The Guardian view on blue plaques and banknotes: making women count
“Representation is what gets me worked up. It’s important,” the feminist writer and activist Caroline Criado Perez told the Observer earlier this year. A few days later, the statue of the suffragist Millicent Fawcett that she had campaigned for was unveiled in Parliament Square, where it joined 11 statues of men. Almost a year earlier, a statue of the Crimean war nurse Mary Seacole was unveiled in the gardens of St Thomas’ hospital, half a mile away on the opposite side of the Thames. Then, in September last year, a new £10 note went into circulation featuring the novelist Jane Austen – following another campaign by Ms Criado Perez, who threatened to take the Bank of England to court after it decided to replace an image of the prison reformer Elizabeth Fry with Winston Churchill, meaning that there would have been no women represented on British money – apart from the Queen.
The Bank appears to have learned its lesson. On Friday it invited members of the public to submit suggestions as to which scientist should appear on the new £50 note, with the mathematician Ada Lovelace and the Nobel prize-winning chemist Dorothy Hodgkin among early frontrunners. Earlier in the week English Heritage asked people to nominate women whose lives could be celebrated with a blue plaque on a London building. At 14%, the proportion of blue plaques currently dedicated to women is “far too low”, the organisation said.
Efforts at boosting women’s representation on monuments and in public spaces are not confined to London. Campaigners in Dorset are fundraising for a statue of the fossil hunter Mary Anning in Lyme Regis. A statue of the suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst will be unveiled in Manchester in December. In York, a consultation is under way with a view to changing the wording on a rainbow plaque celebrating the diarist Anne Lister, so that she is described as a lesbian.
Not everyone is convinced that such undertakings are worth the effort and the money, particularly at a time when so many women have been affected by reductions in public spending. Analysis of tax and benefit changes last year found that government cuts have cost women £79bn since 2010, against £13bn for men. Despite the introduction of new rules for reporting on the gender pay gap, the gulf between men’s and women’s hourly pay has not shrunk for three years. Meanwhile the hopes raised by #MeToo, that violence and harassment of women in the workplace could be dramatically reduced, have faded. Haven’t feminists got more serious battles to fight than over statues and banknotes, it has been asked. Other voices question whether it is even desirable to perpetuate a model whereby prominent individuals and their deeds are celebrated, while more ordinary lives and struggles are forgotten.
But representation is important, perhaps particularly to children in the process of forming their ideas about the world, and themselves. Positive role models – in real life or bronze – won’t eliminate inequality. But it makes a difference to all of us who we see on plinths, screens, stamps and coins. That’s why it matters that women of all sorts – black, white, lesbian, trans, disabled – are represented in all sorts of ways, in all sorts of places.