Hello and today's today's Hello, unladies, it's me, Kristen.

And today's uncut gem is an interview from way back in the very first season of Unladylike.

The story that you're going to hear today

that guest Diane Carlson Evans has to share

blew me away.

And the episode that her story is featured in is how to break the bronze

ceiling and the bronze ceiling refers to the massive gender gap in public statues and memorials dedicated to men, i.e. most of them,

versus women. And going into this episode, this was still in a time when statue conversations

were mostly focused on the gender of it all. It was more about getting statues

up than taking them down.

And the question that I wanted to answer in that episode

was, what does it take to actually get a statue or memorial and what does that process then reflect about our political and

cultural values,

and who the powerful consider worthy of memorializing,

worthy of celebrating in stone or metal or mixed media.

And I will give a content warning

that this episode gets into some pretty graphic detail about the Vietnam War.

Diane Carlson Evans was a nurse and saw a lot on the battlefield and she talks about the reality of that and the

PTSD as a result of that. So we're not shying away from those realities, but I will say that it doesn't

dominate the conversation. And I just remember leaving the interview so blown away by what it really takes to do something big like this and by this I mean get a whole

fucking monument built.

I'm Diane Carlson Evans and I'm the founder of the Vietnam Women's Memorial. It was titled Vietnam Women's Memorial Project in the first 10 years of the effort because it was a project.

...