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from Brooke Bailey, The Remarkable Lives of 100 Women Artists (part of the 20th Century Women Series) [Holbrook, Mass.: Bob Adams, Inc., 1994] pp. 96-97

As the series name suggests, most of the women listed in the book were born in the last quarter of the 19th century or the 20th century. Johnson is one of the few women born earlier who is mentioned in this book.

      Feminist sculptor Adelaide Johnson had a flair for the dramatic. She switched her age around to suit her at different periods in her life, making herself much younger at her wedding and much older during her old age, although she lived to be ninety-six. She recorded in stone many of the high points of the feminist movement, sculpting portrait busts of feminist leaders like Susan B. Anthony. her crowning achievement was a monument to the women's movement, erected in Washington, D. C., in 1921.

      Born Sarah Adeline to farmers in Plymouth, Illinois, Johnson was the eldest of three children. Margaret Huff Hendrickson Johnson and Christopher William Johnson had each been married twice before and had other children. Johnson attended rural schools until her teens, when she lived with an older half brother and took classes at the St. Louis School of Design. Competing with professionals, she took forth first and second prize at a state exposition at age eighteen.

      In 1878 Sarah Adeline changed her name to the more theatrical Adelaide. She moved to Chicago to study, supporting herself with her woodcarvings. She turned a painful accident to her advantage when she fell down an open elevator shaft in the Central Music Hall and broke her hip. Her casualty suit provided the money -- $15,000 -- that she needed to study in Europe. She spent 1883 studying in Dresedn, then moved to Rome. From 1884 until 1895 she studied with Giulio Monteverde in Rome, and kept a studio there until 1920.

      Johnson indulged her taste for the dramatic in her 1896 marriage to British businessman Fredrick Jenkins. She used every step of the marriage to make a statement. he took her name instead of the other way around, and they were wed by a (then rare) woman minister. The bridemaids were her busts of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. She also indulged her vanity by dropping twelve years from her age on the marriage certificate, claiming she was twenty-four to seem younger than Fredrick Johnson's twenty-five years. Despite all this effort, the marriage ended in an acrimonious divorce twelve years later.

      An early advocate of the women's movement, Johnson showed busts of suffragists Stanton, Lucretia Mott, and Anthony at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. All her professional life, Johnson fought public skepticism and lack of funds to achieve her dream of a museum honoring the women's movement. Although she never did manage to bring it about, she did create an impressive sculpture to commemorate the movement, featuring new versions of her busts of Mott, Anthony, and Stanton. new York suffragist Alva Belmont helped her secure funding for the project from the National Women's Party, and the seven-ton white marble sculpture was unveiled on Anthony's birthday in 1921.

      Toward the end of her career, Johnson was unable to sell her work for prices she considered acceptable. Threatened with the loss of her home when she could not pay her taxes in 1939, she pulled a publicity stunt that saved her. She disfigured several of the pieces in her studio, then alerted the press to her symbolic protest. Public sympathy prompted New York Congressman Sol Bloom to intercede on her behalf, which allowed her to hold on to her house until 1947. AT that point, she sold her home and lived with friends. She began to inflate her age, going from eighty-eight to 100 for more press and more sympathy. Newspapers reported her age at her death at 108, although by that time her real age, ninety-six, was remarkable enough i itself.

To find out more

Foirran, Charles, Art and Artists of the Capitol of the United States, 1927

Scherman, Barbara and Carl Hurd Green, eds., Notable American Women: The Modern Period. A Biographical Dictionary, Cambridge, Ma.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1980

Obituary, The New York Times, November 12, 1955

Obituary, The Washington Post, November 11, 1955

Johnson's papers are in the Adelaide Johnson Collection in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress

For More Information

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