She helped get Arizona women the right to vote. Now she might finally get a statue
At a time when it was considered uncouth for women to talk about politics, Frances Willard Munds not only talked about it, she campaigned Arizona legislators to pass the Suffrage Bill in 1903.
It passed both houses but was vetoed by Territorial Gov. Alexander Brodie.
Munds was not deterred. She put together a coalition of women who targeted church members, miners and ranchers, regardless of political affiliation. They spoke at meetings and went door-to-door with petitions to put the suffrage initiative on the ballot.
It passed by more than 60 percent on Nov. 5, 1912.
Two years later, in 1914, Munds was the first woman elected to the Arizona Senate and the second woman elected to a state senate in the United States.
"We believe that we have proved ourselves worthy of the ballot," she said at the time.
All that, historian Melanie Sturgeon said, yet almost nothing memorializes Munds' work. Sturgeon wants to fix that.
She is president of the Arizona Women’s History Alliance, the group working to put a statue of Munds in Wesley Bolin Memorial Plaza at the Arizona Capitol.
Sturgeon was the state archivist and director of the Arizona State Archives for 16 years until she retired in 2016 and researched Munds’ story.
There are only two statues of women at the state Capitol, one a pioneer woman and the other a woman seeing her husband off to work.
A statue at the plaza requires legislative approval. Republican Rep. Michelle Udall introduced a bill, which was approved by the House and is making its way through the Senate.
If the bill passes, Sturgeon’s group must raise $250,000 to get the statue made, shipped, installed and maintained.
It will be cast in bronze, and because Munds was just 5-foot-1, mounted on a three-foot pedestal. Ten sculptors are submitting renditions.
Sturgeon hopes to unveil it on Nov. 5, 2020, 108 years after Arizona women got the right to vote.
Support local journalism. Subscribe to azcentral.com today.