Women Who Travel Podcast: Ashley C. Ford Explores America's Landmarks
You can listen to our podcast on Apple Podcasts and Spotify each week. Follow this link if you're listening on Apple News.
This episode, we join Ashley C. Ford, a writer, educator, and host of the podcast Monumental, and move around the United States to find out more about statues, monuments, memorials, and landmarks. Who gets to put them up? And how are our ideas about them changing? Plus, Ashley shares her own personal stories about the monuments that changed her ways of thinking.
Lale Arikoglu: Hi there. I'm Lale Arikoglu, and on this episode of Women Who Travel, we're moving around the country to find out more about statues, monuments, memorials, and landmarks. Who gets to choose to put them up, and how are our ideas about them changing?
Ashley C. Ford: Monuments are about learning and remembering what happened here, or at least at their best, that's what they're meant to do.
LA: My guest is writer and podcast host, Ashley C. Ford, whose work I've been following for quite some time.
We are talking about travel today, but through quite a specific lens. You are the host of PRX's Monumental. What does the podcast and the theme mean personally to you?
ACF: I think that talking about monuments, memorials, the landmarks that we pay attention to, helps us tell our own story in this country,.I have always found monuments and memorials to be so fun and curiosity inducing. As a kid, I would run to every plaque, I would run to any monument, especially if I could touch it.
LA: Which often you're not allowed to do.
ACF: Which often you're not allowed to do, but it helps, especially when it comes to kids who have a more tactile discovery button like me.
LA: That's so funny though, because I feel like the sort of cliche of being a kid when you're traveling or anywhere with your parents is having to stand while they read the plaque, and yet you were the one that was running towards it.
ACF: Yes.
LA: What was that curiosity? Because clearly you've carried it through.
ACF: Yes, well, I think initially it started with the fact that I grew up in a home where we didn't take a whole lot of vacations. We didn't go see a whole lot of things, and there was no guarantee for me that if I got the special opportunity to see something or be around something that I would ever get to be around it again. So I felt this real responsibility to memorize figures in history or these art pieces that were meant to represent an event that I had never heard of but now I was going to be a little fascinated and a little weird about because I had been in the presence of something that made me curious. I think everybody can come to a love of something like landmarks differently, but it really does start with a child being encouraged. Not that it can't happen later, but it's easier with children.
I think somebody living in and growing up in Europe might have a different experience, mostly because I think you guys are much, much more likely to have a lot of living recorded history right around you and right around the corner. So I can see why it might be a little bit more like, come on.
LA: Yeah. I think it was growing up in London, I mean, it sounds so obnoxious to say this, but I'm like, it's just everywhere.
ACF: Yeah, I mean, but it's not obnoxious. The fact of the matter is that a lot of people, I think most people who grow up in places like I grew up, we don't necessarily get that, or if we do, it's tended toward monuments and memorials of war. That's the biggest thing that you'll find right here in Indianapolis, you'll find those war memorials. And I think that's trickier to have conversations about with children, but a lot, lot easier for adults and young adults to get those references and maybe take a deeper dive into it.
LA: You said it's going to be a lot harder to have those conversations with children. Are there monuments you remember seeing growing up in Indiana and how did they affect you?
ACF: Oh my gosh, yes. So I'm from a city called Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Fort Wayne, Indiana has a very complicated history with the native population, the indigenous population, the Miami Indians that were in that area. And there was a chief of a tribe there, Chief Little Turtle, we have so many statues of Chief little Turtle. We have a whole camp that's a Boy Scouts camp called Camp Chief Little Turtle, but it was really, really hard to find any information or for it to come up in classrooms who Chief Little Turtle was, what he meant to our city. And why I have to walk past what at the time was a really, really scary to me as a small kid image of him and coming to realize that his history is tied up in my history. His history and his time in this place has affected my history and my time in this place.
So in the same park, there's also a statue of the Hamilton sisters and their cousin, which are these three amazing women who did this incredible service work in my city. One of them was a physician, the other one was a social worker, the other was a scholar of Greek mythology, and they helped start the YWCA in our city. Alice Hamilton was not just a physician in her time, but she was also the first female faculty member at Harvard University. She was a social welfare reformer and she was from and lived in and planted her roots in the place where I lived.
LA: And if that monument wasn't there, you'd have had, I imagine, maybe no idea.
ACF: I never would've heard of them. They did not come up in my classrooms. They did not come up in conversation. They didn't come up when someone was dedicating a space. They didn't even really come up as great Hoosiers in our history, and Hoosiers for you, are people from Indiana. That's what we call each other.
LA: This is so fascinating though, because you mentioned Chief Little Turtle who kept giving you a jump scare over and over again in your hometown.
ACF: Over and over.
LA: People decided to erect those statues and yet it wasn't making it into the classroom. Why do you think there's this disconnect?
ACF: I think where I come from, Indiana, the Midwest, there tends to be an issue at times with sort of wanting to hype ourselves up. Wanting to say that something that we've done, something that someone from here has done is worth remembering, worth sort of commemorating, but worth actively remembering. And actively remembering requires a collaboration between not just local education and local parks and local history, it also requires those people to work together to build a narrative that makes sense. And I think it's really hard for them to talk about what's so special about this Chief Little Turtle, what's so special about this Alice Hamilton, without talking about what they were up against. And the fact that what they were up against ostensibly, won. We are still having a lot of those same battles. We are still having a lot of those same conversations, and the fact that they haven't been resolved or acknowledged means that that's where the conversation ends. How do you talk about what was up against women in this time if those same things are up against women in our time now?
One of the things that made me most sad while recording the podcast was realizing how little we build monuments or memorials that feature women. We have so few when we compare it to the total amount of monuments and memorials that have been recorded and counted by different organizations that, I mean, it startled me. It startled me that there are more statues of fictional women than real ones.
LA: It's less scary when they're not real.
ACF: Must be. That must be the case because it's true.
LA: Oh, she doesn't exist, give her a statue.
ACF: Give her a statue. Tinker bells and mermaids, and there are so many more statues of women as mythical figures than women who have lived and fought and celebrated.
LA: Mythical figures that are often written by men as well.
ACF: Yes, yes, that is absolutely true. That's the thing I think that ended up being most startling and heartbreaking for me. There were plenty of things that were startling and heartbreaking, there were plenty of things that were soul edifying that made me feel like, okay, come on, we're getting somewhere. But this is just one of those things that has stuck in my craw that for reasons that are poorly, poorly explained, we have ended up in this situation where despite living in a country that loves to memorialize, loves to build a monument, they have found actual living, breathing, existing, accomplished women less than worthy of being commemorated. And that makes me think about growing up again and thinking that these monuments of the Hamilton women were commonplace. Thinking it was amazing that I could go run among them and touch them and act like I was speaking to them and interacting with these monuments and the whole time not realizing or being able to recognize how rare they truly were.
LA: As an adult, now at 37, have you discovered any other statues or memorials to women that have sparked your imagination or that you've engaged with?
ACF: Not that weren't mythical. Yeah, it's pretty sad because my first thought was Beneficence, which is a statue on the campus of my alma mater, but Beneficence is not a person, beneficence is an idea. She is a mythical person, and even though I would love to live up to her ideal, it would be even more powerful to me if she had been a woman. That would be fantastic.
LA: Coming up the story on her podcast, Monumental, that Ashley was most excited to share.
We're back with podcast host and author, ACF. You've dedicated episodes of Monumental to some specific places that are known for their history, represented through legacy sites or monuments. Could you tell me a little bit about how you decided to tell the stories of those places and their monuments?
ACF: The one that I was most excited to share with the audience, the one I was most excited to talk about was Montgomery, Alabama. And it can be really hard to get people to understand the emotional weight of a monument. It can be really, really hard to get people to understand what it's like to stand inside of, stand among a representation of the pain inflicted upon your family members, your ancestors in the past. And there's a crushing, oppressive understanding that comes from being in a space like that and from knowing that history, but also knowing that it's not going to crush you and also, you are not as alone as you think you are.
I think that that's kind of the beauty of a place like that, but also the sadness of a place like that is that you have to have that balance of feeling it and acknowledging it so that you know in that moment that in no part of this are you all on your own or is your experience so unique that there's no place for you to put your pain, or that there's no place in the world for your pain.
LA: A bronze in Montgomery's Freedom Sculpture Park is called, We Am Very Cold. Here's a clip from Monumental. The show's producer, Tamar Avishai, is in the park.
Tamar Avishai: Captured in rough-hewn bronze, enslaved people are shown in various states of panic and desperation with shackles around their necks. Everyone is connected with chains. Their faces are contorted with grief or with resignation. There are whip scars on their backs. A crying woman clutches her baby, reaching out to a man whose hands are shackled. I looked at this scene, at the small baby's hand desperately gripping his mother and felt the immediate need to look away.
Speaker 5: And what I didn't anticipate when we opened was how many people would say, "Gosh, I've lived in this country my whole life. I've never seen a sculpture that is intended to depict the brutality of slavery and the humanity of the enslaved." We don't have sculptures in this country that speak to the institution of slavery.
ACF: I think that what really helped in the episode about Montgomery, about that situation was that while it was all taken seriously and it was all given to you in a very straightforward way, I don't think anybody listening to that story would feel indicted by it. I don't think anybody listening to that story would feel like it was trying to pound something into them or it was trying to change anything about them. Despite it being this story about acknowledging this very oppressive, this dangerous, this terrible time in our history, it figured out how to acknowledge this time, this oppressive act in a story or in a narrative that actually felt expansive.
Despite the fact that it was talking about something that was narrow and dark and terrible, the story felt like it expanded your thoughts about this time. It expanded your thoughts about this world and how we respond to those moments in our history.
LA: We were talking about the choice of how to tell the story and how to memorialize an event or people. In Hawaii, there is the Pearl Harbor memorial, it's very touristed.
ACF: Yes.
LA: Fewer people know of the sites of the Japanese internment camps, and yet this is a very significant part of American history and recent American history. There are living people who experienced this. Are more people starting to pay attention to these sites? Is this something that's being talked about more or is it still getting lost in the way this story is told?
ACF: It is absolutely still getting lost in the way the story is told. There aren't as many people who are familiar with these sites. We don't talk about them.
LA: What tips do you have for a visitor who goes to a major monument and honestly only has a little bit of time to understand it and to also question it and try and look for the tensions in the opposing sides? That's so much.
ACF: Yes.
LA: With so little context as a traveler.
ACF: Well, I mean, with the information we have available online, not to mention just online, but in libraries, there's so much research, personal research that we can do. Things that particularly interest us, and we can walk in there with our questions already. We can walk in there knowing exactly what we want to figure out while we're in there. Because sometimes you go to a place and you're like, hey, I've always read that this thing is this color and then I read something that said, it's actually this color, and now I'm going to go see it and I'm going to get to get my own view up close and say, no, actually, it definitely was the color that the first guy said. No, actually this new guy, this patina, he's right. It's starting to turn green. You can see it up front and be having a conversation with people who have different opinions in your head, in your own mind, in your own experience.
And like I said before, I'm a very tactile person. I like to touch things. I will go to a monument that a person is allowed to touch just so that I could hold its hand or that I could look into its eyes very directly, and that's when it's a people memorial. Sometimes there are things where there are names all over. I want to read those names. I want to see those names carved into the stone. I want to see how tall this tower actually is. I want to feel my smallness next to it. When you're going to these places, when you're seeing these things, having a clear idea of what you want from that moment, what you are trying to get, what you are trying to learn in that moment, will probably help you not feel so panicked or so rushed or less confused. That's going to come from you.
LA: And you're kind of taking control as well.
ACF: Yes.
LA: You are the one being like, I'm going into this space and I've got these questions and I'm going. Not to say that you'd walk into every institution with a good dose of suspicion, but maybe you should. You probably should.
ACF: Maybe you should, maybe, and why not? Being suspicious, having questions, I think so often that those things get coded as being difficult or being wrong or being otherwise un-trusting. But really, it's about loving to learn. It's about wanting to know what is right as much as you can know what is right or what is correct, it's about having experiences that allow you to learn to trust your own experience. Because you know what? I don't have to worry about who's right when one person says the statue is gold and the other person said it was green, but I saw it with my own eyes and I know that it's green.
LA: Two million visitors go see faces of four presidents in the Black Hills of South Dakota. Ashley asks, do they actually think about the significance of whose land the monument was built on? Coming up.
When it comes to questioning monuments, there are some that have become and will continue to become flashpoints for protest. I'm thinking in particular, Confederate monuments in the last, I don't know, five, 10 years, has really seen that movement grow. Are there specific ones that seem particularly significant for you in telling the story of how we look at monuments and question their place in our lives and in society?
ACF: I think a lot about Mount Rushmore, and I am going to call it Mount Rushmore and I'm going to continue to throughout the conversation because that is, I think, the most recognizable name for that area. But I would always encourage people, I would encourage listeners, I would encourage anybody who hears me right now to look up what the name of the mountain was before it became Mount Rushmore. Because just because we turned something into a monument, just because we turn it into a memorial doesn't mean it didn't have its own history and its own narrative before whoever decided that it was up for grabs to be able to use it this way. Before whoever decided that, it was something else and it may have meant something to somebody else. This place was a place before it was this kind of place.
LA: As we try to reach some conclusions about the power of monuments in this episode, I find myself looking out of the studio window. I'm sitting in the World Trade Center right now.
ACF: Are you?
LA: And we overlook a very famous memorial.
ACF: You do.
LA: And like all of them, a very complicated one. I walk past it every morning and I can't help but at some point look at it, look at the names. I've worked in this building for eight years. I am familiar with that memorial, and I also see crowds of people behaving in all sorts of different ways. Is there one way to behave in these spaces of remembering? Should people be showing a certain level of contemplation and reverence or our selfie sticks okay? I mean, this is something I think about when I walk through it all the time.
ACF: Well, that's a question in my mind, and I think the best kinds of monuments usually don't force contemplation or reflection or peaceful participation, but they imply that that's supposed to be happening here.
I will say that there was a time when it seemed that the memorial, you're speaking of the Twin Towers Memorial, the 9/11 Memorial. There was a time when that space seemed to very much induce that reaction, where the closer you walked to it, the quieter it got. And I have only found that that has changed as the perception of not what happened on that day, but what happened in the aftermath, has started to shift a bit in public consciousness. And people are asking more questions and people are coming to all kinds of different positions about the who's, what's, where's, how's, and who's to blame and how's to blame and all of those things. And I think as the conversation has become more complicated, the experience of being near that memorial has also become a little more complicated.
What I find beautiful is the fact that we have decided to not only continue telling each other's stories about our glorious past or our complicated past, but most likely our glorious past. We've decided to tell stories via statue, via symbol, via commemoration in this fashion. I think that that's fascinating, and I like to feel fascinated. But like most things that I get fascinated about because I'm just like, oh yeah, tell me more. What was the story that was there before and what does that mean? What does that mean that we could make this shift and change the narrative of an entire geographic location because somebody was able to overpower somebody else? Why would we choose to tell the story we tell from that area? Why, why, why, why, why? Everything should take you down a tunnel of why, and it's not that you're not going to find answers along the way, it's just that those answers will lead you to more why's.
And eventually you realize that asking all those questions, asking all those whys, infiltrates the way you see everything else after. Everything else after, well, you'll have those whys and you'll want to continue to ask them.
LA: Ashley, this has been such a fascinating and thought-provoking conversation, and thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and your stories. If people want to follow you and your work and listen to Monumental, where can they find you?
ACF: Well, they can find Monumental wherever you can listen to podcasts.
LA: You don't say?
ACF: You don't say, and I am also all over the place. You can find me at my website, AshleyCFord.com. I have a book called Somebody's Daughter that you can pick up wherever you want, and I am also online in most places as Smash Fizzle.
LA: Thank you so much.
ACF: Thank you.
LA: It's been really lovely.
ACF: I had so much fun.
LA: Oh, I'm so glad. That's it for today. Thank you to the podcast, Monumental, for letting us use a clip. See you next week.
Thank you for listening to Women Who Travel, I'm LA, and you can find me on Instagram @lalehannah. Our engineers are Jake Lummus, James Yost, Vince Fairchild, and Pran Bandi. The show is mixed by Amar Lal at Macro Sound. Jude Kampfner of Corporation for Independent Media is our producer. Stephanie Kariuki is our Executive Producer, and Chris Bannon is Condé Nast's Head of Global Audio.
Originally Appeared on Condé Nast Traveler
The Latest Stories from Condé Nast Traveler
Want to be the first to know? Sign up to our newsletters for travel inspiration and tips
Thanksgiving in Paris Is One of the Most American Things You Can Do
15 Unwritten Rules to Know Before Visiting New York City
Welcome to Park Ranger Instagram—the Most Wholesome Corner of the Internet
