S.F.’s monuments to male supremacy
2 of 87 statues are of women — official moves to change that
Some places that lack equal representation for women are obvious. The Oval Office. The boardrooms of most corporations. Room 200 in San Francisco’s City Hall, which has seen only one female mayor, and she took office all the way back in 1978.
Some places are less obvious. Take the city’s parks, plazas and sidewalks. Incredibly, of the 87 public statues that dot San Francisco, just two represent real women. They’re the bust of that lone female mayor, Dianne Feinstein, in City Hall, and Florence Nightingale outside the main entrance of Laguna Honda Hospital.
Once you realize it, it seems wildly unfair. Ladies, we deserve better.
That’s why an initiative from Supervisor Mark Farrell, to be introduced at Tuesday’s Board of Supervisors meeting, is a good step. Farrell wants to make San Francisco the nation’s first city to sign onto an international movement to increase female representation in the public sphere to 30 percent. In theory, that means boosting women’s representation in elected office, on corporate boards, on street signs and anywhere else in public view.
The first concrete — or, um, bronze — goal of Farrell’s is to install a statue of Maya Angelou outside the Main Library. The late writer, poet and civil rights activist was also San Francisco’s first African American female cable car conductor and, like the title of one of her most famous poems, an all-around “Phenomenal Woman.”
The Angelou statue would cost about $500,000. Farrell wants the board to allot half that money in the regular budget and is working to raise the other half privately. His legislation also calls for the controller’s office to establish a fund to receive private donations to erect future statues of women.
Yes, the initiative is being introduced by a man, but only because Kanishka Karunaratne and Margaux Kelly, two smart female aides in his office, pushed for it.
“It’s important that young women and women of every age see their own gender depicted across the public realm,” said Farrell, who has an 11-year-old daughter. “San Francisco is exactly the right place to make it happen.”
So far the idea seems to be popular. In a city teeming with statues of white men who had nothing to do with San Francisco — we’re looking at you, Irish rebel leader Robert Emmet! — an African American woman with deep connections to the city is downright groundbreaking.
The poet Janice Mirikitani and her husband, the Rev. Cecil Williams of Glide Memorial Church, were close friends with Angelou for decades before her death in 2014. Told of the idea for a statue to commemorate the woman they called their “sister,” they were wildly enthusiastic.
“It would be a great statement for San Francisco, a city of diversity and inclusivity,” Mirikitani said. “She was such a great role model, and she did it so eloquently, so beautifully and with such charisma that no one could resist her message.”
Zulaikha Khalil, 32, a Hunters Point resident and a Civic Center steward who was staffing a play structure for kids in the plaza on Monday morning, said she relates to Angelou on many levels — as an African American, as a woman and as a single mom. She has a copy of Angelou’s poem “Still I Rise” hanging in her living room.
“I think that would be really amazing, especially that it’s an African American female as well,” Khalil said of the proposed statue. “I walk around San Francisco noticing there are a lot of male statues. I’m like, ‘And you are who?’ ”
Of our major park’s 26 statues, just one is of a woman, but she’s the nebulous “Pioneer Mother,” created in 1914 for the Panama-Pacific Expo and not representing, you know, an actual woman.
By the way, Golden Gate Park isn’t alone. New York City’s Central Park sports statues of a lot of historical men, but no real women. You can find statues of Alice in Wonderland and Mother Goose there, though. So that’s inspiring.
There are a few other statues of allegorical women in San Francisco, including the goddess atop a monument between the Main Library and the Asian Art Museum. There are a few more women honored on plaques and fountains in the city, but none of those has her own, full-size statue. So, all told, the female representation is pretty embarrassing, especially in a progressive city that claims to value diversity.
The idea sprung up when Karunaratne and Kelly from Farrell’s office attended an event in early January geared at motivating young women to enter politics.
Rosie Rios, treasury secretary under President Barack Obama, spoke at the event about the goal of increasing women representation in the public sphere to 30 percent, the point at which experts say a minority voice becomes a validated opinion. Rios’ work to add the face of a woman to the front of U.S. currency for the first time is part of that goal, and Harriet Tubman has been selected to become the new face on the $20 bill.
“It normalizes having women in leadership roles, just like having men in leadership roles is normalized,” Karunaratne said of having more women faces in public. “Like with the ‘Wonder Woman’ movie, women are freaking out about how now they understand why men feel strong and powerful. It’s because that’s constantly reinforced by men in superhero, powerful roles.”
Once Farrell’s office settled on the goal, Angelou was an obvious choice. The late poet moved to San Francisco as a teenager and attended Washington High before dropping out to become a cable car conductor. She soon left the city to pursue a career in entertainment, but visited often and maintained many close friendships.
The Main Library was an obvious location not just for the literary connection, but also because Angelou said she was mute after being raped as a little girl and regained her voice only because of time spent reading library books.
Michelle Jeffers, spokeswoman for the library, said Farrell’s staff approached library leadership a month ago, and library staff was immediately on board. Jeffers said that as a mother of a daughter, she knows it’s important to have more female representation around the city.
“I hadn’t paid a ton of attention to it, but now that I know about it, I can’t unlearn it,” she said of the 2-of-87 statues factoid. “It sends a message to our next generation about the things that we value.”
The goal is to have Angelou’s statue erected by 2020, the 100th anniversary of the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. The hope is that more statues of women will follow.
Readers, which other women should be memorialized in San Francisco? Taking any and all real-life suggestions — no Mother Goose, please! — for a future column.