What is this project about?
This Citizen Science Project aims to create a crowd-sourced map of all the memorials to the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the world. Click on the map on your right to see which sites we’ve located so far.
Who is running it?
We are a team of scholars who specialize in the history and memory of feminism in the English-speaking world. In 2018 and 2020, statues were unveiled in Parliament Square and Central Park to commemorate the women’s suffrage movements in the UK and the USA. We knew they were not the first such memorials but we realized (with some embarrassment) that none of us had any idea of how many of these sites there were, what forms they took or where they could be found! Hence the very simple question that this map seeks to answer: where on Earth are the sites of suffrage memory?
Who can take part in it?
Anyone! No team of scholars, no matter how broad, could gather the information necessary to map all of these sites. This is where the magic of the internet comes in: by allowing anyone to submit an entry, we are hoping to harness the power of crowd-sourcing for this project.
Why take part?
So many reasons. We’ll give you three:
- Because it’s fun! Who doesn’t want to share their knowledge about a local memorial? And who doesn’t want to take their students on an expedition looking for one (teachers, if you’re reading…)?
- Because you’ll contribute to the building of a multi-purpose tool that will amuse the curious, inform the student and open up new avenues of research for scholars working at all levels, from the local to the totally transnational, and in disciplines as varied as art history, geography, politics, or memory studies.
- Because the idea that women are legitimate participants in the political process is, in the long sweep of human history, both relatively recent and still not universally accepted. One of the symptoms of the resistance to this idea is the limited place awarded to the memory of women’s movements, not least the women’s suffrage movement, in school curricula, national ceremonies and, yes, in our built environment. To map the sites which commemorate the Women’s Suffrage Movement, then, is to contribute to the breaking down of that resistance by making this shared desire to remember more visible. In that respect, it contributes to the building up and dissemination of a “feminist civic culture”, that is to say a civic culture which celebrates campaigns and campaigners for women’s empowerment because it sees women’s empowerment as something that is valuable and should be enhanced.
How can I take part?
Two ways.
The simplest way is to send us an email to suggest a site you think we should include. Our address is: feministmemory@gmail.com
The more demanding (but also, arguably, more rewarding) way consists in filling in the form we’ve created. Interested? Great! But don’t click on it just yet!
So as not to waste your time, please follow this simple, four-step process:
- Check that the memorial site you have in mind is not already on the map
- If you find that it is but that it is incomplete, please email us any complimentary information to: feministmemory@gmail.com
- If it is not, check that the memorial you have in mind meets the two basic criteria for inclusion in the map
- If it does meet the criteria, then familiarize yourself with this printable version of the form here so that you know what to look for before going “live” (this is to avoid any frustrations caused by the form “timing out” while you search for relevant information).
Now, you can open the form. 🙂
How can I follow the project’s evolution?
We’ve created two feeds, one on Twitter, the other on Instagram. Please follow us there!