Where are the Women Movement
These girls are not just complaining about the lack of
historical statues in Central Park, these girls are attempting to change
society’s view point about how historically, women are not viewed as important and
are often misrepresented. Honestly,
think about you years in high school and middle school, how many women were
actually discussed because of something they did? In my case, it was not
many. Most of the time I had to go and
look up women who accomplished amazing things for projects because our books
barely touched upon these women. Their
effort of making a change is similar to the efforts of those in March Book 1.
In
March Book 1, the men and women of
the Civil Rights Movement were not just complaining about not being served at
certain dinners in the South. These
people were attempting to showcase a bigger issue, the overall treatment of
African American people and those who associate with them. The methods of change in March Book 1 was using the sit in technique and this ended up
working very well for the group. The
girls involved in the Where are the Women movement are using a similar
technique where they are sitting in the park area where they want the statues
to be placed to raise awareness of the issue. Hopefully, the sit-in technique
will work for these girls so they can bring awareness to our society that we
have a lack of known women in our history.
This movement also addresses how women are seen through society’s eyes,
which is a similar theme in Ms. Marvel.
Throughout
volume 1 of Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan
compares herself to Carol Danvers, who was Ms. Marvel before Kamala. Carol Danvers is considered to be the “typical”
American woman with blonde hair and blue eyes, very fit, but not muscular. This is how women are normally represented in
the comic book worlds and it is very unlike the real world. The women in the real world are very
different, each person is their own and no one looks like the way comics
normally depict women on a natural basis.
This unnaturalness and misrepresentation is what Kamala Khan is fighting
against, and it is what the Where are the Women movement also fights
against.
In
Central Park, there are a few statues of women characters, Mother Goose and
Alice from Alice in Wonderland, but these are not proper representations of
historical women. These are all
fictional characters who are nowhere near the real thing. These girls want to have a real woman to be
represented in Central Park. A ten year
old girl even claims how there are “[n]o statues of women, and there’s tons of
men […] We really need a woman’s statue for girls to look up to, not just
Mother Goose or Alice in Wonderland. They don’t count” (Dobnik, 2016). These
girls see the difference it would make even if there was something simple as a
real woman’s statue to represent all of the women who accomplished great
things, but were hardly ever talked about.
