Contemporary Justice and Woman

As the result of an open competition, the Section of Painting and Sculpture commissioned Emil Bisttram, John Ballator, and Symeon Shimin in June of 1936 to create artworks for the walls of a stairwell at the U.S. Department of Justice Building.  Their theme was the “emancipation of humanity through justice.” Bisttram took on the subject of Contemporary Justice and Woman.

Sixteen years after the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment guaranteeing women’s suffrage and three years after Frances Perkins became the first female presidential cabinet member, Bisttram portrayed the emancipation of women under the law. The bottom register depicts women in the past who were bound to traditional homemaking activities such as rearing children, laundering, preparing food, cleaning, and weaving. Their powerlessness is captured in the scene of a bare-breasted woman with her arms and legs shackled kneeling before a man who wears animal skins and holds a club.

The central panel above depicts Justice with a sword.  She has broken the chains of bondage and hands them to a male judge. Below her crouches an old, hooded woman holding the broken shackle, now freed from tradition. In the background, a liberated woman in white ascends toward a light in the distance, representing her journey toward an elevated position in society. Vignettes of modern women in new professional and civic roles frame the central panel. On the left, women are depicted as painters, sculptors, scholars, students, and executives. On the right, they are shown as dancers, athletes, voters, and scientists. These scenes of modern women do not include the unskilled labor typically assumed by working-class women in the 1930s.

Bisttram initially proposed painting two inscriptions on the painting: “Woman Emancipated Through Justice” along the top and “Tradition, Fear, Ignorance Bound Women” at the bottom.  To reinforce the contrast in scenes. Bisttram depicts the tradition-bound women with darker complexions in comparison to the “modern” women, who are slender, chic, and White.

Bisttram installed and signed the mural in 1937. The building’s architects rejected the two inscriptions and arranged for the artist Mitchell Jamieson to paint a laurel border along the top in 1938, where one of the inscriptions would have appeared.