New York City's Gender Statue Gap Is (Slowly) Closing
Slowly, academics have begun to include long-overlooked women into their historical narratives. There's still much work to do on that front, but there's another, more concrete representation of historical gender imbalance that needs to be addressed as well: the figures we've chosen to immortalize as public statues.
In New York City, the numbers are astounding-just five monuments honor women, while nearly 150 extol the accomplishments of men. But a new city initiative has taken on the task of remedying this asymmetry.
As Deputy Mayor Alicia Glen, the project's initiator, explained to The Wall Street Journal, "We started She Built NYC to address centuries of overlooking women in the public sphere, and you can’t undo that with a single statue." This past June, She Built NYC issued a call for women to honor, and received a diverse list of 326 eligible nominations in response. Department of Cultural Affairs has set aside up to $10 million over the next for years to realize a chosen few of these statues.
Glen also explained why it's so important that these statues be created. "The ability to connect to our history happens in a very visual way," she told CNN. "If you don't see it, you may not believe it. And when you walk around the city and only see men, you may start to think that women didn't matter, or perhaps that they didn't do anything."
The first monument to be built will honor Congresswoman Shirley Chisholm, the first black member of congress, who represented part of Brooklyn. Chisholm also ran for president in 1972.
The next figure to receive a statue is yet to be announced-and there's a chance it could memorialize more than one woman. According to The Wall Street Journal, the committee tasked with choosing who to commemorate suggested that some monuments might take on themes like women in politics, or center on transgender activists Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. Other women who received nominations include Jackie Kennedy, Zora Neale Hurston, Billie Holiday, and Jane Jacobs. See the full list here.
But as Glen notes, they really can't go wrong. As she told the Journal, "The nearly 2,000 submissions spanned NYC history and included women ranging from elected officials to artists to lighthouse keepers-pretty much all of them deserving of a monument of her own."
('You Might Also Like',)
