Where are the women in Central Park?
Print Edition
WANDER through Central Park past monuments to figures such as Christopher Columbus, Alexander Hamilton, William Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott, and it may suddenly hit you: Where are the women?
There are none, if you discount fictional characters like Mother Goose and Alice in Wonderland.
Even a heroic dog has its place amid the park’s 843 acres of greenery, but every one of the 23 statues or busts of humans in the park honors a man.
Some Girl Scouts are now trying to change that. They have joined activists raising money for a park monument to two women who revolutionized the country: suffragists Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B Anthony.
“We’re trying to crack the bronze ceiling,” deadpans Pamela Elam, who is spearheading the effort along with Stanton’s great-great-granddaughter, Coline Jenkins.
The aim of the awareness and fundraising campaign — called Central Park, Where Are The Women? — is to erect the statue by 2020, the centennial of American women’s right to vote.
“There are no statues of women, and there’s tons of men,” says Pippa Lee, 10, a scout with Manhattan’s Girl Scout Troop 3484. “We really need a woman’s statue for girls to look up to, not just Mother Goose or Alice in Wonderland. They don’t count.”
Parks Commissioner Mitchell Silver has given the green light to the suffragist monument, which is to rise by Central Park West at the 77th Street entrance.
During one weekly scout meeting in Central Park, the fifth-graders collected US$123 from passers-by on a sidewalk near the future statue site, while chanting “Where are the women?”Any artist may submit a monument design following certain criteria and a jury will pick the winner sometime next year.
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