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PS19 Breaking the Bronze Ceiling: Memorials and Gender 8:30 - 10:40am Friday, 1st May, 2020 Location Federal, B Level Track Track 4 Session Chair Valentina Rozas-Krause, Andrew M. Shanken All session times are in US PACIFIC DAYLIGHT TIME (PDT). 8:35 - 8:55am PS19 La Marianne in colonial North Africa: A civilizing missionary? Daniel E Coslett University of Washington, Seattle, USA Abstract Representations of women were relatively rare in the public art of French colonial North Africa. In the Maghreb, which was far from immune to nineteenth-century European “statuemania,” statues of male politicians, soldiers, clerics, and others dominated. When women did appear, however, they were almost exclusively present in the form of allegorical sculptures intended to represent France, and thus the state, culture, and power of the colonizing authority. The stoic Marianne figure — a scantily clad woman dressed in classical garb and Phrygian (or Liberty) cap — was deployed in public squares and inside town halls for this inescapably political purpose. While a number of scholars have addressed the use of the female body in allegorical French art more broadly, the socio-political significance of this art form within the context of colonial built environments has escaped critical interrogation. This paper, which considers monuments and statues designed for Tunisia and Algeria during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, attends to compelling questions regarding socio-political symbolism in public spaces, aesthetic responsiveness to cultural norms, and the accommodation of various audiences. Within the Muslim context, what did the installation of statues depicting semi-nude White women mean? In a time and place in which Europeans fetishized North African culture and female bodies, how did La Marianne function for both French and indigenous viewers? How were standard representations popular in Europe modified for use in occupied North Africa? Assessing the degree to which imperialist intentions changed meanings and complicated matters is the aim of this paper. Based on several years of on-site and archival research conducted in North Africa and France, it presents works of art that are known, but also unbuilt and unpublished pieces. It explores historic issues that may help inform current debates regarding the suitability of public monuments, representations of the past, and gender equity. 8:55 - 9:15am PS19 Warrior Queens of Ocean: The Monumental Women of Charleston Nathaniel Robert Walker The College of Charleston, Charleston, USA Abstract In 1932, on the southern tip of the peninsula of Charleston, facing the island fortresses and harbor where the American Civil War had raged for four years, a monument was erected to “The Confederate Defenders” of the city. It featured a strong, heroically nude male warrior with shield raised and sword drawn, poised to protect the motherly, placid woman behind him. He is Fort Sumter, and she is Charleston itself, a city that, like many others, had for many years been represented as an allegorical female. In the past this woman had been proud and strong, the “Warrior Queen of Ocean,” but public commemoration of the doomed Southern cause demanded different modes of feminine behavior. At the unveiling, a Confederate veteran praised Southern women by saying, “They also serve who only stand and wait.” Indeed, the new statue depicted the former Warrior Queen doing little else, and as other memorials to women were erected in nearby communities, they too depicted women in decidedly docile poses: one sits placidly, while another clenches her hands in supplication for divine protection. Ironically, however, the monuments of Charleston were most often built by very active women. Furthermore, the entire historic district of Charleston was saved in exactly these years by women, who defended the city from careless men! This paper will trace the trajectory of this contradiction in bronze and stone, in which powerful female agency contributed to the monumental representation of female passivity, ending with the subversion of this dynamic by the women who seized the future of Charleston on their own terms and established the nation's first historic preservation zoning ordinance. As that ordinance approaches its centennial anniversary, there is a growing chorus in the city today to raise a new monument to the women who stood and absolutely refused to wait. 9:15 - 9:35am PS19 White Marble and Women: Adelaide Johnson’s Suffrage Monument Lauren Kroiz University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, USA Abstract In 1886 sculptor Adelaide Johnson began creating a monument to the suffrage movement. In 1921 her marble Portrait Monument to Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony was installed in the United States Capitol Building to mark the passage of the nineteenth amendment, which enfranchised women. This talk examines Johnson’s lengthy process, particularly the ways her final white marble joins the busts of three feminist suffrage reformers—Mott, Stanton and Anthony—across time. Johnson turned to photographs to capture the visage of early reformer Lucretia Mott years after the activist’s death, but relied on a series of personal sittings to create a series of portraits depicting Stanton and Anthony. The odd form of the monument, in which three highly finished, representational busts seem to emerge ensemble from a chunk of rough-hewn marble, led some to call the sculpture “three women in a bathtub.” This talk considers battles over the monument by drawing together episodes in the complex history of both suffrage and neoclassical sculpture. My analysis of Portrait Monument focuses on the non finito techniques use in Johnson’s marble, analyzing the conjoining rendered possible and impossible in her form, material and medium. For example, Johnson overlooked abolitionist Mott’s split with Stanton and Anthony in 1870 when the latter two agitated for white female franchise by fighting against the Fifteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution that gave black men the right to vote. I trace Johnson’s representation of white women while considering the ways the sculpture ignored, effaced, and made materially impossible black women feminists, as well as how white racism is naturalized in a monument that seems to grow from the Carrera stone itself. 9:35 - 9:55am PS19 "We shall beg no more”: Helen Keller and Women’s Commemoration in the National Statuary Hall Sierra Rooney University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, La Crosse, USA Abstract Designated by Congress in 1864, the National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol showcases one hundred statues of notable American individuals donated by each state’s legislature, and where, until very recently, stood only seven statues to women. In an effort to modernize Statuary Hall and better reflect the diverse American populace, Congress passed a legislation in 2000 allowing states to substitute previously donated statues. To date, Helen Keller is the only woman to enter the Hall as a replacement statue, when in 2009, the Alabama state legislature voted to replace their statue of Confederate officer, Jabez Lamar Monroe Curry (first donated in 1908). Keller’s admission to the ranks of honored Americans indicates progress toward a more-inclusive view of American history, but her statue also invites a more considered analysis of how, when and why governments choose to commemorate female figures in public spaces. This paper traces the patronage and reception of the Keller statue through newspaper accounts, federal proceedings, and commissioning documents. My resulting analysis demonstrates that the civic processes that resulted in this monument epitomizes a powerful, official endorsement of a new pantheon of American heroes, one that acknowledges the historical contributions of American women. However, given the limited ways that Keller was afforded heroic status, this statue also reveals just how carefully the story of female empowerment is constructed. 9:55 - 10:15am PS19 The Gendered Politics of “Trümmerfrauen” Memorials Julia Tischer McGill University, Montreal, Canada Abstract Die Trümmerfrau. She was the first hero to rise from the ruined cities of post-war Germany. With her bare hands she freed the Nation from the rubble of war to build new beginnings. Engaging Trümmerfrauen memorials as primary sources, this paper addresses the roles of gender in political constructions of national memorial cultures anchored in three distinct commemoration eras in Austria and Germany. From the early Berliner monuments of the 1950’s we learn that the “heroic” performance of the “guiltless” women served as distraction from the negative National Socialist past. Breaking from strict, fascist gender roles they subscribed to narratives of collective amnesia and reconstruction. The monuments that appeared in 1980’s detached themselves from forgetting, aligning both a feminist critique of historical gender blindness with new approaches to remembrance work that confronted grief and guilt. Since the European migrant crisis, a third wave of memorials controversially unveiled by right-wing politicians, circumscribe the Trümmerfrau to revisionist representations of nationalist victimhood that rely on narratives of conservative gender roles. I argue for Trümmerfrauen memorials as sites where memory politics have been negotiated through, often stereotyped, representations of gender. Other than commemorating her, these sites trace a history of gender politics that have been publicly prescribed, negotiated and subverted..

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