Women compartmentalizedas "the rest"

Series on statues in Peace Garden continues

with Addams

SOME SOCIAL IRONIES are too hilarious to leave unspoken, even though they are often unwelcome by those with an overly developed sense of political correctness.

If you’ve been following along over the past few weeks, I have been talking about the artistic merits of the statues in our university’s Peace Garden and how they relate to our values as Americans.

This week I fully intended to continue this series as planned and talk about the Jane Addams statue that was added to the garden just last year.

I wanted to talk about her impressive achievements and to see how her statue reflected them artistically, but when I went to the Peace Garden to take a look, all I found was a large box where Jane used to be.

Jane is inside the box, of course, and for a good reason; the library construction that is going on now and will be going on for quite some time is taking place right next to the statue, and obviously nobody wants it to be hit by flying debris.

The irony is this: the university created a committee specifically to find a strong woman who could be the subject of a statue in our Peace Garden, they hired a woman to make the statue, they had a big ceremony to dedicate it and less than a year later they are covering it up with a gigantic box because men are at work next door and they don’t want the little lady to get hurt.

If this was planned, the university should at least have had the creativity to give the box a glass ceiling.
But really I think it’s just a makeshift box assembled on the fly because someone realized at the last minute there was some risk involved with tearing down an old building and erecting a new one right next to a costly piece of art.

Now I can’t very well comment on a statue I can’t see, so let’s just play with what we have at hand: a woman in a box, three powerful male leaders and a construction site.

It’s a bit of a stretch, but I think there’s a lesson we can draw from this comical situation.

It’s easy when following the march of history to forget the breadth of humanity that lies beneath it.

The soldiers who marched at Thermopylae, Agincourt and Verdun had mothers and fathers, brothers and sisters, children, wives; and all these people lived their lives in much the same way as we live ours now.

They ate bread and drank water, worried about work and tried hard at school, fell in love and made enemies, told jokes and shared stories and all participated in the essential human experience.

The great historians told us about the soldiers and the leaders, the progress and the construction, but they assembled a box of silence around the rest of humanity.

But what does “the rest” even mean? Even real heroes like Jane Addams can fall into that unspoken category of “the rest.”

Did anyone here really know who Jane Addams was until the statue went up? Do we know now?

Historians have pushed women in particular into the category of “the rest” and it has traditionally been the place of artists to bring them back into the public consciousness.

You won’t find much said about women in Herodotus or Thucydides, but all of the major Greek tragedians wrote plays about heroic women and the ridiculous treatment and double standards they had to endure.

It isn’t the historian and the statesman who empower women; it is the poet, the artist and the sculptor.

They do so by expanding the imagination of the public, by exposing the beauty of humanity in the human form and thought and experience, and in doing so they enliven our sensitivity.

I hate to use the word “sensitivity” because of the effeminate connotations it has taken on after years of TV sitcoms, but it seems to me that if we really are going to be a superior people, we need to have a superior sensitivity.

We follow the motions of the great and the beautiful like constellations in the night sky and aren’t even aware of what is happening in the hearts of the people standing next to us.

“Why do you imagine golden birds? Do you not see the blackbird walks around the feet of the women about you?”

The Jesuits have a phrase, age quid agis, “Do what you are doing.” Enough of that.

History is full of people who just do what they are doing.

Think about what you are doing, think about what other people are doing, about action, about consequence, about potential, about proportion, about joy, about pain.

I think you’ll find that there are construction sites in your own life, things that are “really important” though you don’t know why, leaders you worship and admire for no reason at all and people you’ve boxed up to keep them out of your way.

Humanity isn’t something you can box up and put aside, however, and if you try, you’ll be the only one who’s really in a box, alone and in the dark.

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