Ida B.Wells is one of my sheroes. I was planning to open Women’s History Month with a story dedicated specifically to her, because I was delighted to see the street that had been re-named for her in Chicago now has the street signs up.
A stretch of Congress from Grant Park to the Jane Byrne Interchange was officially changed to Ida B. Wells Drive during a renaming ceremony Monday morning at the Harold Washington Library Center downtown.
Her name and life's work is recognized at the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Alabama, but now Wells is getting recognition in Chicago, which been a long time coming.
She's actually the first African American woman to get a street named after her in downtown Chicago. A monument will also be placed in her honor at the former site of the Ida B. Wells housing project next year. Among those present as Wells was honored was her great-granddaughter Michelle Duster.
This wouldn’t have been my first story on Wells and anti-lynching activists, and it won’t be my last. You can go back and read: “The 'strange fruit' was often female”; “Ida Bell Wells-Barnett was a lioness”; “Ida B. Wells: Women's History Month shero”; and “Ida B. Wells-Barnett fought to make black lives matter.”
I changed my mind, though, when I checked to see what was happening with a statue/monument to Wells, which has been in the planning stages for years. The funds have been raised and it looks like finally, somewhere in the U.S., there will be a public statue of her. It’s hard to believe there has never been one, though not so hard when I realized that there are very few statues, monuments, or memorials to historical women—of any color—across the U.S.
To be honest, I hadn’t thought much about that at all. My focus has been on the removal of statues, monuments, and shrines to white supremacy and the confederacy. That includes the one of Dr. J. Marion Sims in New York City, who experimented on enslaved black women.
While reading stories about the planned Wells statue I came across this interview at Shondaland with Wells’ great-granddaughter, Michelle Duster:
SL: It seems so strange that Ida B. Wells, who has such a legacy and made such a difference in American history, doesn’t have a monument already. Why is this?
It’s not only about Ida B. Wells not getting recognized. Women in general have been underrepresented, underappreciated, and understudied. We haven’t gotten much recognition in this country as far as monuments or buildings, parks, streets, or any other kind of things named after them. Overall, less than 10 percent of the country's statues are dedicated to women and out of the national monuments only 2 percent are dedicated to women. There are about 50 statues of real people in Chicago parks and only one — one — is of a woman. And that’s of Gwendolyn Brooks and it was installed about a month ago. There are statues of make believe women, like symbolic figures or Dorothy from “The Wizard of Oz,” but not real people. It’s the same in New York City. There are only five statues in New York City that are of women.
In Chicago we just recently worked with a Alderman to have a street named after Ida B. Wells. It’ll be the first time that any street in the city has been named after a woman — any woman. So it’s not just her. And it's worse for black women. Just based on my own research, because I haven’t been able to find a central location for the information, there are only about 12 statues of black women nationally. It’s just a really incredible lack of representation across the board. By contrast there are more than 700 Confederate statues and over 1,700 public sites that recognize the Confederacy.
Having no idea that women were so poorly represented in public spaces, I sat here and chided myself for not having noticed. As a feminist, professor of women’s studies, and former art history major, I should have.
The City of Chicago honored teacher, journalist, suffragist and civil rights leader Ida B. Wells Monday, renaming Congress Parkway downtown in her honor.
Gender disparities don’t only apply to statues and memorials. Street names are being examined, too. “Mapping the Gender Imbalance in City Street Names” looks at this issue from a global perspective.
The results are fascinating, and maybe not surprising: streets named after men are more numerous and more centrally located than streets named after women in the metro areas we analyzed. Between Bengaluru, Chennai, London, Mumbai, New Delhi, Paris, and San Francisco, the percentage of streets named after women is an average of 27.5. Among the cities in India, Bengaluru tops the list with 39% of streets named after women.
Reading some of the history while researching the proposed Wells statue made my stomach churn.
In 1923, North Carolina Congressman Charles Manly Stedman proposed the construction of a memorial to honor the “faithful colored mammies of the South.” With the support of Southern leadership groups like the Daughters of the Confederacy, the Senate backed the bill to memorialize the enslaved Black women who performed domestic labor. But the protests from Black leaders in response—as well as backlash in the national press—led the bill to stall out in the House of Representatives. Nearly a century later, however, there’s a new push to honor a Black heroine of America’s past.
Mammies? Um … hell, no! Thankfully that was quashed. We were already put on pancake boxes as Aunt Jemima.
I happen to live in Ulster County in New York State, which does have several statues of Sojourner Truth. She was born enslaved here, as Isabella Baumfree.
The Rev. James Rowe describes her statue, which he sees on his early morning jog:
She is carrying two heavy jugs, one of liquor and one of molasses, back from the Rondout Creek area where she would have purchased them for her owner who ran the local Jug Tavern. The statue is beautiful, but it is not pretty. Her clothing is a rag of a dress, her feet bare, her back showing the scars of beatings, and in the predawn light I can almost see the determination in her eyes set toward freedom.
I sat here thinking about all the statues and monuments I’ve seen in my travels across the U.S. They almost all seemed to be of men. Growing up in New York City, I made many trips to the Statue of Liberty, aka “Lady Liberty.” However she is a symbolic figure, not a real woman from our history. A quick internet search turned up several articles exploring the lack of representation of women in public spaces:
Where are the women? New effort to give them just due on monuments, street names
The National Park Service lists 152 monuments in the United States, which range from buildings to volcanoes and canyons. Only three (less than 2%) are dedicated to historic female figures: Harriet Tubman Underground Railroad National Historic Park in Maryland, the Belmont-Paul Women's Equality National Monument in the District of Columbia, and the Rose Atoll in the US territory of American Samoa, named for a female explorer. All three have been established in the past decade.
Why the dearth of statues honoring women in Statuary Hall and elsewhere?
When the 2011 Maryland General Assembly session ended Monday, left unfinished was the effort of some residents to honor a famed abolitionist in a space held by a long-forgotten Revolutionary War figure. The failure of the campaign to replace a sculpture of John Hanson in the U.S. Capitol’s National Statuary Hall with one of Harriet Tubman especially irked some women’s advocates. “I am pretty disgusted,” says Linda Mahoney, president of the Maryland Chapter of the National Organization for Women. “Women continue to be put in the margins or in the footnotes. Yet there is just so much documentation about what Harriet Tubman did. This is separate and unequal treatment.”
But even those advocating for Tubman might not have realized how rare it is to establish a statue commemorating a female figure. Of the 5,193 public outdoor sculptures of individuals in the United States, only 394, or less than 8 percent, are of women, compared with 4,799 of men, according to the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s Art Inventories Catalog, considered the most up-to-date catalogue of such works. And none of the 44 national memorials managed by the National Park Service (such as the Lincoln Memorial) specifically focuses on women and their accomplishments, writes art historian Erika Doss in her book “Memorial Mania.”
The lack of female monuments and statuary “sends a very clear nonverbal message . . . about the relative stature of boys and girls and men and women. It expands the broader message that the contributions of women don’t matter,” says Lynette Long, a Washington area psychologist and founder of EVE (Equal Visibility Everywhere), a year-old nonprofit group that advocates for gender parity among the nation’s signs, symbols, monuments, currencies and even parade balloons. Long says the nonverbal signal sent by the dominance of male statuary trumps any verbal communication girls receive about being equal to boys. “Humans tend to trust the nonverbal, and the statues send a very clear nonverbal message. Girls can’t be what they can’t see,” she says.
It’s Way Too Hard to Find Statues of Notable Women in the U.S.
When you walk the streets of cities like New York and Washington, D.C., it’s hard to miss the sculptures that mark the parks and neighborhoods. Historic figures often can be seen standing erect or sitting astride on their horses, stoically striking a poise. More often than not, these statues have another thing in common: their gender. The majority of public statues in the United States are of men.
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A group called Where Are The Women? is looking to change this ratio. Recently, it successfully campaigned to have statues of women’s rights pioneers Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton installed in Central Park (which, notoriously, had no statues of non-fictional women on its grounds) and is now raising funds to build the suffragettes.
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Currently, few of the statues that do show women on city streets around the country are modeled on historic figues, Kriston Capps writes for CityLab. Instead, women often appear as archetypes, symbols of abstract concepts or as nameless figures in a memorial. While one campaign isn't enough to solve persistent issues of gender discrimination and inequality in the U.S., by pressing to honor real women from history, cities around the country can restore them to a story that has ignored them for so long. After all, as it stands now, there remains only five public statues of historic women in New York City: Joan of Arc, Golda Meir, Gertrude Stein, Eleanor Roosevelt and Harriet Tubman.
The Only Five Public Statues of Historic Women in NYC
Recently we covered the Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony Statue Fund’s campaign to install sculptures of the suffragists in New York’s Central Park, as out of the park’s 29 statues not one is of a real woman. Setting aside the allegorical females and fictional heroines like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, who are the historic women honored in New York’s public statuary?
There aren’t many. However as NYC Parks Commissioner Mitchell J. Silver told Next City last week, he and Mayor Bill de Blasio are “absolutely thrilled we can address this inequity,” noting their conceptual approval for the statues of Stanton and Anthony that puts them into the fundraising stage. Meanwhile up in Queens at its Borough Hall, the former plaza of the “Triumph of Civic Virtue,” a much hated 1920s sculpture of a nearly nude man with a sword standing on two female sirens, may be remade into a place honoring prominent women from Queens. (As for “Civic Virtue,” he was exiled to Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery in 2012.)
A few women are honored on the I. Miller Building at Broadway and 46th Street, restored last year, with sculptures of Mary Pickford, Ethel Barrymore, Marilyn Miller, and Rosa Ponselle. And at the Bronx Community College’s Hall of Fame for Great Americans, busts of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Susan B. Anthony, Mary Lyon, Maria Mitchell, Emma Willard, Alice Freeman Palmer, and Lillian Wald are included. Then there are a few statues on churches of saints and of real women on private property that have a public presence, like the statue of Mother Clara Hale at the Hale House. There are also the faces of female models if you know where to look, like Audrey Munson, who posed for several statues including the Isador and Ida Straus Memorial. Yet none of these can really be considered as public statuary that honors individual historic women.
We’ve looked at Washington and New York City. Here’s a piece from the West Coast:
Inside the Push for More Public Statues of Notable Women
Kanishka Karunaratne jogs by Golden Gate Park regularly, but until recently she never paid much attention to its monuments.
During a January event aimed at mobilizing young women to run for political office, Karunaratne heard an interesting factoid from former U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios: The only women among Central Park’s statues are Alice in Wonderland, Shakespeare’s Juliet and Mother Goose.
Karunaratne, a legislative aide for San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors, decided to look into the park near her home, and was shocked to find it fared even worse. The only female figure there is the “Pioneer Mother,” who symbolizes the matriarchs who moved west along the Oregon and California trails. And across the 87 statues in the entire city, only former Mayor and U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Florence Nightingale are represented.
Things are starting to change, and in a year where we see a historic group of Democratic women running for the presidency, it is fitting that Shirley Chisholm will finally be getting her due.
N.Y. Today: The City Has Few Statues of Women. Here Comes Shirley Chisholm.
A statue of Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to serve in the House of Representatives, is coming in 2020. It’ll be placed outside the Parkside entrance to Prospect Park.
“We set out to correct a glaring inequity in our public spaces,” New York’s first lady, Chirlane McCray, said in an interview on Thursday.
Shirley Chisholm selected as first She Built NYC monument
In June 2018, New York City First Lady Chirlane McCray and Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen launched She Built NYC, an initiative to commission public monuments honoring the women who have made New York City the most dynamic place on the globe.
The effort kicked off with an open call for nominations. Through women.nyc, members of the public submitted close to 2,000 nominations of women, groups of women, and events in women’s history they believed should be permanently memorialized through She Built NYC.
To see the full list of public nominations, please click here.
Scrolling through the list of public nominations submitted for New York, I found quite a few names I’d like to see memorialized in public spaces, and most are not specific to the city.
What woman, or women, would you like to see statues of in your area?