FEMINISM ON THE MOUNT | BY: TORI HOLVEY
May 11, 2020
Seven years after women across the United States were granted the right to vote, a Black Hills Monument was constructed to display the country’s stone-faced masculinity. Each president depicted larger-than-life on Mount Rushmore, from George Washington and Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, had their own take on feminist and women’s causes of their day, opinions that are now immortalized within the earth even as the social landscape of the country changes.
Completed in 1941 after 14 years of construction, Mount Rushmore was chiseled during the last few years of the first wave of American feminism. This ideology was “mainly concerned with women’s right to vote…[and] promoted equal contract and property rights for women, opposing ownership of married women by their husbands' “ (.ohiohumanities.org). Many of these key ideals promoting women’s independence from her husband arose in the 1930’s under the Great Depression. This time of economic downfall pushed many women outside of their hegemonic roles as homemakers and into industrial jobs in order to help make ends meet. Although they were able to work outside of the home in mass numbers for the first time, women were still in lesser working roles labelled, “women’s work” (history.com) that paid women far less than men. It was to the backdrop of these societal rearrangements and inequities that Mount Rushmore and its four Presidents rose from the Black Hills to enforce a hegemonic male gaze over the country.
Looking furthest into the past, George Washington’s stance on feminism can be analyzed through the way that the country remembers him. There is an aura of supercharged masculinity present in the American imaginary that recalls him. The Smithsonian Magazine’s interview with Alexia Coe dives into the way that biographers and artists represent Washington commenting on how they eternalize his masculinity from a fascination with enlarging his thighs in art to expressed power and dominance over an animal such as a horse and in print, “feel[ing] the need to explain [his lack of biological children], when it seems really obvious to me that Washington was unable to have children as a result of smallpox” (smithsonianmag.com).
Thomas Jefferson’s actions, as opposed to his memorialization, were not a glowing testament to women’s advancement. Acting within the strong and abusive role that authoritarian masculinity can take on, Jefferson is known to have raped his female slaves, further stripping them of their dignity, asserting his power over their persons in more than one way. Friedman explains this, “relieved [him] of mythic power” (jstor.org) he so desperately tried to hold onto and prove through his atrocious acts. Since these facts only recently came to light about the third President of the United States, the modern public, having taken strides in social advancement from the abolition of slavery to the Me Too Movement, is now reckoning with and adapting to how it perceives the Jefferson Legacy.
Chronologically, Abraham Lincoln who famously lost his life to the masculine iconography of a gun, took a soft-spoken stance on women’s rights. During his presidency, the first wave of American feminism was within the first decade of existence, bringing attention to women’s issues at a more local level for the first time. While serving in the Illinois statehouse, Lincoln is quoted saying, “I go for all sharing the privileges of the government, who assist in bearing its burdens. Consequently, I go for admitting all whites to the right of suffrage, who pay taxes or bear arms, (by no means excluding females)” (gilderlehrman.org). While on the surface Lincoln does not deny the inclusion of women in the political conversation entirely, he presents them as an afterthought included in parentheses. To compound this, the “Suffragists” article continues, “Lincoln knew that most women could not pay taxes in Illinois (only widows who did not remarry could pay taxes in their own names) and that none could join the militia.” As an expert politician, Lincoln- similar to his predecessors, did not stray far from the expertly carved path of masculine control that had dominated the hegemonic narrative for the first century of America’s existence.
Campaigning strategies employed by Theodore Roosevelt, specifically during his 1912 campaign, along with the support from Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum (nps.gov), enacted a reelection platform that included giving women the right to vote. During this time period, first wave feminism had begun to gain national attention with their goal of women’s suffrage on the horizon and Roosevelt helped fuel this empowering fire by “[writing] a thesis in which he advocates equal rights for women, including the fact that they shouldn’t change their names when they get married…[and] he introduces women in executive and other positions in the New York City Police Department'' (pbs.org). As an advocate for women never before seen in the United States, Roosevelt also possessed a hyper masculine side that arose, “as a reaction against a ‘feminine’ side of his own nature that had the potential to expose him as soft and weak” (middlebury.edu). Known for worldwide hunting trips and diplomacy that included large sticks, the complex personality of Theodore Roosevelt resembles current hegemonic masculinity that calls for the man to hold power, dominate, and resort to violence when necessary while verbally appeasing women for his own personal gain.
While all of these presidents took their own approach to feminism within the social context of their day, the time period of their policies and actions was vanquished when their faces were made a permanent fixture of the Black Hills. As Jenny Jones explains, the sculptor Gutzon Borglum, “pictured a magnificent monument that would embody the first 150 years of the nation” (ascelibrary.org). The issue with this idea, however, is that it did not take the next 150 years of America to come into account. This too plays into the anti-feminist rhetoric that each of the aforementioned president wielded to varying degree compounded by the sculptor’s shortsighted conquest. Capti goes on to describe the construction of this monument, “as a "scar" on the sacred [landscape], a form of ecological pornography which proselytizes "nature as being enhanced by being mutilated in the image of what white males think nature ought to be and do" (law.du.edu). Going back to the central theme of control, centered in the intersection of negative masculinity and one bold enough to employ it, those involved with Mount Rushmore continue to shape the story, narrative, and nature in order to fit their personal desires.
All in all, powerful men who are proudly displayed in the midst of a natural environment like gods in combination with their mortal pasts contribute to the negative gender-based sentiment surrounding Mount Rushmore. With its certain permanence into the foreseeable future the anti-feminist ideals that the Black Hills are now filled with must reckoned with in the collective past before similar modern-day issues can be solved.