Professor Clare Wright is a woman on a mission.
She wants to address the under-representation of women in Melbourne’s statues where, out of 580 public statues, only nine are of real women.
Clare Wright with a statue ‘Sofia’ by Herman Hohaus at LaTrobe University Bundoora Campus which typifies the allegorical depiction of women in statues. Credit:Paul Jeffers
“It’s not a very pretty picture,” the La Trobe University historian says. “It gives very culturally coded messaging to our current generation of Australians, not only Australian girls, as to what they might be capable of achieving.”
Professor Wright heads a lobby group A Monument of One’s Own, which surveyed Melbourne’s statues and found only 36 are of women and of those only nine are historical, named women rather than allegorical or symbolic figures.
Betty Cuthbert is one of the female athletes immortalised in bronze.Credit:Michael Rayner
The nine statues of real women include four saints, two athletes, a queen, the founder of the children’s literature collection at the State Library and an Indigenous rights campaigner who, in the statue, is presented as a wife.
The remaining symbolic and fictional women are largely semi dressed, often reclining and depict a maternal, saintly or sexualised image of women rather than of achievements, including an audience member at a musical performance, sick children and a statue representing chastity, fertility, the moon and hunting.
Ms Wright says the dearth of statues of women in Melbourne adds to the “respect gap” in Australian civic and political life.
“When all of the people that we appear to consider significant and important and valuable enough to commemorate are male, that sends very strong messages, both to women and to men about who is worthy of respect,” she says.
Invisible women: Melbourne’s monumental problem – and how to fix it
Source: Philippines Alive
