Above the colorful sea of 30,000 runners who will check their watches and bounce from foot to foot to soothe last-minute jitters at the start of the Boston Marathon April 20 will be a new stationary figure, standing as a tribute to those who came before.
“The Girl Who Ran” depicts Roberta “Bobbi” Gibb – the first woman to complete the marathon in 1966 – cast in bronze and captured midstride, eyes focused straight ahead. Ms. Gibb, an accomplished artist, is also the sculptor of the life-size monument. Sixty years ago, 100 yards from this spot, she hid in a forsythia bush, her long hair tucked beneath a hooded sweatshirt. She waited, coiled like a spring, to leap into a race not open to women.
Times have clearly changed. On Monday, when the runners line up for the 130th Boston Marathon, women will make up nearly half of the competitors. Ms. Gibb’s statue may represent a moment of her personal history, but to the artist, it embodies much more. “I also want it to be for not just women, but men and women, because much as women were locked into a stereotype … so were men. We were segregated,” she says in a phone interview from her home on the North Shore of Massachusetts.
Why We Wrote This
When Bobbi Gibb sprang out of the bushes and into the Boston Marathon, she proved women could run 26.2 miles. A new sculpture she crafted at the race start marks her legacy.
A recent ribbon-cutting ceremony at “The Girl Who Ran” marked the culmination of a nearly decade-long fundraising effort by Boston Marathon winners and private donors. The effort was coordinated by the 26.2 Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing the sport.
“The Girl Who Ran” is not only the first Boston Marathon-related statue to represent a real woman, but it is also a rarity among public works of art. Most monuments that portray female figures are allegorical, such as the Statue of Liberty, says Sierra Rooney, an associate professor of art history at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. Her research shows there are around 400 monuments honoring real women in the United States, about 8% of all monuments. Dr. Rooney is particularly struck by “The Girl Who Ran” because it depicts a living person, created by the athlete herself.
“It is about the physical strength of a female body. And that’s quite unusual in the landscape of public monuments,” says Dr. Rooney. “The cultural conception of what it means to be a hero has so long been bounded by sort of masculine ideals of being a politician, being a statesman, being an explorer, these professions that historically have excluded women.”
