Where are all the monuments to women in Seattle?

If you were to take a tour of public monuments to women here in Seattle — it would be a short one.

The first — and only stop — would be in the University District, at Peace Park.

There, you'd find a statue of Sadako Sasaki, a Japanese girl who survived the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

She died from leukemia years later as a result of radiation exposure. But before she died, she folded more than a thousand paper cranes, a symbol of peace.

As Melissa Santos from Axios originally reported, out of the 400 permanent art installations included in the City of Seattle’s civic art collection, there’s only one outdoor monument honoring a female historical figure.

Which, as professor Sasha Welland will tell you, is an issue.

"They shape our collective memory of the place and the people because there are these markers in the landscape in the places that we walk by every day that reminds us of something of someone or some movement, or some moment in historical time," Welland said.

Welland, chair of the Department of Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies at the University of Washington, explained the role of monuments in public life. The large, imposing bronze statues we often think of when we hear the word monument are often government leaders, or the "winners" of history, she said.

Those monuments often act as an ideological imprint of the values and narratives of those groups.

For example, the statue of George Washington at the University of Washington is often the first thing prospective students see when they tour the campus, a point student activists and organizers echoed during Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020.

"They were calling for that statute to come down, and they were organizing a lot of their protests in that area, because this figure that towers above the campus and reminds students who step on to the campus that, you know, the state and the university is named after not just the first president of the United States, but a slave owner," Welland said.

There are several public art pieces throughout Seattle that depict generic or abstract female figures. But there's a gap between a feminized, abstract idealization of something like liberty and justice, and historical marginalization of women and people of color, Welland said.

Soundside reached out to Seattle's Office of Arts & Culture to ask if there are any plans to create more monuments of women. Interim Director royal alley-barnes was unavailable for an interview, but, in an emailed statement, she acknowledged the dearth of monuments focused on women in Seattle and beyond.

"We, as a country, are still working to represent the historical contributions of so many in our society. While Seattle has a long history of dedication to the arts and art in public spaces, we are still subject to the larger history of our society," alley-barnes wrote. "The few monuments in the City of Seattle’s Civic Collection were created prior to the creation of the Seattle Office of Arts & Culture and the 1 % for Public Art program. These artworks were subsequently accessioned into the City of Seattle’s collection as gifts to the city by private owners. These monuments, however, were not tributes to women."

Listen to the full story above.