Greenwich Branch member Ida Angland has created this original poem and musical composition, titled “Daunting is the Woman,” to honor the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment and the unveiling of the first statue of real women in Central Park by the group Monumental Women today, August 26.

Originally invited to perform the piece at the unveiling of the monument, due to COVID-19, Angland will now present it virtually by Gateway Classical Music Society. A Zoom sing-along will be offered to the Greenwich Pen Women as well.

Inspired by a lecture given to the Greenwich Pen Women in December 2019 by Coline Jenkins — the great-great-granddaughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, a Greenwich resident, and Monumental Women vice president — Angland was deeply moved by the “absurd reality” that there were no monuments to real women in Central Park, only fictional ones like Mother Goose. “Women’s Rights Pioneers,” by sculptor Meredith Bergmann, features Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Sojourner Truth.

Angland wrote, “I thought about the powerful feelings that reality stirred in me, and I decided to use the poem’s message as the lyrics to a marching hymn, which I have dedicated to the movement.”

 

 

Daunting is the Woman

By Ida Angland
Greenwich Branch

 

Daunting is the woman

Whose statue stands divine

A monument to eternity

Her bearing proud sublime

Standing tall and beautiful

Belies her suff’ring and tears

For living seen tho invisible

In time to marching years

Truth revealed her compromised

Dismissed, forgotten and small

But now the trends are turning

As gallant she stands tall

A change is now approaching

Remembered times unfold

In monuments to woman

Preserve her story told

Rising far revealing

So high above the stone

Her light forever glist’ning

Immortal strides are sewnPo

Daunting is the woman

Her worth at last be known

Her light forever glist’ning

So high above the stone