A visitor wandering the deeper recesses of Brooklyn’s sprawling Greenwood Cemetery may happen upon a marble structure that, at 17 feet tall, towers over nearby gravestones and mausoleums. It depicts a muscular male nude, sword in hand, standing astride two writhing female forms on a pedestal that once functioned as a fountain. A plaque explains that the sculpture once stood in more prominent locales: first, outside of Manhattan’s City Hall, and later, near Queens Borough Hall. It originated as a Progressive Era allegory of “Civic Virtue” overcoming “Vice” and “Corruption” (the trampled female figures). When I first came upon Civic Virtue, its base was scrawled with recent graffiti that declared: “This Oppresses Women.”

The vandal’s sentiment echoes those of suffragette activists a century ago who protested the monument’s misogynistic symbolism even prior to its installation at City Hall in 1922. Reformist Mayor Fiorello La Guardia shared feminists’ antipathy to Civic Virtue, referring to it as “Fat Boy” and complaining about having to see its buttocks every day when leaving work. He managed to have it demoted to the newly built Queens Borough Hall in 1941. It continued to attract criticism there, especially after the postwar resurgence of feminism. It remained in Queens, neglected and deteriorating, until 2012, when it was consigned to a little-visited corner of Greenwood Cemetery — a belated recognition of its status as an aesthetic and political relic.