UNCORRECTED PAGE PROOFS
Not For Resale
THE SECRET LIFE OF LADY LIBERTY
Hieronimus
Cortner
The Secret Life of Lady Liberty
Goddess in the New World
Robert Hieronimus, Ph.D., and Laura E. Cortner
The goddess origins of the Statue of Liberty and her connections
with the founding and the future of America
• Examines Lady Liberty’s ties to Native American spiritual traditions, the Earth Mother,
Roman goddesses, Black Madonnas, and Mary Magdalene
• Reveals the sharp contrast between depicting “liberty” as a female and the reality of
women and other suppressed classes even today
• Explains how this Goddess of the New World inspires all people toward equality,
compassion, peace-keeping, and environmental stewardship
Uncovering the forgotten lineage of the Statue of Liberty, Bob Hieronimus and Laura Cortner explain
how she is based on a female symbol representing America on the earliest maps of the continent in the
form of a Native American “Queen.” The image of a woman symbolizing independence was embraced by
the American revolutionaries to rally the populace against the King, filling the role of “Founding Mother”
and protector of the fledgling republic. Incorporating Libertas, the Roman goddess of freed slaves, with
Minerva, Demeter, Justice, and the Indian Princess, Lady Liberty is seen all over the nation’s capital, and
on the seals and flags of many states.
Showing how a new appreciation for the Statue of Liberty as the American goddess can serve as a unifying inspiration for activism, the authors explore how this Lady Liberty is a personification of America
and its destiny. They examine multiple traditions that influenced her symbolism, from the Neolithic
Earth Mother, to Mary Magdalene, Columbia, and Joan of Arc, while revealing the sharp contrast
between depicting “liberty” as a female and the reality of women and other suppressed classes throughout
history. Their study of “Liberty Enlightening the World” led them to conclude that the empowerment of
contemporary women is essential for achieving sustainable liberty for all.
Sounding the call for this “Goddess of the New World” to inspire us all toward peacekeeping, nurturing, compassion, and environmental stewardship, the authors explain how the Statue of Liberty serves
as the conscience of our nation and is a symbol of both the myths that unite us and the diversity that
strengthens us.
Robert Hieronimus, Ph.D., is an internationally known historian, visual artist, and radio host
and has appeared on History, Discovery, BBC, and National Geographic. The host of 21st Century
Radio, he lives in Maryland. Laura E. Cortner has co-authored previous titles with Robert Hieronimus
including Founding Fathers, Secret Societies and United Symbolism of America. Her work appears regularly in periodicals like UFO Magazine, FATE Magazine, and several Beatles publications. She is the
director of the Ruscombe Mansion Community Health Center and lives in Maryland.
Destiny Books • ISBN 978-1-59477-493-5 • $19.95 (CAN $23.95) Paper
Also available as an ebook • 448 pages, 6 x 9 • 103 black-and-white illustrations
Rights: World • Spirituality/History
September 2016
Secret Life of Lady Liberty PDF for marketing.indd 1
Secret Life of Lady Liberty_cover.indd 1
For Review Only
Goddess in
the New World
Robert Hieronimus, Ph.D. and Laura E. Cortner
5/26/16 10:18 AM
5/26/16 10:33 AM
The Black Statue of Liberty 223
Abolitionists versus Suffragists
Historically there is a direct connection between women’s rights and
civil rights. Women, of course, are also largely missing from the original
artwork in the U.S. Capitol, except in the guises we discuss throughout this book. They are either idealized allegorical embodiments of the
virtues, or they are saintly mother figures, pictured in the one and only
approved role for women. The official woman suffrage movement in the
United States began as an offshoot of the abolition movement, much as
the second wave of the women’s movement of the 1970s can be credited
as being an offshoot of the civil rights movement. During both of these
protest movements women volunteers showed up to help, and were told
to either sit in the balcony or go make the coffee, but most of all, keep
quiet.
This challenge to women’s authority, and to their mental ability
to help those less fortunate, led women of both generations to a newly
raised consciousness. They must organize a separate movement to open
up opportunities for women. For the first few decades of the nascent
woman suffrage movement, in the 1840s and 1850s, abolitionists and
women’s rights activists worked side by side, men and women together,
on both causes.
As the Civil War loomed, most woman suffragists willingly laid
down their advocacy work to assist with the war efforts. But as soon as
the war was over, when they tried to resume their activism, they found
a wedge had been driven between these two disenfranchised groups.
Those advocating for Black Americans were pitted against those working for women’s rights, decreasing the effectiveness of both of their
campaigns.
Many women insisted that the same civil rights coming for ex-slaves
be granted simultaneously to women, but factions within the abolitionist movement disagreed. They called it “the Negro’s hour,” and worried
if woman suffrage was pushed at the same time, suffrage for the Black
man might be jeopardized. At the first annual meeting of the American
Equal Rights Association in 1867, Sojourner Truth, a former slave,
prominent suffragist and abolitionist said: “If colored men get their
For Review Only
SeLiLa.indd 223
5/25/16 6:49 AM
224 The Black Statue of Liberty
rights, and colored women not theirs, the colored men will be masters
over the women, and it will be just as bad as it was before. . . . I am for
keeping the thing going while things are stirring; because if we wait till
it is still, it will take a great deal to get it going again.”14
When it came time to draft the Fourteenth Amendment to the
Constitution, which was designed to eradicate the three-fifths clause
and grant full citizenship to freed slaves, someone craftily inserted the
word “male” into the language. Then just to be sure, they repeated it
three times, making it very clear that full citizenship was being withheld from Black women. It was the first time gender was mentioned
in the federal Constitution,* and women’s rights activists were furious.
They argued that it effectively turned females into noncitizens.
Former slave Frederick Douglass initially joined the women’s
rights activists in opposition to the Fourteenth Amendment, but later
switched his support. He said at the 1868 meeting of the Equal Rights
Association that “The government of this country loves women. They
are the sisters, mothers, wives and daughters of our rulers; but the negro
is loathed. . . .The negro needs suffrage . . . for his own elevation from
the position of a drudge to that of an influential member of society.”15
When the Fourteenth Amendment passed, women realized their
only option was to get their own Constitutional amendment. Elizabeth
Cady Stanton predicted that if “male” was introduced into the U.S.
Constitution, it would take them a century to get it out, but she was
wrong. It’s actually taken longer, because the Equal Rights Amendment,
which would prohibit discrimination on the basis of gender, has never
passed. Ask most young people today if women have equal rights guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution, and they will mistakenly say yes. “We
talk about exporting women’s rights,” historian Sally Roesch Wagner
told us, but “the world looks at us and says, well, we have a greater proportion of our leadership that are women than you do, and we guarantee women equal rights.”
For Review Only
*Voting laws in some of the early colonies allowed female property owners to vote. Gradually, state constitutions inserted the word “male” into voter rights, meaning until the
Fourteenth Amendment, the gender discrimination against voting came from local state
legislation, not the Constitution.
SeLiLa.indd 224
5/25/16 6:49 AM
The Black Statue of Liberty 225
It bears repeating here that the United States currently ranks 71 on
a list of 190 countries in terms of percentage of women in the national
legislature, with approximately 19 percent of the U.S. Congress composed of women.16 Many women’s rights activists point to the Nordic
countries as an example for how legislation and quotas are necessary
to increase the number of female leaders in the United States. Gender
equality has been legislated into both the home and society in many
northern European countries, and today approximately 40 percent
of the positions in their respective governing legislatures are held by
women.
The United States missed the chance for a second American
Revolution at this point in history. If the series of Constitutional
amendments designed to protect newly freed slaves after the Civil War
had included women, Wagner says it would have been truly revolutionary because finally the Constitution would have guaranteed equal
rights for everyone. The original Constitution contained slavery as a
foundation principle of the United States government and, “the revised
Constitution, after the abolition of slavery,” said Wagner, “contained
sexism as a foundation principle of the United States government.”17
The betrayal felt by many woman suffragists by their former allies
in the abolition movement brought ugly emotions to the surface and
revealed embarrassing streaks of racism and xenophobia. Elizabeth Cady
Stanton in particular has been called out for her racist language, but
she was by no means the only one saying that educated white women
deserved the vote before freed slaves and illiterate immigrants. Carrie
Chapman Catt, who inherited leadership of the suffrage movement
from Susan B. Anthony and went on to found the League of Women
Voters, used nativist language that was just as offensive, advocating that
women needed the vote to achieve white supremacy.
Often criticized as elitist, toward the turn of the century suffragists
began to reform their own movement, and found common ground with
labor organizers during the Progressive Era. Activists like Jane Addams
joined the suffrage cause and encouraged women to bring their mothering tendencies out into the community to aid the poor. The efforts
of suffragists, labor unions, immigrants, peace activists, and other
For Review Only
SeLiLa.indd 225
5/25/16 6:49 AM
226 The Black Statue of Liberty
p­ rogressives coalesced under several common goals, such as ending child
labor and creating better conditions for working women.
Liberty and the Slave Religion
The question of why Black women were singled out for discrimination
in the Constitution returned us to one of our original questions about
the Goddess in the New World. In chapter 10 we look at the symbolism of the “dark mother” and how it played into the fear peculiar to
Western society of women’s life-giving power. This led us to study the
African traditions brought over to this country by the slaves, which
included venerating their ancestors and goddess-like entities. Slaves and
their proud descendants in North America reflect some of their ancestors’ African traditions, as evinced by the experiential approach they
employ in Christian worship today. Like the Native American traditions, African traditions place more emphasis on experience than on
dogma. Dancing and drumming are so integral to their worship that
some say they dance their religion.
In the Southern Hemisphere of the Americas the religious experience of slaves retained much more of the original African influence
than it did in the North. This difference is explained by a number of
factors. Most notably, the North did not have a constant re-Africanizing from new slaves in the form of the millions upon millions of newly
kidnapped Africans arriving year after year in the South. The number
of Africans imported directly into North America was far lower, meaning the Yoruba-based practices coming over from West Africa were not
continually reintroduced like they were in the South, and were gradually forgotten. In North America, especially in the northern colonies,
blacks were more integrated in Euro-American society when compared
to the large concentrations of Africans working and living together on
the South and Central American mines and plantations. Their isolation in the South from the Euro-American population facilitated the
continuation of their private religious traditions.18
Finally, Catholic religious practices of South and Central America,
which featured holy relics of ancestors/saints, candle lighting, votives,
For Review Only
SeLiLa.indd 226
5/25/16 6:49 AM