An event Thursday marks the official start of a $2 million fundraising campaign for a monument to women's suffrage being planned for the Ohio Statehouse grounds.
The campaign is organized by the Capitol Square Foundation and the Women's Suffrage Monument Commission to support construction of the monument by 2026.
Nationally, fewer than 8% of public statues depict real women.
State lawmakers created the commission in 2019, ahead of the 100th anniversary of ratification of the 19th Amendment giving women the right to vote in 1920. However, Statehouse rules drafted amid political tensions in 2020 imposed a new waiting period of five years on erecting any new monuments on Statehouse grounds.
A committee agreed last week to waive the final few months of the waiting period for the suffrage monument. That may allow the commission to, for the first time, share some details about the sculpture, such as the artist who's been chosen to create it, at Thursday's event.
Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Doris Kearns Goodwin will kick off the campaign at the Ohio Statehouse Atrium on Thursday.
Megan Wood, CEO and executive director of the Ohio History Connection, the state's history office, will lead a discussion with Goodwin followed by a question-and-answer session.
Goodwin plans to discuss her eighth book, “An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s,” which was published in April. The book is a reflection on her final years with her longtime husband, Richard Goodwin, a former White House speechwriter who died in 2018, and on the singular era they lived through. The two were married for 42 years.
