Gordon Brown today called for a permanent memorial in Westminster's Parliament Square in honour of the suffragette movement.
The prime minister was speaking on the 90th anniversary of the first women being awarded the vote on February 6 1918.
"There should be some permanent memorial to the campaign that was mounted for the right to vote and perhaps a monument in Parliament Square would be a very good indication of the support of the whole country," he told MPs at question time.
But what women want is something more concrete than a statue.
Labour's Margaret Moran asked Brown what he was going to do to boost the current "one-in-five" ratio of women MPs.
Thanks to a rash of all-women shortlists at the 1997 elections, Labour is several laps ahead in terms of female representation in Westminster. The party boasts 97 women MPs (27%), while the Liberal Democrats have just nine (14%) and the Tories 17 (9%).
Brown conceded that there was no room for complacency: "We want to see more after the next general election," he told MPs.
There's certainly plenty of scope for improvement. The Fawcett Society has worked out it would take Labour about 20 years to get an even split of male and female MPs, the Lib Dems 40 years and the Conservatives about four centuries.
As Fawcett director Katherine Rake told today's SocietyGuardian, there's quite a way to go on other fronts too in terms of equality. Perhaps a statue will remind women that the struggle for fairer representation is far from over. Surely no bad thing.
