Abstract
Is it reasonable for officials to decide that a public, municipally sponsored monument no longer deserves to be permanent municipal property? Frederick MacMonnies’s Civic Virtue offers insight into this question. The 1922 monument invoked a higher common life, but its statue portion was widely interpreted as misogynous. That reputation has continued to this day, and the work is now in disrepair. This article, a biography of Civic Virtue from its conception in the 1890s to its tumultuous afterlife beginning in 1922, reveals how sex and the city were the heart of the problem and argues that the work should be stabilized as a unique historical embodiment of those controversies.
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