It is so normal for places to be named after men (mostly white men) and not women that I didn’t notice it until, in 2015, I made a map renaming places after women and realized I’d grown up in a country where almost everything named after a person—mountains, rivers, towns, bridges, buildings, states, parks—was named after a man, and nearly all the statues were of men. Women were allegorical figures—liberty and justice—but not actual people. A landscape full of places named after women and statues of women might have encouraged me and other girls in profound ways. The names of women were absent,
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