Half the Population, None of the Pedestals
An analysis about what we choose to honor, and how it affects our perception of reality.
I want you to think about all the statues you’ve seen. How many were of George Washington? Now how many were of women? Any women.
You might immediately think of
But I want you to try to think of a statue of a historic, real woman. Not a woman who is the personification of an ideal (like liberty), but an actual woman who did a thing and we put up a statue.
Please, help me out in the comments with any statues of actual women, because all I can think of is the Molly Malone statue in Dublin, Ireland.
Despite women making up more than half (yes, 51%) of the population, we are often treated as a minority. Women are in a unique situation in that we are actually in more of a position of power than we think, but the world is so tilted toward the male that it is sometimes very easy to forget that. Caroline Criado Perez in her book Invisible Women illustrates this point far better than I ever could, but what I want to explore today is how the world of what we choose to honor in statues reveals this issue so well.
It’s quite telling that there are more statues of creatures that I can recall than statues of historic women. I mean, Balto deserves a statue too, don’t get me wrong, but all of NYC has only 5 statues of historic women? Philadelphia only has 4. At maximum estimates, only 8% of statues are of women.
Who Cares about Statues?
Statues are the monuments the past chose to erect because they thought those folks were worthy of our time and attention. They wanted us to remember these people, know who they were, and tell their stories.
Statues are not only remembrances of the past, they are active landmarks. They become a part of a place and the zeitgeist of it. For example, the Sailor and Soldiers Arch is a monument in Hartford that has become a symbol of the city because it is so distinguishable and so central. It’s also where most events downtown are held, and every Tuesday a running group of about 100 people meets there to do a run around Bushnell Park. These monuments and statues become part of our present.
In the last decade there was a lot of discourse about removing Confederate statues for the same argument. The statues we leave up are endorsements of what we choose to honor over time. And somehow we are still not ready to recognize the women of the past. Perhaps we just keep forgetting they did anything since we haven’t left up anything to remember them.
I saw the same point made when I was in Dublin, Ireland. In addition to the Molly Malone statue, I saw this:
So who are some of those great women we forgot? Some of them have been Wright under your nose.
The Women We Forgot
Here’s some women that have been forgotten, and here’s the real kicker: most really talented women don’t want to spend their lifetimes waiting to be heard. They don’t have time to wait for the next generation or for their society to get their shit together and recognize their brilliance. So you know what many historic women did? Married or associated with some pretty incredible men, who then were given the credit for all the work they did. Here are just a few examples:
Watson and Crick and Rosalind Franklin
Rosalind Franklin was a chemist and X-ray crystallographer who studied DNA at King's College London from 1951 to 1953. Her unpublished data paved the way for Watson and Crick's breakthrough, including the now-famous Photograph 51 — an X-ray image that immediately convinced Watson the molecule's structure was a helix.
There’s speculation they stole her work and there’s speculation that maybe she was a collaborator. Regardless, she did not get credited until years after her death and was not a part of the Nobel Prize awarded to Watson and Crick.
There’s a word for this phenomenon of men stealing the research of women. The Matilda effect. How prevalent does something have to be before there’s a name for it?
The Wright Brothers and their SISTER, Katherine
The brothers known for the invention of flight never could have done it without their sister. She learned advanced mathematics with them, helped them come up with new ideas, ran their households, kept the brothers going when they thought all was lost, and in the end, when she decided to get married, her brother erased her from history. This Drunk History has a great segment that explains this story in a far more entertaining way than I could.
Upon his death in 1948, Orville Wright left $300,000 to Oberlin College in her honor — and he had once been quoted as saying "When the world speaks of the Wrights, it must include our sister."
Maria Anna Mozart
Yup, like the famous Wolfgang Mozart. She’s not even mentioned in the movie, Amadeus, but Maria Anna Mozart was a child prodigy alongside Wolfgang. The two toured performing together at the biggest courts of Europe as wunderkinder. There are reviews praising her performances — she was even billed above Wolfgang on some of those tours. However, that all stopped once she turned 18. For a woman to be out so publicly was improper. Today none of her work survives.
Imagine the beauty we have lost - the music folios, the paintings, the poems, the perspective - just because we’ve suppressed the voices and talents of women for so long. Encouraging them to just be vessels for the next ‘great man’.
These women I’ve mentioned, that we know about but haven’t honored, have all been white, and there are plenty of women of color we also know have been forgotten by time, and unfortunately so many have been lost who we can’t even remember anymore. They are not less great because they’ve been forgotten; we are the lesser for not knowing them, not the other way around.
Here’s just one more woman, a woman of color, that we should have had a statue of long ago:
Katherine Johnson (of Hidden Figures)
Katherine Johnson was an American mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. crewed spaceflights. She worked at NASA for 33 years, calculating trajectories for Project Mercury and the Apollo missions.
When John Glenn was about to become the first American to orbit the Earth, he requested that Johnson personally verify the electronic computer's calculations by hand. "If she says they're good," he said, "then I'm ready to go." When his life mattered, he didn’t quibble about race or gender, he wanted the best, and she was.
These are just a handful of impressive women and I could go on and on, because women have been half the population of the world for all of time. My point is that history has been largely written by men for men, and women haven’t always been viewed as worth listening to.
These are just the women we know about, the ones who made it through the sieves of time, but it makes me really sad to think about all those other women we will never remember. It’s one of the reasons I do what I do on my other Substack, “What Surfaced”, where I tell the stories I find in archives, like this one about a woman in NYC whose story started a turning point in its corrupt trajectory.
The Impact
We erect statues of the past to remember, and if we’re not remembering the incredible things that women have done in the same measure as men, there are going to be those folks that inevitably fall into the trap of thinking that women don’t do/haven’t done anything.
I remember about ten years ago being at a conference where a man about my age was presenting a summary of research that indicated women performed less well in STEM classes, and this explained the reason for less women in the STEM fields.
Don’t worry, I said something, and I didn’t rip his head off either, but pointed out directly the flaws in his argument in the Q&A. He’s just ignorant, and it isn’t totally his fault; he didn’t grow up with statues of Rosalind Franklin around. I got an applause.
In 1916 no one would have been applauding. I would have been kicked out. In fact, 1920 is when Oxford finally opened its doors to women, and it’s not like that was easy for the first women. It’s not like everyone in 1920 suddenly stopped thinking women were inferior. There’s been progress, but there is still work to do.
It’s shocking that only a decade ago we still have people presenting at conferences -meaning someone read that abstract and let it through to the presentations, denying someone else that slot - that can still make these wild claims about women’s abilities/brains and STEM fields, even with the changes we’ve had, we need more changing.
We need more statues.
Right now we ask all people to look up to the men on those pedestals and imagine the past, and all they can see are great men.
And a great dog, good Balto.
But imagine if, instead, they could look up and see the truth; that there have been great men and women of all races and creeds, and they all deserve to be remembered.
If you know of an incredible woman we should be honoring, I’d love to hear a little about her in the comments.