't a game changer. He says, you know, women's suffrage didn't really make any impact in Wyoming because Sure, they elected a few women to the school board, but otherwise it was, you know, men still ran everything and, you know, didn't really make a difference, right? So he really kind of minimizes the significance. And people listen because T.A. Larson is kind of a big deal.

In 1965, he publishes a seminal history of Wyoming. He becomes known as Mr. Wyoming and educates generations of Wyomingites with his take. He really kind of shaped the narrative, both publicly and within the academy as well. And little by little, this idea that suffrage is at the center of Wyoming's story, it recedes. Today most people know Wyoming as the cowboy state, not the equality state.

Helton says this evolution happens in the context of larger political forces in the country. Second wave feminism is happening, the civil rights movement, Vietnam protests. Women's equality was associated in some ways with, you know, we don't want to get too close perhaps to some of these more radical interpretations of things happening today. That conservatism also probably had an effect on what the statue actually looked like.

Esther was six feet tall, kind of severe looking, squarish in shape, not an attractive woman, people kept telling me. But the statue is hyperfeminine, almost willowy. maybe the details of what the actual woman Esther Morris looked like are less important to the people who are embracing these monuments than is a general idea of here's what a woman ought to look like.

This is Cynthia Culver Prescott. She's a historian at the University of North Dakota. Prescott studies early monuments to what she calls pioneer mothers. A white woman in a sunbonnet, either striding westward on on the trail or seated, resting from her labors later in life, are the two sort of standard images.

Many of these monuments to unnamed frontiers women were put up in the 1910s and 1920s, and the women they depict are full of symbols. Typically surrounded by children, emphasizing this portrayal of this white woman as being an embodiment of white civilization. that with the coming of white women you have Christianity, you have book learning, and all of these things are seen as being sort of part of the trappings of white society arriving.

the implication being displacing indigenous cultures in the region. The most prolific sculptor of Pioneer Mothers was Avard Fairbanks, the same artist commissioned to make Esther. Prescott has documented about 200 of these sculptures by Fairbanks and others, all with similar tropes. These pioneer w mother monuments are a way to kind of instruct the next generation and what a true woman really looks like, what a true woman should act like.

Statues of women can be complicated even today. Remember those four sisters in the Wyoming Capitol? Truth, justice, courage, and hope. Tony Ross, the retired senator, says the artist's initial build of the statues was a little too risque for a government building. There was a debate over their clothing as to whether or not it was The artist, Delisalde, had to add heavier draping. Also there were issues race. by several different legislators as to the size of the women's nipples.

And so we we had to literally we had to have Delisol Yeah. It's a true story. The allegorical woman is a beautiful, sexued woman. But the real woman couldn't be herself either. The statue of Esther represents a woman who accomplished real things and wielded power. But by making her form more traditionally feminine, Her sculptor also refused to see her fully. The statue ignored that Esther Hobart Morris consistently defied other people's ideas of her and what her life should look like.

And it turns out it's not the only monument to this woman that didn't get the facts right. Back in South Pass City, Site Superintendent Joe Ellis strolls down the main street until he reaches one of the rebuilt historic cabins. Out front stands a stone marker. So here's my monument.

Home and office site of Esther Hobart Morris, and it's in the wrong spot. This spot is actually where her son's newspaper office stood. When the curators realized the marker was in the wrong spot, They put up a metal text panel explaining that. Ellis says he's not sure why this happened. The site had the town's maps with landownership labeled all along, but he sees it as a symptom of a larger injustice.

That the story of Esther hasn't been fully explored or told in South Pest City, that she hasn't been given her due. We're the equality state and that was became our motto and it became something that we built monuments in the wrong spot for. On the spot where Esther actually lived now stands a section of the site's sewer system. Something about the optics. Putting sewer lines near her home, or more recently, placing her in the Capitol basement. Even though it's a really, really nice basement.

Rub Zellis the wrong way. The placement is i it's important because it was that first impression of the Capitol building. Here's the sculpture of this woman that represents a major portion of our history. And yeah, it it probably is a better place in the basement in terms of preserving the statue and also giving it an opportunity to build more programs around, but it's also that statement of, you know, this is front and center is important to people.

And there's a lot of people that miss her at that location. I meet Peg Osland at Esther's old spot in front of the Capitol on a blustery August morning. She shows up wearing a suffragette white blazer, a colorful stone butterfly brooch affixed to the lapel. I'm kind of emotional about this. She's emotional because Esther has been gone from her place in front of the Capitol for so long. In 2019, Oslan, along with her mother and some friends, started a campaign to get Esther back outside.

Now it's twenty twenty three. and her mom, Mary, passed away in twenty twenty one. I I really fight for this statue, for the generation uh before me. My mom and then my grandmother. These are real frontier women. Oslan says her mother grew up poor in Mount Vernon, New York. She trained as a nurse, met her husband in the hospital. Then he brought her to Wyoming. Where she couldn't even get a job as a nurse. Started having children.

She had eight, Oslan's the oldest. Meanwhile, Oslan's father was elected to the state senate, ran for governor, and helped set the stage for the development of Wyoming's coal fields, the biggest in the world. That work skyrocketed the state's wealth. Mary Oslin often stayed in the background. She took a backseat a lot of times as the wife, but as she got older, and then in her widowed years, she really became much more outspoken of her own views.

One of the things she became adamant about later in life was putting Esther back in front of the Capitol. What, I wonder, did the Esther Monument say to Mary Osland and women like her? What about her absence? Historian Cynthia Culver Prescott says the monuments we see or don't have a subconscious effect. If you're a woman and realize there aren't any statues of women, or if you're a person of color and you don't see any statues that look like you.

then that has a psychological impact that that's not easy to measure about what what's important, what's powerful in our society. Lindsay Linton Buck has spent a lot of time thinking about this type of subconscious messaging in Wyoming. She's a photographer who lives in Jackson. We are the cowboy state, that kind of more patriarchal imagery is still very strong. In twenty fifteen, she started a project called Women in Wyoming.

Photographing and interviewing Wyoming women. I wanted to show and highlight stories that you haven't necessarily heard of or that you necessarily think about when you think about Wyoming. She photographed a cowgirl, a wildlife biologist, a choreographer. Completely different career path. An abstract painter, a writer, the state's first female Supreme Court Justice, Wyoming's first Native American senator.

I think at the root, it was my experience of growing up in Wyoming and never imagining a future for myself here and wanting to create something that. Girls growing up in this state could see those pictures of themselves. Seeing is believing, and it's so powerful to see a reflection of yourself.

out in the world. And then as I continued to move along, it was you know, wanting to create something that adds to the cultural history of Wyoming, of American history, and then, you know, tie back to this pioneering history that we do have as a state that kind of got lost for a lot of years. The project features twenty-five people, a kind of iconography of the women of contemporary Wyoming. They're photographed in their work clothes, on the land, in their elements.

There's a Wyoming-ness about the images as a set, animals and landscape ever-present, hair windswept, satisfied grins, but the portraits offer individual stories. When you can cease a representation of yourself, that opens your imagination, it expands your mind, it expands your perception of what is possible. That is everything, right? That is How we keep moving forward, that is how we keep stretching ourselves.

Back at the Capitol, Peg Austlin marches across the empty spread of concrete where Esther once stood, up the Capitol steps, down the checkered marble hall. descends a set of stairs, walks around the corner, then another set of stairs into the underground connector, through to its terminus, to Esther's current perch. Look at that face. Esther holds her head high, and there's forward movement in the bronze as if she's defiantly striding into the future.

The pedestal is gone, but her bigness is still imposing. Oslan keeps gazing up at her, eyes shiny, like she's got a crush on her. That's a humbling statue. She helped bring Wyoming into being. then it's a quiet s satisfaction of a job well done. The statue's move and Oslin's campaign got a lot of media attention, and some sympathetic allies in government.

But in the spring of twenty twenty three, legislators affirm their decision to keep Esther in the basement connector. There are rumors that someone will introduce another bill to move her back outside. She's so needed now. And by men and women. But Esther can't do it alone, right? Can't be a lone voice for women, for broader equality. I imagine she'd want some. With their own stories dotting the prairie, even in the Wyoming elements. Who might they be?

Wyoming boys and girls in some not too distant future, might they pause on a walk, raise a hand against the sun and sharp wind, and look up at some new statue, reading her face. Irena Zhoroff. She is the author of Special thanks to musician Joe. Bissaria. Joe Ellis, Wyoming. And the American Heritage Center for providing archival. Lagrid and

The senior editor for Monumental is Rosalind Tortesilius, and our senior producer is Nancy Rosenbau. Jamie York is our writer, and our production assistant is Perry Gregory. The show is recorded by Bryce Bowman and And Ben Erickson at Earshot Audio Post and mixed by Tommy Bazarian, with support from Emanuel Desarme, Pedro Rafael Rosado, Morgan Flannery, and Sandra Lopez Monsalve. Fact-checking by Christina Rebel.

Our theme was composed and produced by Jelani Bowman with additional music by Alexis Quadrado. Edwin Ochoa is our project manager, and our executive producer is Jocelyn Gonzalez. Monumental is produced by PRX Productions. made possible by a grant from the Mellon Foundation. For more on the show, visit us at prx.org slash monumental. Ford, thank you. From PRX