Qualla: Virginia Women's Monument

Virginia Women's Monument: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit WomenArtistUpdates, CC BY-SA 4.0. The idea came from a 94-year-old. Em Bowles Locker Alsop — a Richmond writer who had once been screen-tested for the role of Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind — decided in 2009 that the grounds of the Virginia State Capitol needed something more than dead Confederate generals on horseback. She called her state senator, Walter Stosch, and asked him to introduce a resolution. In 2010 the Virginia General Assembly created the Virginia Women's Monument Commission by unanimous vote. Alsop died in 2015 at age 98, three years before the monument opened. The result is titled Voices from the Garden: The Virginia Women's Monument. Eleven life-sized bronze figures stand in a small oval granite plaza on Capitol Square, with two benches and a series of tempered glass panels — the Wall of Honor — etched with more than 200 additional names from four centuries of Virginia women's history.

Image: WomenArtistUpdates | CC BY-SA 4.0

Virginia Women's Monument: The First Seven

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kss5pj, CC BY-SA 4.0. The first seven statues were unveiled in October 2019, four hundred years after the first English settlement at Jamestown. The roster reaches deep into the Commonwealth's history. There is Anne Burras Laydon, who arrived in Virginia in 1608 as a teenager and became one of the fir...

Image: Kss5pj | CC BY-SA 4.0

Virginia Women's Monument: Four More

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit WomenArtistUpdates, CC BY-SA 4.0. In May 2022, four more statues were installed to complete the original commission. Sarah Garland Boyd Jones became the first African American woman to pass the Virginia medical board examination, in 1893; she co-founded the Richmond Hospital Association and what later became Rich...

Image: WomenArtistUpdates | CC BY-SA 4.0

Virginia Women's Monument: The Wall of Honor

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit WomenArtistUpdates, CC BY-SA 4.0. Two benches line the sides of the oval plaza. Behind them, a series of tempered glass panels bears the names of more than 200 additional Virginia women — a roster that ranges across politics, science, the arts, sports, civil rights, medicine, and the messier corners of American h...

Image: WomenArtistUpdates | CC BY-SA 4.0

Virginia Women's Monument: Capitol Square

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kss5pj, CC BY-SA 4.0. The monument sits on the same Capitol Square that holds Thomas Jefferson's 1788 Capitol building and Houdon's marble statue of George Washington — long the visual definition of Virginia state authority. By placing eleven bronze women within sight of those older monuments, the Gen...

Image: Kss5pj | CC BY-SA 4.0

Virginia Women's Monument: The Politics of Standing Still

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Kss5pj, CC BY-SA 4.0. Voices from the Garden opened to the public in 2019, in the same Capitol Square where Confederate commemorations had been a fixture of Virginia public space for more than a century. Within two years, most of the major Confederate statues along nearby Monument Avenue had been remo...

Image: Kss5pj | CC BY-SA 4.0