Breaking the Bronze Ceiling; Women, Memory, and Public Space
Co Edited by Valentina Rozas-Krause and Andrew M. Shanken
Fordham University Press
2024
9781531506414
https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.12865306
Review by Rukmini Swaminathan
Breaking the Bronze Ceiling; Women, Memory, and Public Space pays homage to a 2020 political campaign in Kentucky. The campaign prompted the construction of a memorial to mark the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage. Such a campaign indicates the sparse existence of commemorative structures dedicated to women by women. Breaking the Bronze Ceiling addresses the underrepresentation of women in the physical landscape of cultural memory and encourages readers to engage with analyses of existing monuments. Through the course of eight chapters and eleven case studies from North America, South America, Africa and Europe, the book draws our attention to the myth of equality using the subject of representation in public spaces.
Monuments of women fall short of “breaking the glass ceiling” as they continue to perpetuate stereotypes of gender. The book highlights this through its structure, which is framed using sculptural tropes: ‘patronized women, public women, women warriors, and allegorical women’. Working through these categories, the authors observe how representations are ‘fixed’ but also co-opted to suit different contexts. Officials and planners are often seconded by the public in the commissioning of work that ‘fixes’ identities. However, every monument discussed in the book also highlights how these ‘fixities’ are contested amongst the public. The monument then becomes a site that initiates the breaking of narratives to include more representations of cultural memory.
On the theme of “patronized women,” Amanda Su’s ‘George Eliot at Nuneaton and Trans Monumentality’ (chapter 2), investigates how anti-BLM (Black Lives Matter) protesters choose to protect the statue of George Eliot, a central monument in the town of Nuneaton in Warwickshire, England. The statue of Eliot depicts her as a docile Victorian woman seated on a bench, looking downcast. It is a precise symbol of women’s domestic roles and the importance of this labor within the mining town. Under the Thatcher government, the coal industry faced severe financial constraints leading to unemployment of white working-class men and redirecting of women's labor to the home. These experiences have since influenced the support for Brexit and anti-BLM protests in Nuneaton. Eliot’s statue has been used to symbolize notions of ‘conformity’ in these political protests. However, Su’s analysis of the statue stresses Eliot’s trangender identity that is suppressed in the narratives of working-class rights. Eliot reflects the co-existence of several identities and several competing narratives; while she was trans and a sympathizer of the Civil war, people who endorse different values from Eliot use her as a symbol of their cause by constraining themselves in their representation of her.
A similar case is seen in the next section, “public women”, where partial lives of certain figures have been incorporated into the ‘public’ imagination. ‘“We Shall Beg No More”: Helen Keller, Politics, and Commemorations in the National Statuary Hall’ (chapter 4) by Sierra Rooney discusses the insertion of a statute of Helen Keller on behalf of the state of Alabama to the National Statuary Hall, Washington D.C. The statue freezes Keller in the body of a young girl next to a water pump, a famous instance in her life when she learned to associate words with images. While the insertion of Keller in the space of primarily male statues demonstrates Alabama’s “progressive” thinking, Rooney brings us back to the ‘fixing’ of Keller’s identity. The infantilization of Keller glorifies her as an icon of disability, while also disassociating her from the liberal values Keller fought for as an adult. The memorialization of figures like Keller and Eliot have placed them in singular molds when in fact, their lives were multifaceted.
In section 3 and 4, ‘women warriors’ and ‘allegorical women’, the gendered subjects resist the freezing of bodies without their consent. The chapters elucidate the gap between the histories sanctioned through monuments and narratives that are inherited and remembered by ‘living’ subjects. By placing material and immaterial actors in conversation with one another, the fissures between the two provide scope for resistance. In ‘The Myth of the Passive Woman in Confederate Monuments’ (chapter 5), Nathaniel Robert Walker discusses the ‘Warrior Queen’ as a symbol of Charleston, South Carolina. Some of Charleston’s statues portray her being protected by a man. During the Civil War, to protect the women and children of the town from ‘outsiders’, the men of Charleston incarcerated them. Drawing on this event, Walker rereads the monuments of the ‘Warrior Queen’ statues as a memory of the women who resisted ‘their own’ people. She argues the women of Charleston protected the city from its own people who wanted to modify the landscape for the sake of progress. These women also campaigned to memorialize the work of confederate women. The confederate sculptures build on the allegory of Patience. They depict women kneeling, thereby submitting to ideals of womanhood envisioned by women of Charleston as the preservation of culture and devotion to family. The artifacts present the women as protectors of the city, taking history into their own hands. However, Walker is critical of what history is being memorialized. While the confederate monuments of Charleston honor women, the representation of ‘black’ women as the ‘mammy’ reifies the ‘fixing’ racial hierarchies. The book underscores the complicacy of women in maintaining racial and class hierarchies while also advocating for gender rights. In another case study, the Antimonumenta collective in Mexico reinscribes the soldaderas monuments that commemorate Mexican women in the revolution. While they acknowledge the ‘indigenous’ woman, she is yet to rewrite her own story like the ‘mammy’.
Despite the Antimonumenta collective’s blindspots, in ‘Firearms, Flowers, and Barricades: Women’s Reinscriptions in the Mexican Landscape of Monuments’ (chapter 6), Tania Gutirrez-Monroy comments on the shared relationship between the commemorated and activists today. She analyzes the Soldaderas statues in Mexico and their inability to suggest the dual role of women as mothers and fighters in the revolution. Shawls worn by the women were used to carry bread and messages between homes bridging the private and public as they moved in these spaces. Though the shawl is cemented on the statues, their adaptive quality between the public/private divide is not comprehended on the statue. The depiction of the Soldaderas women as fighters forgets the other identities she embodies as a mother and a woman, which allow her to move between the public and private worlds so seamlessly. Today, the Antimonumenta collective uses the Soldaderas statues and public spaces to reawaken issues of the ‘home’ and bring them out in the open. They draw inspiration from the past to rewrite their own histories.
The book fittingly concludes with an allegory of Patience who signifies preservation, virtues of care while awaiting change. Daniel Herwitz’s ‘Patience on a Monument: A History Painting’ studies Penny Siopis’s rendition of Patience as black woman sitting on a rock while her surroundings depict the end of the Apartheid in South Africa. It comments on the passive role of women as she patiently accepts her fate of bearing the brunt of violence. Is she sitting on gold? Is she sitting on waste? As she sits on the ‘pile’, Hertwitz’s argues her act of waiting, can be understood as a form of agency. It is finally her turn to speak, assuring readers that the future of memorialization is in the midst of change. As it breaks the “Bronze Ceiling”, we are left with many possibilities of what the future of remembering could look like. The book uses an array of examples from different parts of the world to show the simultaneous “breaking” of “gender equality” in monuments as a global concern. However, in placing these case studies together, there is fear of flattening histories of gender and race which are significantly shaped by their regional contexts.
Rukmini Swaminathan is a PhD student at the department of History, University of Michigan. Her research focuses on postcolonial public housing in India. She is particularly interested in the intersections between design history, material culture and the aesthetics of public culture.