"Rendering the invisible visible in prominent spaces, this ground-breaking guide to Scotland sets the record straight with regards to women’s pivotal roles in shaping the nation."
“The way we memorialise our history is key. As George Orwell noted in 1984 ‘He who controls the past, controls the future. He who controls the present, controls the past.’ He.” So Sara Sheridan shares in her introduction to Where Are the Women? — a tremendously enlightening alternative guidebook that imagines a landscape in which “women are commemorated in statues and streets and buildings - even in the hills and valleys”.
Noting that her home city of Edinburgh has more statues of animals than women (!!!), Sheridan has painstakingly put women on the Scottish map, quite literally, from Edinburgh and Glasgow, to Orkney and beyond. In each destination, monuments to notable women connected to each location have either been renamed, rededicated or adapted to commemorate a woman or women, or else created afresh. So, for example, Arthur’s Seat in Edinburgh is now St Triduna’s.
Fittingly for such a trailblazing book, the monuments themselves are also marvellously inventive. While some are conventional statues, others have been conjured in the form of festivals, murals, parks, installations, fountains, bells and cairns — it’s fair to say, no stone has been left unturned. Not only is Where Are the Women? incredibly informative as it centres the achievements, courage and legacies of remarkable woman (most of whom have been cast aside by history and unfamiliar), but it also prompts wider thought around who, how, and why we commemorate in the first place.
| Primary Genre | History |
| Other Genres: |
Can you imagine a different Scotland, a Scotland where women are commemorated in statues and streets and buildings - even in the hills and valleys?
This is a guidebook to that alternative nation, where the cave on Staffa is named after Malvina rather than Fingal, and Arthur's Seat isn't Arthur's, it belongs to St Triduana. You arrive into Dundee at Slessor Station and the Victorian monument on Stirling's Abbey Hill interprets national identity through the women who ran hospitals during the First World War. The West Highland Way ends at Fort Mary. The Old Lady of Hoy is a prominent Orkney landmark. And the plinths in central Glasgow proudly display statues of the suffragettes who fought until they won.
In this guide, streets, buildings, statues and monuments are dedicated to real women, telling their often unknown stories.
For most of recorded history, women have been sidelined, if not silenced, by men who named the built environment after themselves. Now is the time to look unflinchingly at Scotland's heritage and bring those women who have been ignored to light.
Where Are the Women? features in the following genres: Biographies & Autobiographies, History, Social and cultural history, Feminism and feminist theory, Society and culture: general, Society and Social Sciences, Society and culture: general, Social groups, communities and identities, Gender studies, gender groups, Gender studies: women and girls, Feminism and feminist theory, History and Archaeology, History: specific events and topics, Social and cultural history
Where Are the Women? is available in Paperback
Where Are the Women? was written by Sara Sheridan, Historic Environment Scotland and published by Historic Environment Scotland
Where Are the Women? has 447 pages
£8.99
