Monuments, Statues, and Commemorations of Women

Sherene Baugher, John H. Jameson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2026
• Print ISBN:
  9781032910383
  9781032936826
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040658086
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Monuments, Statues, and Commemorations of Women examines the heritage messages presented by statuary monuments, focusing on statues and monuments of women and exploring the challenges involved in depicting the key role played by women across different societies.

The chapters within the volume examine the motives behind – and impediments to – the installation and commemoration of women around the world from antiquity to the twenty-first century. Describing the role androcentrism has played in the great predominance of statues memorializing men, the book argues that the lack of statues of accomplished women renders their achievements invisible by erasing them from the past. In describing the identity of the kinds of women who are represented in heritage landscapes, the authors use diverse perspectives to evaluate the roles of race, class, ethnicity, gender, and religion and consider how they impact what kinds of women are represented on or in heritage landscapes. Case studies from Australia, Europe, Africa, and North America explore and analyze the statues and monuments of women of color, white women, and LGBTQ+ women.

Monuments, Statues, and Commemorations of Women is essential reading for academics and students working in the fields of archaeology, and feminist studies, cultural heritage, history, and art history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Contributors
• Series Foreword
• 1 Where Are the Monuments to Women?: An Introduction
• Section I Monumental Symbols, Heroes, and Real Women
• 2 The Boadicea and Her Daughters Statue Near Parliament
• 3 Commemoration of Molly Brant: A Canadian and American Dichotomy in Memorialization of an Indigenous Woman
• 4 In the Footsteps of Heroines: Resurrecting a Nineteenth-Century Female Leader, Efunroye Tinubu, in Twentieth-Century Nigerian Politics
• 5 Monuments from the Margins: Reframing the Visibility of Women in London’s Commemorative Landscape
• 6 The Missing Statues of a City’s History: Female Representation among Commemorative Monuments in the City of Leiden
• 7 The Waving Girl of Savannah: Commemoration, Local Memory, and the Politics of Place
• 8 The Rebecca Nurse Monument and George Jacobs Headstone: Using Landscape Archaeology to Discover a Commemorative Environment
• 9 Remembering Millicent Fenwick, the Conscience of Congress
• Section II Battling Oppression in the Twenty-First Century
• 10 Remembering Their Contributions: American Statues to Harriet Tubman and Other Black Women of Achievement
• 11 Why Katherine Johnson? Why Now?: The Shifting Symbolism in Black Women Statuary at HBCUs
• 12 Statuary and a Gendered Reckoning with Australia’s Settler-Colonial Past
• 13 Public Statues of Women: Who Are They for? Working Women?
• 14 Queering “His-Stories” Versus “Herstories” in Narratives about Statues of Women in European Cultures: Insights from Feminist Theories
• 15 The Enthralled Male Gaze
• 16 Monuments to Queer Women: Navigating Complexities and a Typology
• Index