Where Are the Women? If Statues are Tributes, Why are There So Few Women?

There is a statue of three important women now in Central Park. It took years to get it done. To say it's a start is kind of pathetic.

Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument, Central Park. Photo: Central Park Conservancy

NOTE: As I’m scanning my past published pieces for the book of essays I’m in the process of putting together, I’ve come across several I’d forgotten about but still find interesting. As I do this, I’ll pass them along to you, hoping you’ll find them interesting, too. Some of them are old enough that they need updating or explanations. This is one of them.

When I first wrote this piece for Medium, there were no coins depicting women, other than the Susan B. Anthony dollar, which never really became a thing and is just a collector’s item now. Now we have quarters with five famous women on them. Yay for us!

And the Central Park monument has become a reality. Yay again! But what took so long? And what’s next?

If I’ve missed something since writing this piece, please let me know. If there are new statues of women anywhere in the country, I want to know about them. If not, I want to know why not. As always, the comment section is open. Fire away!

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Imagine that Women’s Faces Were Everywhere and Men’s Faces Were Not

(First published at Medium, May, 2019)

Suffragists Stanton, Anthony, and Mott. Photo credit: Architect of the Capitol (AOC)

I watch CBS’s Sunday Morning almost every week. It’s a relaxing hour-and-a-half celebrating creativity, inspiration, and nature. Simple joys. To hell with the rest of the world while it’s on. I’m transported. I need this.

So last Sunday, when one of the segments was about the statuary in NYC’s Central Park, I cozied up. Ah, art! I’m in! I’ve never been to Central Park but I learned there are 23 statues lining the park’s paths. There are statues of Shakespeare, Hamilton, and Christopher Columbus. There is a statue of Balto, the dog. But who’s missing? Women. Of those 23 statues, there are two depictions of women: Mother Goose and Alice in Wonderland.

(I know! I had that same reaction.)

So, because that was just so ridiculous, two women, Coline Jenkins and Pam Elam, formed an organization called Monumental Women and began hounding the park people to consider a proposed statue of our favorite suffragists, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. (Jenkins is Stanton’s great-great granddaughter.) They got nowhere, but, as they said — not exactly triumphantly — they persisted.

On that Sunday Morning airing all they could say is it may or may not happen, which sort of tells us it probably won’t.

Then they moved away from Central Park and talked about another statue of the suffragists— Stanton and Anthony and a third, Lucretia Mott — a huge, ambitious sculpture that, after much fanfare over its installation in the Capitol Rotunda in 1921, was removed from public viewing the very next day and left to languish in a deep dark place away from the public until 1997, when it was finally returned to the Rotunda. Seventy-six years later. (See above photo.)

But what caught me by the neck hairs and raised me up out of my chair was a conversation with psychologist Lynette Long, the head of the group, EVE, Equal Visibility Everywhere. They were talking about the need for role models and what those large, expensive displays could mean to girls and women looking for confirmation that their gender matters, when Lynette recounted a conversation she had with one of her children:

“One day I said to my son, ‘How would you feel if you looked at every statue and it was a woman? And on all the coins it was a woman? And all the streets are named after women, and the schools, national holidays? There’s not a single holiday named after a woman. And he’s like, ‘I get it.’”

And I was like, “I get it”.

Why is it that depictions of America’s important women are missing from so many public places? Why are our role models so under-represented on street signs and buildings and fricking statues? And how can it be that women have tried to open our eyes to this for decades and even those of us who call ourselves proud feminists never put two and two together? We’re invisible. And it’s deliberate.

Of the 100 statues in Statuary Hall in the Capitol, 11 of them are women. Each state gets to place two statues depicting people they’re most proud of. You’ve probably seen Oklahoma’s choice, Will Rogers. His statue happens to be in the very spot where lawmakers most often talk to the press. The cameras catch his “Aw, shucks” stance as the politicians at his feet dance around the inevitable “yes or no” questions. I’m glad it’s there. But how about taking those cameras over to a woman once in a while?

The 11 women include Helen Keller and Sacajawea, along with suffragists, teachers, scientists and a Mother Superior. But Kansas now wants to change that number. They want to replace one of their male statues with Amelia Earhart.

As shown in the Sunday Morning segment (see Monumental Women link below), two male sculptors are hard at work on the prototype. They want Amelia to appear tough and courageous — everything they think women want to be — so they’ve made her look as masculine as possible.

I always thought Amelia was beautiful, even in her aviator garb. She was tough, she was smart, and she wasn’t above posing for glamour shots. The contrast between her looks and her vocation was a big part of her mystique. It was hard to believe, during her time, that a woman who looked like Amelia could do the things she did with such aplomb. She was fascinating because she reveled in being a woman but did the job of a man. I want them to keep her in her aviator clothing but soften her look. I want her to look like the woman she wanted the world to see.

Photograph: File/Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe College/AP

I want to see statues of Eleanor Roosevelt, Hillary Clinton, Shirley Chisolm, Barbara Jordan, Mother Jones, Dolores Huerta, Nancy Pelosi, Bella Abzug, Gloria Steinem, “Big Annie” Clemenc, Ida B. Welles, Erin Brockovich, Viola Liuzzo, Maya Angelou, Betty Friedan, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and all those other women who shaped us and fought for us and showed us what grace and courage looks like. I want to see their names on bridges and road signs and on our money. (Yes, I remember Susan B. Anthony on the dollar coin. Seen any of those lately?)

Update: They did it! They put women on coins. It’s a start:

I want to see the first national holiday honoring a woman.

I want to live in a country where women aren’t invisible because of their sex and men aren’t venerated because of theirs. I want that little Girl Scout carrying the sign that reads “We can’t be what we can’t see” to know that we’re working hard to open those doors, to shatter that ceiling, to throw off those cloaks of invisibility. I want her to know we will be seen.

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**Addendum: On August 26, 2020 a new statue depicting women will be unveiled in Central Park. It depicts Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. The women of Monumental Women did it! Story here.

Update, 2025: They did it! This is the unveiling.

Monumental Women's live event unveiling the first statue of real women in NYC's Central Park.

Are women so invisible the country hasn’t seen fit to memorialize them, even in statuary? It seems so. Is it a big deal? It is to us women. Or it should be. We aren’t seen. Even now, we’re not seen. I want to be seen. How about you?

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