Making Columbia a ‘City of Women’: Group advocates for representation on landmarks
Of the dozens of downtown Columbia streets named for historical figures — Huger, Gervais, Taylor, Pickens and Hampton, to only scratch the surface — just one is named for a woman.
Can you guess which one?
Perhaps not shockingly, it’s Lady Street.
It’s named for Martha Washington, whose husband, George, inspired the naming of — wait for it — Washington Street.
In a city where women comprise roughly half the population, women are represented by just 4 percent of Columbia’s 145 public streets and landmarks named for influential people in history, according to Historic Columbia and the S.C. Women’s Rights and Empowerment Network, or WREN.
“These spaces and places have been centered around this idea of the male perspective on things being the universal or the central perspective, and we see how limiting that can be,” said Eme Crawford, communications director for WREN. “I think those messages that women and girls can sometimes internalize is ‘this isn’t a space that was really created with you in mind,’ and women might feel like they have to fight to be in certain spaces.”
In the midst of a nationwide movement to elevate women’s rights and influence, a local group is highlighting the contributions women have made to Columbia’s past and present and the opportunities for women to shape the city’s future.
The new Columbia City of Women initiative will next month unveil the names of one dozen women who have particularly affected South Carolina’s capital. The effort is a partnership between WREN and the Historic Columbia Foundation.
As the project unfolds, these 12 women will be honored in creative ways that include a map, walking tour, social media campaigns and possibly special icons throughout downtown.
The goals are to highlight the imbalance in historical recognition in the city and to educate people about Columbia’s significant women.
“This is not to say ‘down with men’ or anti-men or anything like that, but it is a matter of making spaces and recognizing the work that women have done to build this city,” Crawford said.
The 12 women, whose names are being kept secret until a grand launch event at the Columbia Museum of Art on March 31, represent home life and caregiving, education, business and nonprofit leadership and entrepreneurship, Crawford said.
They’re a reflection of the thousands of women daily playing those roles throughout the city, shaping the Columbia of the future.
The Columbia City of Women project is inspired by a reimagined, feminist map of the New York City subway system, created by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, which renames the city’s subway stations after significant women.
In a 2016 essay for The New Yorker, Solnit wrote:
“Almost every city is full of men’s names, names that are markers of who wielded power, who made history, who held fortunes, who was remembered; women are anonymous people who changed fathers’ names for husbands’ as they married, who lived in private and were comparatively forgotten, with few exceptions. This naming stretches across the continent; the peaks of many Western mountains have names that make the ranges sound like the board of directors of an old corporation, and very little has been named for particular historical women, though Maryland was named after a Queen Mary who never got there.”
Former S.C. First Lady Rachel Hodges (whose husband, Jim, was the state’s governor from 1999 to 2003) received a copy of that map as a Christmas gift in 2017. She couldn’t get it off her mind, she said — “Why is this map speaking to me? And what am I supposed to do?”
She took the map to WREN and Historic Columbia and then rallied a committee of women who lead throughout the city.
Thus was born Columbia City of Women.
“I was shaking the fog off my vision and seeing that it was time for women’s names to be part of the landscape of Columbia,” Hodges said.
Not just in New York City or Columbia, but almost universally, women are underrepresented in accounts of history and recognition of significant events and people.
“The reality is that women play a large role in the development of this community,” Historic Columbia director Robin Waites said. “And the fact that we are underrepresented essentially puts out there that women don’t have the same opportunities, or women don’t take advantage of the opportunities that are out there. But if you don’t ever see it, particularly for young people, how do you know it’s out there?”
The naming of 12 significant women is a small start toward honoring the women who have shaped and are shaping Columbia, she said.
“That’s not to say that we’re going to ask for streets or buildings that are named for men to take those off. But we certainly want to be able to find that balance,” Waites said. “Once we balance that representation piece, it becomes an empowerment tool and an inspirational building block so that people can look at someone who looks like that, inspiring them to behave in different ways.”
Hodges said she imagines that, in the future, groups of schoolchildren who step off buses to tour the S.C. State House downtown will walk down Main Street and stumble upon a City of Women icon.
“And their guide will pull out their phone and say, ‘Let’s talk about who this was,’” she said.
The Columbia City of Women launch event announcing the 12 honorees will be a limited-admission event at 6 p.m. March 31 at the Columbia Museum of Art. Tickets start at $35 and are available online at www.eventbrite.com.
The kickoff event will be followed by two days of women-centered programming by WREN, including the organization’s annual summit on women’s economic empowerment with keynote speaker Aja Wilson on April 1 and a panel discussion about gender pay equity on April 2, which is national Equal Pay Day.
