In honor of International Women’s Day, let’s talk about the statues of women in Golden Gate Park. It’s a short list. There are just three. And only one pays tribute to a real and specific woman — by way of the figure of a child.
That’s compared to the 15 monuments to specific men, including presidents (Garfield, McKinley) ; generals (Pershing, Halleck); famous composers (Verdi, Beethoven); writers (Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare); and of course, long-time park superintendent John McLaren, who famously hated having statues in the park. The ratio would be even more lopsided were it not for the three statues of slave-holders taken down by protesters in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Still to be fair, that’s a better ratio than the city as a whole, where only 5 of our 87 public statues honor women.
The sole monument to an actual female person is the Sarah B Cooper memorial, which honors one of the earliest and influential proponents of early childhood learning. Cooper wrote a series of articles in 1879 that helped propel the kindergarten movement, starting with "The Kindergarten, a Remedy for Hoodlumism" (Times were different, folks!) That same year, Cooper organized the city’s first free kindergarten. By 1892, with the aid of funding from philanthropist Jane Stanford, there were 32.
The memorial, which overlooks the Children’s Playground, was dedicated in 1923 and replaced with a newer figure in 1939, now much eroded. Though celebrating someone real, the statue itself is anonymized, presumably in honor of all the children Cooper helped to educate. So instead of Cooper, we have a naked young girl standing by a pool (now filled with plants) with a cat and squirrel at her feet.
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Next up on our tour: the Pioneer Mother, a towering tribute to a painfully limited vision of womanhood. Having what is in essence a shrine to the nineteenth century cult of domesticity might not be so annoying if she weren’t the most monumental figure of a female figure in the park.
The original idea for the statue came from San Francisco socialite and author Ella Stirling Mighels, herself the daughter of two pioneers who was born in a mining camp. According to Cynthia Culver Prescott, an historian and author of “Pioneer Mother Monuments: Creating Cultural Memory”, Stirling was inspired to create a tribute to pioneer mothers after being stirred by the sight of the city’s existing Pioneer Monument “towering over the city’s smoldering ruins in the aftermath of the massive 1906 earthquake.” She envisioned a monument that would celebrate the civilizing influence pioneer women had brought to “the rough-and-tumble world of gold rush California.” Mighels imagined it would feature a seated woman with children leaning in, “a church around the mother’s knees.”
It’s worth noting that Mighels opposed women’s suffrage, even after California women got the vote in 1911. She thought “disenfranchisement kept [women] above the political fray, making [them] better able to teach citizenship to children.”
Others took up her idea, forming the Pioneer Mother Monument Association around 1912 and began fundraising with the goal of having the statue done in time for the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition. The Association’s vision was to celebrate “the self-sacrificing women who, with their little ones at their side, braved the dangers and underwent the hardships and privations that are always incident to pioneer life.”
It took years to raise the $25,000 to cover the statue’s cost. Schoolchildren donated pennies and nickels, women’s clubs across the state contributed, but the bulk was given by the Native Sons and Daughters of the Golden West. Massachusetts sculptor Charles Grafly was chosen to sculpt the piece, (a choice that angered some who thought have gone to the job should have gone to a California artist.)
In Grafly’s hands, the piece took on an allegorical twist. There was the stolid pioneer mother arms outstretched, beckoning new vistas and folded in her skirts two unclothed children, symbolizing the future.
The base held plaques showing maps of the Oregon and California trails and images of prairie schooners and ships, cacti. and cattle skulls. The inscription, written by University of California president Benjamin Ide Wheeler, read “Over rude paths, beset with hunger and risk, she pressed on toward the vision of a better country. To the assemblage of men busied with the perishable rewards of today, she brought the three-fold leaven of enduring society faith, gentleness, hope, with the nurture of children.” Gag me with a prairie schooner.
Reaction when Pioneer Mother was unveiled at the PPIE on July 1, 1915 was generally favorable. (Incidentally the crowd included the sole female survivor of the Donner party -- a woman who surely understood those “rude paths beset with hunger and risk” referenced in Wheeler’s inscription.)
But not everyone loved the monument. The president of the PPEI Woman’s Board described it as “the most stolid, prosaic specimen of motherhood one could imagine,” and added, “I should be glad if a competent earthquake put her out of commission.”
Others took offense at the naked children. The real pioneer mother, one critic wrote “The Chronicle”, would toil “by the candle’s feeble flicker, cutting down Pa’s old pants to three-quarter’s length for sonny, and from a breadth of Ma’s old skirt a dress was made for sissy.” Mighels, meanwhile, felt the monument strayed so far from her vision of mothers as vessels of morality that she refused to attend the unveiling.
The statue went into storage following the PPEI. It was brought out for the 1939 world’s fair on Treasure Island and then in 1940, the Native Daughters of the Golden West had it moved to the park, where it now sits, fittingly, by, the Pioneer Log Cabin.
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Last stop on our tour: a relatively small sculpture placed inconspicuously on a stump at the edge of JFK Drive: the recently installed “Rooted In(justice)”.
It was created by sculptor Dana King. (She also made the phenomenal Monumental Reckoning installation that surrounds the now-empty plinth where a statue of slave-holder Francis Scott Key once resided.) This statue is a metal cut-out of a female African American figure with her fist raised high — a feminist and Black-Lives- Matter inflected take on Lady Liberty. Though just a flat silhouette, she is rich with a sense of power and possibility.
As anonymous females go, I’ll take her over Pioneer Mother any day.
P.S. After this posted, Helen McKenna, flame-keeper of the Botanical Garden, let me know of another female statue: Flora, who resides near the entrance of Garden’s entrance. She’s a fairly abstract figure but definitely emanates a female energy:
Also - Pioneer Woman is supposedly VERY haunted...
Great column! Pioneer Woman needs an upgrade not only because of the sexism, but also as we reconsider the glorification of the “pioneers” at the expense of the indigenous populations they displaced.
Let’s get a statue of Dianne Feinstein in the park!