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Women Warrior Memorials and Issues of Gender in Contemporary American Public Art

In recent decades, a significant number of memorials honoring women soldiers have been built in America. These include national projects such as the Vietnam Women’s Memorial, dedicated in Washington, D.C. in 1993, and the Women in Military Service for America Memorial, which opened in Arlington National Cemetery in 1997, and various state and local memorials erected in Arizona, Illinois, Kentucky, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, and Oklahoma (Figure 1). Many are aligned with a major cultural shift in American memorial culture toward a more democratic and inclusive sensibility, one that seeks to represent and even reckon with absent, and ignored, subjects in the national narrative. Like the African Burial Ground National Monument, dedicated in New York City in 2007, and the Slave Labor Commemorative Marker, unveiled in Emancipation Hall in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center in February 2012, memorials to women soldiers may be seen on similarly revisionist terms: as public art projects that challenge a longstanding focus on a heroic and mostly white male dominated national history. Yet close attention to these “women warrior” memorials, as many are increasingly called, reveals that gender issues remain central not only to the experiences of women in the U.S. military but to how they are remembered and commemorated. While these memorials recognize and pay tribute to women in the military, they elide its dominating masculinity and simultaneously reinforce contemporary American infatuation with all things war. Women—real women, not symbolic and allegorical figures—are practically invisible in American memorial culture. None of the several dozen memorials managed by the National Park Service (NPS), a group of iconic totems that range from national touchstones like theWashingtonMonument, the Lincoln Memorial, and the recently dedicated Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial located on “the mall” in Washington, D.C., to the Wright Brothers National Memorial in North Carolina and Mount Rushmore in South Dakota, focus specifically on women. Likewise, of the 5,193 public outdoor sculptures of individuals recorded in the Smithsonian Public Art Dialogue, Vol. 2, Issue 2, September 2012, 190–214