Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, November 8, 1993 TAG: 9311080064
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
You bet.
It's tough to find statues of women in Washington, a city with enough statues to qualify as pigeon paradise. For instance, in the Capitol's Statuary Hall, only six of the 95 heroic figures are women.
That's the way it is around the country, too. When it comes to being immortalized in bronze or marble, women get short shrift.
The new sculpture near the Vietnam memorial is the first honoring women who served in the military. It is controversial, like the war itself. It depicts three fatigue-clad women, one seated on a pile of sandbags cradling a wounded soldier.
"The sculpture is a work of deception," said Ted Sampley, who publishes the U.S. Veteran Dispatch in Kinston, N.C. "It gives the false impression that American women were serving shoulder-to-shoulder with men in combat in Vietnam."
Nurses and doctors served in the rear, he said.
"It's quite difficult to know what's forward and rear when nurses were killed in Vietnam by shrapnel," said Karen Johnson, who served 20 years as an Air Force nurse. "You'd have to be forward to be hit by mortar fire."
In any case, she said, "what is realistic is that the men being air evacuated in helicopters were in their uniforms. Often it was a nurse or medic who were at some point holding them. I don't think that's taking artistic license at all."
Nearby, the black granite panels of the Vietnam Memorial hold the names of 58,000 dead or missing, eight of them female. In all, 10,000 women served in Vietnam.
In sculpture, women tend to have names like Freedom or Serenity. They are allegories, not real people; or fantasies, like Mother Goose.
The statue of Freedom was just hoisted back to the top of the Capitol dome after her first cleaning in 130 years. From the ground, 288 feet below, most tourists mistake her for an Indian warrior - male, of course.
"Probably up to the 1920s, women were not in a position where they did anything that got them memorialized," said George Gurney, curator of sculpture in the Smithsonian's Museum of American Art. "They were shown as the symbol or allegorical element; women seemed to embody the abstract as opposed to the specific."
"History has been written from the perspective of men's deeds," says Patricia Ireland, the president of the National Organization for Women. "It's part of our culture, a commentary on the value that culture puts on women and women's lives."
by CNB