Lessons from history
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Review of past forms: simple past / past continuous / past perfect / past perfect continuous Articles: a / an / the / Ø Adjectives and adverbs: positionReading
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New York City will finally honor real women
with a statue in its famous Central Park. City officials voted this week for
the creation of a statue of three female civil rights leaders. Central Park
has 23 statues of men who were important in history, but none of women. In fact, females are represented only by
statues of imaginary characters. These include a statue of Alice, the hero of
Alice in Wonderland books by 19th century British writer Lewis Carroll. The
new statue from artist Meredith Bergmann is to be uncovered next August.
Visitors will see the representation of past activists Susan B. Anthony,
Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Sojourner Truth. The three women were contemporaries and
leaders in the anti-slavery, women’s rights and anti-alcohol movements. Their
activism helped to secure the right of women to vote in 1920. Pam Elam is
president of the non-profit organization Monumental Women. It worked with
historians, community leaders and local officials in support of the statue.
Elam said the artwork shows "the power of women working together to
bring about revolutionary change in our society." The group privately
raised $1.5 million to create and care for the new statue and a linked
educational program. Bergmann's early design for the statue
included only Anthony and Stanton. Observers criticized its lack of
African-American representation, noting that women of that group were also
important to the fight for women’s suffrage. So, Bergmann redesigned the
statue to add Truth. Central Park is not the only area of New York limited in
statues representing historical women. In fact, the government group She
Built NYC says the large city of five boroughs has just five public statues
of women from history. A
2016 news story in the magazine Smithsonian.com reported that women were the
subject of only about seven percent of public statues in the United States
that depict real people. Retrieved February 7, 2020 from https://learningenglish.voanews.com/a/new-york-s-central-park-to-gain-statue-of-women-in-history/5138022.html |
