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Breaking the Bronze Ceiling
Women, Memory, and Public Space
Edited by Valentina Rozas-Krause and Andrew M. Shanken
Contributions by Carolina Aguilera, Manuela Badilla Rajevic, Daniel E. Coslett, Erika Doss, Tania Gutiérrez-Monroy, Daniel Herwitz, Katherine Hite, Lauren Kroiz, Ana Maria León, Fernando Luis Martínez Nespral, Pia Montealegre, Sierra Rooney, Valentina Rozas-Krause, Daniela Sandler, Kirk Savage, Andrew M. Shanken, Susan Slyomovics, Marita Sturken, Amanda Su, Dell Upton, Nathaniel Robert Walker and Mechtild Widrich
Published by: Fordham University Press
Series: Berkeley Forum in the Humanities
272 pages, 152.00 x 228.00 mm, 71 b/w illustrations
Breaking the Bronze Ceiling uncovers a glaring omission in our global memorial landscape—the conspicuous absence of women. Exploring this neglected narrative, the book emerges as the foremost guide to women's memorialization across diverse cultures and ages. As global memorials come under intense examination, with metropolises vying for a more inclusive recognition of female contributions, this book stands at the forefront of contemporary discussion.
The book’s thought-provoking essays artfully traverse the complex terrains of gender portrayal, urban tales, ancestral practices, and grassroots activism—all anchored in the bedrock of cultural remembrance. Rich in the range of cases discussed, the book sifts through multifaceted representations of women, from Marians to Liberties, to handmaidens, to particular historical women.
Breaking the Bronze Ceiling offers a panoramic view of worldwide memorials, critically analyzing grandiose tributes while also honoring subtle gestures—be it evocative plaques, inspiring namesakes, or dynamic demonstrations. The book will be of interest to historians of art and architecture, as well as to activists, governmental bodies, urban planners, and NGOs committed to regional history and memory.
More than a mere compilation, Breaking the Bronze Ceiling epitomizes a movement. The book comprehensively assesses the portrayal of women in public art and offers a fervent plea to address the severe underrepresentation of women in memorials.
Contributors: Carolina Aguilera, Manuela Badilla, Daniel E. Coslett, Erika Doss, Tania Gutiérrez-Monroy, Daniel Herwitz, Katherine Hite, Lauren Kroiz, Ana María León, Fernando Luis Martínez Nespral, Pía Montealegre, Sierra Rooney, Daniela Sandler, Kirk Savage, Susan Slyomovics, Marita Sturken, Amanda Su, Dell Upton, Nathaniel Robert Walker, and Mechtild Widrich
List of Figures | ix
Introduction
Valentina Rozas-Krause and Andrew M. Shanken | 1
Part I: Patronized Women
1. Innocence and Guilt: Memorializing a Gender Tragedy in Nineteenth-Century Santiago de Chile
Pía Montealegre | 19
2. George Eliot at Nuneaton and Trans Monumentality
Amanda Su | 41
Toppling Pocahontas
Kirk Savage | 69
Monument to the Chilean Women Victims of Political Repression
Carolina Aguilera and Manuela Badilla Rajevic | 73
Part II: Public Women
3. White Marble and White Women: Adelaide Johnson’s Portrait Monument
Lauren Kroiz | 79
4. “We Shall Beg No More”: Helen Keller, Politics, and Commemorations in the National Statuary Hall
Sierra Rooney | 101
Monument to Sojourner Truth
Katherine Hite | 118
Fearless Girl, New York City
Marita Sturken | 122
Monument to the Empress Maria-Theresia, Vienna, Austria
Mechtild Widrich | 126
Part III: Women Warriors
5. The Myth of the Passive Woman in Confederate Monuments
Nathaniel Robert Walker | 133
6. Firearms, Flowers, and Barricades: Women’s Reinscriptions in the Mexican Landscape of Monuments
Tania Gutiérrez-Monroy | 158
Memorial to the South Carolina Women of the Confederacy
(Frederick Wellington Ruckstuhl, 1909–1912), Columbia, South Carolina
Dell Upton | 180
Memorial to the Black Mothers of the Periphery Fighting against State Terrorism, Rio de Janeiro
Daniela Sandler | 189
Mujeres Creando, Plaza Chola Globalizada, La Paz, Bolivia
Ana María León | 193
Part IV: Allegorical Women
7. The Colonial Marianne: Representing Liberté and France in Occupied North Africa
Daniel E. Coslett | 201
8. Female Winged Victory Statues in French Algeria
Susan Slyomovics | 230
The Argentine Marianne
Fernando Luis Martínez Nespral | 253
I Am Queen Mary, Copenhagen
Erika Doss | 257
Patience on a Monument: A History Painting
Daniel Herwitz | 261
List of Contributors | 265
Index | 271
Valentina Rozas-Krause is Assistant Professor in Design and Architecture at Universidad Adolfo Ibáñez in Chile and Harvard University Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow (2023–24). She is the author of Ni Tan Elefante, Ni Tan Blanco (Ril, 2014) and the coedited volume Disputar la Ciudad (Bifurcaciones, 2018). These books join peer-reviewed articles in History & Memory, e-flux, Latin American Perspectives, Memory Studies, Anos 90, ARQ, Revista 180, Cuadernos de Antropología Social, and Bifurcaciones alongside chapters in Golpes a la Memoria (Tege, 2019) and Neocolonialism and Built Heritage (Routledge, 2020).
Carolina Aguilera teaches at the School of Sociology, Universidad Diego Portales in Chile, and is Associate Researcher of the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies COES-Chile. Her main areas of research are focused on the sociology of memory and urban sociology. She has published in Memory Studies, Kamchatka, Límite, AUS, and Bifurcaciones and has written chapters in collective volumes including Patrimonio: Contranarrativas Urbanas (Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2019), Disputar la Ciudad (Bifurcaciones, 2018), and Golpes a la Memoria (Tege, 2019).
Manuela Badilla Rajevic received her PhD (2019) and MA (2013) in sociology from the New School for Social Research. She is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Sociology Department at the University of Valparaíso. She is also an adjunct researcher at the Centre for Social Conflict and Cohesion Studies COES-Chile. She has published her work in Sociological Forum (2019), Mobilizations (2019), Space and Culture (2020), and Memory Studies (2020, 2021).
Daniel E. Coslett is Assistant Professor of Architectural History at Drexel University. He is a scholar of colonial and postcolonial built environments whose work addresses intersections of architecture, heritage, archaeology, and tourism. He has published an edited volume, Neocolonialism and Built Heritage: Echoes of Empire in Africa, Asia, and Europe (Routledge, 2020), and two coedited volumes, Rethinking Global Modernism: Architectural Historiography and the Postcolonial (Routledge, with Vikramaditya Prakash and Maristella Casciato, 2022) and Islamic Architecture Today and Tomorrow: (Re)defining the Field (Intellect, with Mohammad Gharipour, 2022).
Erika Doss is Distinguished University Chair in the Edith O’Donnell Institute of Art History, University of Texas at Dallas. Her most recent books are Spiritual Moderns: Twentieth-Century American Artists and Religion (Chicago, 2023) and American Art of the 20th–21st Centuries (Oxford, 2017).
Tania Gutiérrez-Monroy is Assistant Professor at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of “Building Indigenous Resistance: The Casa de los Pueblos y Comunidades Indígenas, Yä nghü yä jhöy, Samir Flores Soberanes” and “Reframing Narratives: A Woman and Her Building at the Dawn of the Mexican Revolution,” both published in the Journal of Architectural Education.
Daniel Herwitz lived and taught in South Africa during the moment of democratic transition and splits his time between Ann Arbor and Cape Town. He is Fredric Huetwell Professor of Comparative Literature, Philosophy and History of Art at the University of Michigan where from 2002 to 2012 he directed the Institute for the Humanities. He has written widely on contemporary art, culture, and politics in a cosmopolitan way, on philosophical aesthetics, and on transitional justice. His latest book is The Political Power of Visual Art (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).
Katherine Hite is Professor of Political Science on the Frederick Ferris Thompson Chair at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York. She is the author of Politics and the Art of Commemoration: Memorials to Struggle in Latin America and Spain (Routledge, 2012; Spanish translation Mandrágora, 2014) and When the Romance Ended: Leaders of the Chilean Left, 1968–1998 (Columbia, 2000), as well as several publications on the politics of memory, memorials, and memorial museums across the Americas, including Texas, where she grew up. Hite is active in her Poughkeepsie, New York, community, including as cochair of “Celebrating the African Spirit.”
Lauren Kroiz is Associate Professor in the History of Art Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Kroiz is the author of Cultivating Citizens: The Work of Art in the New Deal Era (University of California Press, 2018) and Creative Composites: Modernism, Race, and the Stieglitz Circle (University of California Press, 2012). She is currently at work on a project about whiteness and the visual culture of female suffrage.
Ana Maria León is Associate Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. She is author of Modernity for the Masses: Antonio Bonet’s Dreams for Buenos Aires (University of Texas Press, 2021) and Bones of the Nation/A Ruin in Reverse (ARQ, 2021)
Fernando Luis Martínez Nespral is Professor of Architectural History and researcher affiliated with the American Art and Aesthetic Studies Institute, both at the School of Architecture, Design, and Urbanism, Universidad de Buenos Aires. Currently, he is a member of several international associations, including the College Art Association, the Society of Architectural Historians, the Global Architectural History Teaching Collaborative, the European Architectural History Network, and Our North Is the South (cofounded with Ana María León).
Pia Montealegre is Assistant Professor at the Instituto de Historia y Patrimonio, Universidad de Chile and member of the Gender, Space & Territory Studies Group. Her research focuses on urban and architectural history from a gender perspective.
Sierra Rooney is Assistant Professor of Art History at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, specializing in art of the United States, particularly commemorations of women and the politics of representation. She is joint editor with Jennifer Wingate and Harriet F. Senie of Teachable Monuments: Using Public Art to Spark Dialogue and Confront Controversies (Bloomsbury, 2021). Her writing has appeared in journals such as Panorama, Public Art Dialogue, De Arte, Journal of Urban History, and Capitol Dome, as well as the collections Artists Reclaim the Commons (University of Washington, 2013) and Museums and Public Art? (Cambridge Scholars, 2018).
Daniela Sandler is Associate Professor of Architectural and Urban History at the School of Architecture and Planning at the University at Buffalo. She works on memory, preservation, grassroots urbanism, urban inequalities, and social inclusion. Her book Counterpreservation: Architectural Decay in Berlin since 1989 (Cornell University Press, 2016) won the 2019 Antoinette Forrester Downing Book Award.
Kirk Savage is the William S. Dietrich II Professor of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. He is the author of Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, 2nd ed., 2018) and Monument Wars: Washington, the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (University of California Press, 2009).
Susan Slyomovics is Professor of Anthropology and Near Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is also author of The Object of Memory: Arab and Jew Narrate the Palestinian Village and The Performance of Human Rights in Morocco, and coeditor of Women and Power in the Middle East, all available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Marita Sturken is Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University, where she teaches courses in visual culture, cultural memory, and consumerism. She is the author of Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (University of California Press, 1997), Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, with Lisa Cartwright (Oxford University Press, 3rd ed., 2018), Tourists of History: Memory, Kitsch, and Consumerism from Oklahoma City to Ground Zero (Duke University Press, 2007). Her most recent book is Terrorism in American Memory: Memorials, Museums, and Architecture in the Post-9/11 Era (New York University Press, 2022).
Amanda Su is a PhD candidate in English at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation explores how the cultural imaginary of Chinese womanhood served as an exemplum for both socialist and liberal feminisms during the Cold War. She also writes about memory activism and feminist interventions in the built environment. Her work has been published in the Journal of Asian American Studies and ASAP/J.
Dell Upton is Distinguished Research Professor of Architectural History at the University of California, Los Angeles. His research focuses on architectural history, the Black cultural landscape, and statues and monuments since antiquity. He is the author, most recently, of What Can and Can’t Be Said: Race, Uplift, and Monument Building in the Contemporary South (Yale, 2015) and American Architecture: A Thematic History (Oxford, 2019). Upton has been a Resident of the American Academy in Rome and Kress-Beinecke Professor at the Center for Advanced Study of the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art.
Nathaniel Robert Walker is Associate Professor of Architectural History in the School of Architecture and Planning at the Catholic University of America. He recently published Victorian Visions of Suburban Utopia: Abandoning Babylon (Oxford, 2020) and coedited, with Elizabeth Darling, Suffragette City: Women, Politics, and the Built Environment (Routledge, 2019). He has also published essays in multiple journals, such as Buildings and Landscapes, Utopian Studies, Arris, and the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians.
Mechtild Widrich is Professor in the Art History, Theory and Criticism Department at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She researches and writes on art in public space, architecture, performative and participatory practices, and the theory of the public sphere. Her most recent book Monumental Cares: Sites of History and Contemporary Art (Manchester University Press, 2023) rethinks monument debates, site specificity, and art activism in light of challenges that strike us as monumental or overwhelming, such as war, migration, and the climate crisis. In 2022 she was guest professor at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, and 2022/23 Faculty Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Notre Dame.