Monument to Lexington women revealed

A new bronze monument entitled ‘Something Is Being Done,’ by the sculptor Meredith Bergmann, was unveiled at the Lexington Visitors Center lawn on Wednesday, May 15th. The monument honors and celebrates the contribution of Lexington women to the town’s “political, intellectual, social and cultural” history, as noted by LexSeeHer, Make Women Visible, the organization that brought it to fruition.

“When you walk around the historic district here, there’s a lot of monuments and memorials, many of them very beautiful, and none recognize women,” Jessie Steigerwald, President of LexSeeHer, explained at the monument’s unveiling. Wearing a gold sash emblazoned with the words “Massachusetts” and three different pins, “Make Women Visible,” “Ask Me,” and her name pin, she was surrounded by women asking her questions. 

Steigerwald first ignited a discussion calling for a monument to make women more visible at an event at the Lexington Depot on March 8, 2020, International Women’s Day and the year of the Suffrage Centennial. 

“We started gathering other women who were interested, and that was the Steering Committee, and that’s when we started discussing what we wanted,” Steigerwald recalls. They started raising money before they had a monument or sculptor in mind. “They were giving money to an idea, and that was actually pretty nice,” adds Leslie Masson, Vice President of Finance and Treasurer for LexSeeHer.

Before seeking permission for the monument site from the Select Board or the Monuments Memorials Committee, they were required to demonstrate sufficient community interest by raising the necessary funds. LexSeeHer obtained 501(c)(3) non-profit status and raised $200,000. “As you’re seeing today, there was a lot of community interest!” Steigerwald said, “We ended up having hundreds of people donate to the campaign and write letters explaining why they strongly believed women should be visible.” 

Martha Wood, Vice President for Development for LexSeeHer, thanked the over 600 donors to the fund, “from the 5-year-old who broke her piggy bank and donated her money and the young girls who had a lemonade stand to raise money for this. You are all very important,” she said at the unveiling.

After forty-five years living in New York, sculptor Meredith Bergmann moved to Massachusetts four years ago. “This specific commission was exciting because I didn’t know any of the historical figures that they initially proposed. It’s a great opportunity to learn more about the local sense of history, which is different in every place.” 

Bergmann found herself wrestling with LexSeeHer’s original desire for three statues, not wanting to repeat the pieces she was well-known for, like the Boston Women’s Memorial and the Women’s Rights Pioneers monument in Central Park. “I’m always trying to engage with a history of sculpture and of monuments and memorials and try to put a twist on it and bring it up to date, and I’m always trying to do something I haven’t done before, and that’s how I eventually veered away from three statues to many, many women and I had to find a shape and a format for that,” Bergmann said. 

LexSeeHer launched a five month long campaign to solicit suggestions from the Lexington community of who to include in the monument. “It expanded in a way we had not expected because Meredith’s design allowed us to do that. And it’s amazing that there are that many women, and more, with these amazing stories,” says Leslie Masson, who was also on the Research Team, fact-checking and finding out more about the women nominated. LexSeeHer compiled a list of women they thought spoke across time and from different professions and ages. “And then everyone who was in the Historical Society’s exhibit in 2020, ‘Something Must Be Done: Bold Women of Lexington,’ we considered all of those women as nominated, and that’s how we learned about Margaret Tulip,” Steigerwald said.

While all the women selected for the monument were considered to have made a lasting impact in some way, Margaret Tulip, a Black woman who lived in 18th-century Lexington, was one of the most talked about. Masson’s dogged research further revealed Margaret Tulip’s incredible struggle. Enslaved as a child, emancipated, and then unjustly enslaved again, she filed a ‘freedom suit’ in the courts and, after two lawsuits, eventually won her freedom in 1770.   

The monument’s name was inspired by the story of Abigail Harrington, who was said to have awoken her son, a fifer for Lexington’s militia company, declaring, “The Reg’lars are out, and Something Must Be Done!” on the morning of April 19, 1775. Other women honored on the monument include Mary Elizabeth Miles Bibb, who was the first female Black graduate from the Massachusetts State Normal School (then in Lexington) and a trailblazing abolitionist. Caroline Wellington was a key figure in the national, state, and local suffragette movement. Other women looked to the skies, like Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, a British-born Harvard astronomer and astrophysicist whose theories on the composition of the sun and stars were foundational to modern astrophysics, and Peggy Kimball, an aviator in the 1930s who acquired the highest rating in aviation available at that time.

As the breadth of the project grew, outreach to the descendants of the twenty women chosen to feature in the sculpture began. Celeste Freeman, Vice President of Community Outreach, mainly focused on African-American descendants and tried to locate and identify them. “We were able to have the descendants actually come to Lexington and meet with high school students to talk about the history of Blacks in New England, so that’s been really exciting,” Freeman says. 

LexSeeHer Advisor Ann Kim Tanhor, a Digital Learning Coach at Lexington High School, said, “I’m very excited to see the descendants in front of it. At the high school, I have two students who interviewed two of the descendants in a podcast,” she explained. “They were super interested to know about Margaret Tulip and to meet her descendants on Zoom. And people say this, but for the students, they were like, ‘This is like history coming alive!’ You know it really was! To meet the real-life descendants and to know the impact that Margaret Tulip had many, many generations later.”

Carol Tucker is Margaret Tulip’s fifth great-granddaughter. Tucker traveled to Lexington with her family members to see Tulip’s image and her story memorialized in the monument. “Today marks a moment of profound celebration, remembrance, and immersed in pride, not only for my family but for the entire community. Now ‘Something Is Being Done,’” she said standing on the podium before the hundreds of guests at the unveiling. “We eagerly anticipate the stories and the lessons that will emerge here as a crossroads of past and present to inspire our future.” Tucker asked guests to touch Margaret Tulip’s hand as they walked through the portal of the monument, “And please know that you’re touching Margaret’s lineage as her hand is the exact replica of her 6th great-granddaughter and my daughter, Sidney,” who served as a hand model for the sculptor, along with LexSeeHer Advisory Board Member, Amelia Worthy, who modeled for Tulip’s likeness.

The ‘Something Is Being Done’ monument stands twelve feet high at its center, with bronze sculpted panels about ten feet high and about sixteen feet across. Although its frame is only four inches thick, Bergmann estimates that the whole piece weighs 3,000 lbs. “We had a structural engineer, and we had a landscape architect to supervise the plaza because of the anchoring system for the sculpture,” Bergmann recalls. Working with a local foundry, Sincere Metal Works in Amesbury, using a “lost wax process,” the sculpture was molded, then a wax version made, then that was melted out, and into those cavities the bronze was poured, requiring Bergman to spend over a hundred hours at the foundry. “There are different women on each side of the sculpture — there are over 20 women, but 10 figures on each side, so they’re back to back to back, and they fit within each other’s outline,” Bergmann details of her intricate design.

The proposed location of the women’s monument sparked some local controversy. Some considered the Battle Green and surrounding area, revered for their Revolutionary War history, inappropriate for the monument. “There are people who have a lot of stake in this area; they have a vision, and this wasn’t part of the vision,” Masson explained.  US women weren’t allowed to serve in many Armed Forces sectors until the Women’s Armed Services Integration Act of 1948. “There’s this idea that only veterans really deserve to be memorialized here,” Masson noted. She was surprised by the intensity of some pushback, recalling, “We actually had someone say — I still can’t get over this — ‘Women had nothing to do with the battle!’ and that’s ridiculous! Women were here. Women were helping the wounded!” Masson added a more modern context, pointing out that “Covid has taught us there’s more than one way to serve your community.”

Special guest and Leader of the Massachusetts Tribal Council, Elizabeth Solomon, spoke to the underlying fact that all of these monuments sit on Native space and on the homelands of the Massachusett tribe. “Today we are coming together to also recognize this place as women’s space, to make women visible and to honor women’s contributions,” she said. “Preceding all of the women we honor here today are 10,000 years of native women who lived in a matrilineal and natural local culture in which women had active and highly valued positions of influence and agency.”

Town Meeting and Select Board members, state senators and representatives joined the unveiling celebration. State Rep. Michelle Ciccolo read a Proclamation from Governor Maura Healey and Lieutenant Governor Driscoll “in recognition of the creation, unveiling, and celebration of the first monument honoring women in the birthplace of American Liberty,” as the Lexington Police Honor Guard and the Fire Department Honor Guard, who flanked the monument, looked on. The LexSeeHer Chorus sang “Something Must Be Done” as Sue Keller, Grand Marshall, dressed as the aviator Peggy Kimball (who appears on the sculpture), with the Lexington Girl Scouts Color Guard marched in a procession from the Depot to the Lexington’s Women’s Monument for the unveiling.

Steigerwald talked about this being just the start of a conversation that would reveal a layer of unseen history in Lexington. “It’s the beginning of finding other people who also would like to do some of this work with us. We’re not done!”

“I would say the most important thing is for other people to try to do it! Less than 7% of monuments in America recognize historic women, and even fewer recognize women of color,” a very animated Steigerwald adds.  “It’ll be hard to raise money, or you’ll have a process from your town that makes it very difficult. But you have to try to persist.” LexSeeHer is starting a monthly Zoom meeting to support people who are thinking about doing something similar in their community.

Researching individual lives and how people lived back then can be challenging for a project like this. Personal diaries or books might be in libraries across the country or are difficult to access; some books are not available online. Leslie and Colin Masson are in the early stages of establishing a $50K fund to support the research of colonial and early history,  aimed at helping students and others interested in learning more about their nation’s early history. (More details to follow on LexSeeHer.)

Historical reflection is important and necessary work, revealing fresh perspectives that can provide much-needed lessons. Perhaps this will inspire Lexingtonians to not only reflect on what these women did but also, hopefully, find ways to carry their legacy forward into action on the most challenging issues for which “something must be done” in present-day Lexington.