Memorials must be for the deserving

Thomas M. Keane Jr.
31 October 2003
Boston Herald

It was an uncomfortable juxtaposition.

Last Saturday, on the day Louise Day Hicks was buried, a large crowd gathered on Commonwealth Mall for the unveiling of the Boston Women's Memorial. Hundreds applauded the lives of three women who lived centuries ago. Meanwhile, most of Boston was doing its best to ignore the just-finished life of one of the city's most prominent.

It's a safe bet that Hicks will not anytime soon get her own statue on the mall. Yet why not? After all, Hicks was more famous in her day than ever were Abigail Adams, Phyllis Wheatley or Lucy Stone, the three women featured in the memorial. And like them, she was an activist and early feminist who made her mark on the world.

In an era when women stayed at home, Hicks graduated from Boston University Law School in 1955. She started her own law firm and shortly after began a long career in politics: school committee, city councilor, two-time mayoral candidate and, in 1970, the first - and still only - female Bostonian ever elected to Congress.

With her slogan of "You know where I stand," she captured the imagination of a city and the attention of the entire nation.

She made the cover of Newsweek in 1967. Her round face, pursed lips and bouffant hairdo epitomized Boston.

It was a remarkable life. So why isn't Hicks part of the Women's Memorial?

Well, I think we all know why, don't we?

In the wake of her death, most of the words about Hicks have tried to dance around the central problem of her public life. One local politician said, "She tried to make a difference while remaining true to herself." Another claimed she had simply been "misunderstood." An editorial weakly criticized her "lack of vision."

Few wanted to touch on the core issue: "You know where I stand" was code for segregation. Hicks professed that she personally was not a bigot, but her public actions gave enormous succor to those who were.

When the NAACP in the early 1960s demanded integration of Boston's schools, it was Hicks who refused. She was the woman who said of Martin Luther King Jr., "I feel he has done great harm to the civil rights movement because he is not truly representative of the Negro people." And when federal courts eventually forced Boston to desegregate, it was Hicks again who became the symbol of resistance.

Hicks faded from public life toward the end of the 1970s. As the busing crisis subsided, a contrite Boston began a concerted effort to turn away from the turbulence of those days, trying to erase an ugliness that even now soils the city's reputation.

Hicks, icon of one era, was no longer welcome in today's.

That's not so with Adams, Wheatley and Stone, whose ideals and politics - as controversial as they may have been in their days - fit comfortably into the mainstream of the 21st century.

Adams was an early advocate for the rights of women. "Remember the ladies," she wrote to her husband John when he was in Philadelphia to sign the Declaration of Independence (an admonition he apparently ignored).

One-time slave Wheatley, who lived just 31 years, was a literary phenomenon, author of the first book ever published in America by a black writer.

And Lucy Stone, abolitionist and suffragist, organized the first national women's convention, playing a decisive role in securing women the right to vote.

All three led influential lives, reaching beyond themselves to, as Stone said in her dying words to her daughter, "Make the world better." And the memorial's sculptor, Meredith Bergmann, has produced a fitting work. Her statues are approachable and human- scaled, showing the joys and scars of their lives in their carved faces and bodies.

Yet, as the name Women's Memorial indicates, the purpose of the piece is not simply to mark the lives of three people who happened to be women. Rather, it hopes, in some fashion, to remember all women.

Does it? I think not, in the same way, perhaps, that no statue of a man can represent all men.

Part of the reason for that, of course, is our uniqueness as human beings. Part also is that these are statues for women who were well known. Yet the fact is that most women (as well as most men) live in relative anonymity; the defining characteristics of their lives (especially for women) are their publicly uncelebrated roles as mothers, caregivers and members of a family.

And then there is this: Adams, Wheatley and Stone got their statues because they ended up on the right side of history. Hicks did not.

"Remember the ladies," is a nice sentiment, but it doesn't apply to all.

Some ladies, it appears, we would rather forget.

Talk back to Tom Keane at tomkeane@tomkeane.com.