LOVELAND, Colo. — The Senate passed a bill this week ensuring a monument honoring the women's suffrage movement will stand in our nation's capitol.
The piece was created by Jane DeDecker, from Loveland.
Ever since she was a finalist for a women's suffragette monument in Central Park, she's been fighting to get a monument in the nation's capital dedicated to the 70 years women campaigned for the right to vote.
In February, the U.S. House passed a bill to make her monument possible. The bill finally also made it through the Senate on Thursday.
DeDecker's monument features both the women most know by name, and some who are not as famous for their actions.
“Two women don’t create a movement," she said, referring to Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. "I think it was a lot more than that."
When DeDecker set out to honor the women who paved the way for the right to vote, she said she found more women.
“Alice Paul, Sojourner Truth, Ida B Wells," she said, going down the line of the sculptures she's made of their heads.
She found Black women who marched even as they were being pushed out of the movement and Chinese women who advocated for the vote knowing they wouldn't get one.
“We want to tell a complex story," she said.
DeDecker worked with Jody Shadduck-McNally with the forming nonprofit group called "Every Word We Utter" to donate her monument to the National Park Service so it could be placed in the nation's Capitol.
"We didn't know we'd have to do all these steps to just donate a monument to the National Park Service," Shadduck-McNally said. "But, it's been quite the education and journey."
All these steps included having Congress pass a bill to accept the donation. It also required physical steps to the offices of every legislator in Washington D.C. to ask for support.
"We did a lot of walking about 25,000 steps a day at least and we were there at a very busy time in Washington," Shadduck-McNally said.
DeDecker is making plans to have her sculpture displayed near the U.S. Supreme Court building and Senate offices.
"You know, we've been overlooked and I just feel like these women do not need to be overlooked anymore," DeDecker said.
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