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2 What Time o’ Night It Is Sometimes I was in their house, sometimes I was with them. —Epicharmus By the time I reach the top of the stairs, the atmosphere becomes palpable. I enter into the house of rhetoric above ground—that world where rhetoric envelops the contemporary sociopolitical atmosphere, like a frame of a house.1 As it becomes more and more tangible, the atmosphere actually gathers a material weight as it shifts from a figural dimension to a concrete one. So as I reach the top of the stairs, I exit the deepest ancient region of the house and enter another building , the U.S. Capitol. Analogically speaking, the Capitol stands in concretely for the house of rhetoric whereas before—when I was digging beneath the house— the Capitol stood for the palindrome of the . The Capitol continues to be my dynamic point of departure for leaping from one house to another and back. I have been in the basement and haunted for over a decade. I had gone down to see the monument to Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. Now I see it in the Rotunda. Rising behind the three women like a mountain is a fourteen-thousand-pound mass of stone (figures 2.1 and 2.2). The large blank section of stone should be Sojourner Truth.2 And then again, it could be no one—just an “uncarved block of rock . . . there to haunt us. We should let it haunt us.”3 Perhaps it is anticipating a fourth figure, yet unknown but in full possession of authority. In fact, she may have already arrived, as some imagine the fourth figure is Rosa Parks.4 At the very least, the portion not yet hewn could be, as the sculptor Adelaide Johnson declared, the “true spirit”5 as well as the unfinished business awaiting women in a democracy. The inscription at the base of the monument stenciled on the backside seems to corroborate this interpretation . Figure 2.1. The Portrait Monument to Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony. Photograph courtesy Dave Swanson. Figure 2.2. Pioneers for women’s suffrage. From left to right: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott. Photograph courtesy Dave Swanson. What Time o’ Night It Is / 53 I did not see the inscription in 1983. Apparently, when the monument arrived in 1921, it had a 232-word inscription stenciled at its base, a portion of which reads: “WOMAN, FIRST DENIED A SOUL, THEN CALLED MINDLESS, NOW ARISEN DECLARED HERSELF AN ENTITY TO BE RECKONED. SPIRITUALLY THE WOMAN MOVEMENT IS THE ALL-ENFOLDING ONE. IT REPRESENTS THE EMANCIPATION OF WOMANHOOD. THE RELEASE OF THE FEMININE PRINCIPLE IN HUMANITY. THE MORAL INTEGRATION OF HUMAN EVOLUTION COME TO RESCUE TORN AND STRUGGLING HUMANITY FROM ITS SAVAGE SELF.”6 While the Office of the Curator duly records that there had been an inscription, I did not know until later what happened to it. In her report on the monument, Susan Brandell writes that after it was first delivered, the “gold-gilt inscription” was “whitewashed” to make it “unreadable.”7 The inscription deemed “pagan”8 was called “blasphemous,”9 and at the direction of the Joint Committee on the Library the lettering was removed, a process required “before it was taken into the Rotunda” and then the statue “was veiled in suffrage yellow.”10 Nevertheless, its arrival marked a day of celebration. The unveiling ceremony was held in the Rotunda on February 15, 1921, for the 101st anniversary of the birth of Susan B. Anthony. The ceremony was attended by representatives of over seventy women’s organizations. Members of the National Women’s Party referred to the statue as the “Victory Monument”11 and thought the receiving of it in the Rotunda a breakthrough of the feminist spirit.12 Pundits, however, responded differently. They called it “Three Ladies in a Bathtub,” an epithet that came to signify the presence of women in the Rotunda in the days preceding the congressional judgment of its position in the Capitol. The ceremony in 1997 was similar. The Chicago Tribune reported, “More than 600 women’s rights activists, tourists, members of Congress, government officials , and teenage girls in modern-day, mini-skirted white suffragette costumes jammed the Rotunda for the reinstallation, which replicated the first and very brief placement of the statue there 76 years ago.”13 Pundits said the statue was “too ugly,”14 a complaint echoing the epitaph “Three Ladies...

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