After a six-year fundraising campaign, a sculpture now stands in Wesley Bolin Plaza to honor the leader of the suffrage movement in Arizona.
Frances Willard Munds pioneered efforts to enshrine equal voting rights in Arizona by introducing a successful ballot initiative years before passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The peak of Munds’ effort came just eight years before a suffrage bill was passed in the U.S. Congress. She served as the president of the Arizona Equal Suffrage Association from 1909 to 1912. Her 15-year attempt to pass a bill that would give women the right to vote was blocked by the territorial governor, Alexander Oswald Brodie.
At the time, Munds said Brodie was “controlled by machine politicians.” She knew another avenue would have to be taken.
“Since that time it became apparent that we could never succeed with a suffrage measure until it came to a vote of the people,” Munds said during a celebratory speech in 1912.
Ironically, the fate of women’s voting rights was left purely in the hands of male voters when the initiative was introduced in 1912. The measure was approved by more than 60% of voters and Arizona became the eighth state to grant women their suffrage rights.
The initiative to put a statue in her honor at Wesley Bolin Plaza was spearheaded by The Arizona Women’s History Alliance, which is led by the organization’s president, Melanie Sturgeon. It began over six years ago when a bill to put the statute in the plaza was approved by the Legislature and signed into law.
Six years after the legislation passed, her statue now sits in the plaza. Sturgeon said the campaign effort to fund the statue took longer than expected.
“We had no idea what we were getting into when we started that we have spent the last six years raising funds for the statue,” Sturgeon said. “We finally broke the bronze ceiling.”
In a tear-filled speech unveiling the statue on May 4, Sturgeon expressed gratitude for Munds’ tireless efforts to lobby for equal suffrage rights.
“These women that I've been discussing made many sacrifices to gain the vote and they worked as volunteers traveling the territory organizing clubs, lobbying legislators and talking to many men to convince them that women should be equal voting citizens,” Sturgeon said. “As we've worked for the last six years to make the statue a reality, their persistence was a model for us.”
Stephanie Hunter was selected as the sculptor for the Munds statue. Its conception began over five years ago, Hunter said.
“You're watching a little girl's dreams come true before your very eyes,” Hunter said. She constructed the memorial figure in her own home for the last five years. “This statue represents more opportunities for women.”
Secretary of State Adrian Fontes emphasized the value of a vote as we approach the November election.
“ It's the hard work day in and day out, it's the lobbying, it's the handing out of flyers on Election Day, it's those tiny little acts that amount to the one real tradition in American democracy,” Fontes said. “And that is this. In this democracy, let us never forget the value and the importance of the vote.”
Munds, in closing out her celebration speech in 1912, said, “We had a battle royal but we won by the simple play of wit which taught me that man’s wit is no match for women’s in point of keenness. By securing the suffrage planks, we swept the ground from under the feet of our opponents and not one politician dared raise his voice against us.”
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