Where the Girls Aren’t

Here is a brief excerpt from a column by Gail Collins, featured in The New York Times. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain information about deep-discount subscriptions, please click here.

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America loves to memorialize men in uniform with statues. Women, not so much. The statue above is of David Farragut, a Navy flag officer during the Civil War who now stands in Madison Square Park in Manhattan. Credit: Emon Hassan for The New York Times.

Let’s have a statute of limitations on statues.

It is possible that you didn’t know a 24-year-old black woman started the integration of the New York City mass transit system in 1854. It’s a very good story that involves some kicking and screaming, a ruined hat and a future president of the United States.

And now she’s getting a statue next to Grand Central Station. About time.

We’re coming to the end of Women’s History Month, and all in all, it’s been a pretty good celebration. Perhaps a little superior to the one when Donald Trump dropped in on a women’s empowerment panel and asked the assembled high achievers whether any of them had ever heard of Susan B. Anthony.

So about Elizabeth Jennings, a Manhattan schoolteacher in the years before the Civil War. She was rushing to church services, where she was supposed to play the organ, when a trolley conductor told her that his car was only for white people and she’d have to get off and wait for another ride.

Jennings was fearless. She grabbed onto an open window frame, screaming “Murder!” when the conductor tried to pull her off. She hung on for dear life until a police officer shoved her onto the sidewalk, soiling her going-to-church dress and smashing her bonnet.

Her family hired a young lawyer, Chester Alan Arthur, to file suit against the streetcar company for discrimination. Jennings won 100 years before Rosa Parks. And several follow-up suits later, segregation in New York mass transit came to an end.

Arthur, a machine politician of no remarkable talent, later became president of the United States. Jennings was forgotten.

For years I’d spend Women’s History Month muttering that there ought to be a statue of her at Grand Central Station. Now it’s happening! New York is trying to do something about its wildly man-centric population of public monuments, and City Hall has commissioned five female statues, one for each borough.

Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman to serve in Congress, will be greeting visitors to Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Queens gets singer Billie Holiday and the Bronx gets Dr. Helen Rodríguez Trías, a pioneer in treating families affected by H.I.V.

Staten Island gets Katherine Walker. She was a tiny widow who ran a lighthouse outside the New York harbor in the early 1900s until she was 73. When the waters got bad and boats started to sink, she rowed to the rescue, saving at least 50 lives over the years.

See? This is the sort of thing you learn when you get to see monuments that don’t involve generals on horseback. There needs to be a statute of limitations on statues of guys in stirrups.

The nation’s nonmilitary statue population is very heavy into politicians. For instance, down on Madison Square there’s a tribute to Roscoe Conkling, a 19th-century boss who gave Chester Alan Arthur his big career break running the deeply corrupt port of New York.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Gail Collins joined The New York Times in 1995 as a member of the editorial board and later as an Op-Ed columnist. In 2001 she was appointed editorial page editor – the first woman to hold that post at The Times.

In 2007, she stepped down to finish her book: When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present. She returned as a columnist in time to cover the 2008 presidential election.

Ms. Collins is also the author of America’s Women: Four Hundred Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates and Heroines, and five other books.

 

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