Look At Us

As public memorials face a public reckoning, there’s still too little thought paid to how women are represented — as bodies and as selves.

- Megan O'Grady

In her 1792 tract “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman,” Mary Wollstonecraft argued that men and women should be educated together as equals, “for only by the jostlings of equality can we form a just opinion of ourselves.” Wollstonecraft was that rare thing in 18th-century England: a female public intellectual, one who argued passionately for women’s place in society. More than two centuries later, men and women jostle in all matters of public life, and yet their likenesses in the public space do not. In the United Kingdom, by one estimate, only some 3 percent of public statues are of nonroyal women. The number is thought to be about 7 percent in the United States, but in New York City, up until last summer, there were famously only five statues of historic women: the Catholic saint Joan of Arc, the former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir, the Modernist writer Gertrude Stein, the former first lady Eleanor Roosevelt and the abolitionist Harriet Tubman. If humankind vanished tomorrow and aliens arrived from another galaxy, they wouldn’t be faulted for believing that the whole of human history was composed of men on horseback.