Sit-Down Men and Stand-Up Women
Flint, Michigan
Sit-Downers Memorial Park was built by the United Auto Workers to honor those who took part in the 1937 strike against General Motors. It marked a new approach, a "sit-down" strike. The workers just sat down at their factory posts on December 30, 1936, and refused to work until their demands were met. It lasted 44 days.
Sitting doesn't make for a very dynamic memorial, so it was designed with two separate groups of statues. In the first, the men (the factory workers were all men) lounge on car seats, read a newspaper, take a nap, waiting for the strike to end. In the second, set against the outside wall of the factory, a woman is dragged away by a policeman, another woman carries a basket of food to the men inside, and a third is about to swing a baseball bat to smash out a window.