Women of Germantown

Women of Germantown by artist David McShane is located on the historic YWCA building in the Germantown neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The community wanted to have a mural dedicated to the female leaders from this area of Philadelphia. From a list of fifty names, McShane worked with the community to select six women to feature, with the additional forty four names listed at the base of the wall.

The six woman depicted are: Maggie Kuhn, founder of the Gray Panthers; Louisa May Alcott, author and abolitionist; Sadie Tanner Alexander, the first African-American woman to go to Penn Law School and become a member of the Pennsylvania Bar; Sarah Ward McLean, a philanthropist whose family helped build the first Germantown YMCA; Clarice Gamble Herbert, the first African-American woman to assume the directorship of a YMCA; and Dinah, a freed slave who saved Stenton Manor from the British during the Revolutionary War.

McShane worked from photographs for all of the women except Dinah. For that portrait, McShane used as a model Irma Gardner-Hammond, who portrayed Dinah at the dedication ceremony.