Putting Her on A Pedestal | Building Monuments to Real Women
Recently there has been a growing focus on the scarcity of monuments to women, and a call for change. The number of monuments to women in the United States is estimated at 7%. In the UK, that number is even lower, at 3% for nonroyals, according to New York Times Magazine. (NYtimes.com/2021/02/18) None of the 44 memorials maintained by the National Parks Service honor women, according to Smithsonianmag.org.
Megan O’Grady, in her February NYT magazine article rhetorically asks why we care about this issue, “in an era in which statues are tumbling down.” The answer she provides is that, “in the theatre of the public imagination, representation still matters.” I would add that if we want a future of true gender equality, our public spaces and our art, must reflect not only who we have been, but who we want to be. In the words of Plato, as we often repeat at ATHENA International, “what is honored in a country is cultivated there.”
Many older statues represent women who are nude, immature, fictional, or frightening. However, even more recent statues such as a 2020 statue of a naked Mary Wollstonecraft erected in London, as well as 2017’s “Fearless Girl,” a privately sponsored sculpture of a girl with a ponytail near Wall Street are according to O’Grady, “statutory folly.” Other statues represent women more equitably. The “Boston Women’s Memorial,” erected in 2003 on Commonwealth Avenue, features three women who shaped Boston’s history: Abigail Adams, Lucy Stone and Phillis Wheatley. Virginia also has a “Women’s Memorial,” which honors 12 fascinating women.
Last summer, The Women’s’ Rights Pioneers Monument was installed in Central Park and has quickly become a frequently visited site. The memorial honors three incredible suffragists: Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. It was the first women’s memorial (of the nonfictional variety) installed in Central Park in its 167-year history. All the women are clothed. The organization that raised funds for the project, Monumental Women, hopes to, “write women back into the historical record,” through educational partnerships and advocates for honoring women and their achievements in municipal spaces.
I live in a revolutionary war town and meet friends for walks at the “Paul Revere Capture Site” in Lincoln, Massachusetts (years ago my kids loved learning that he called the British “bastards,” a statement memorialized in a plaque at the site). I recently learned of revolutionary war hero Sybil Ludington, a sixteen-year-old young woman who demonstrated incredible bravery and skill on her own midnight ride through Putnam County, New York. Although Paul Revere is a key figure in American history, and many have visited his prominent statue in Boston, the far lesser-known Ludington rode almost twice as far to warn her local militia of an imminent battle in Danbury, Connecticut! While riding, unlike Revere, she was forced to fend off dangerous men with a stick. A statue of Ludington (with her stick) was erected in the small town of Carmel, New York, over 50 years ago. Most of us have never seen it. We don’t even have the fortune of knowing how Ms. Ludington would have described the British. Like many female heroes, her words and deeds were until recently largely forgotten.
As we stroll through our public spaces this spring and summer and visit monuments that reflect our society, let’s consider the possibilities for honoring real women who embody the history and the future that we wish to cultivate. In the words of Amanda Gorman, “for while we have our eyes on the future, history has its eyes on us.”
Karen J Laufer
ATHENA contributor