Last Tuesday the campaign group Mary on the Green unveiled its long awaited statue dedicated to 18th century writer and philosopher Mary Wollstonecraft. The group have been fundraising and campaigning for this statue for 10 years.
Mary Wollstonecraft is regarded as the ‘mother of feminism.’ Born in 1759 in Spitalfields, London, Mary went on to have a fascinating life. She was a part of a circle of renowned radical philosophers including Thomas Paine and William Godwin and went on to France to experience life in Revolutionary France, and had to flee during Robespierre’s Reign of Terror. She published 7 books and several articles in popular 18th Century newspapers. Probably her most famous work was A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in which she argued that the equal education of boys and girls would lead to a more equal society. Her reputation was left in tatters after a posthumous account of her rather unconventional life published by her husband, William Godwin, in 1798 shocked its readers. It was not until the rise of Second Wave Feminism in the 1960s that the study of Mary’s life and works really came back to prominence.
The Mary On The Green campaign came around because there are so few statues dedicated to women and, if there was any historical women deserving of a statue, Mary surely makes the top 10. As of 2018 there were 828 statues across the whole of the UK, and of this only 174 are women; but only 80 named women (bbc.co.uk/news/uk-43884726). Of the 265 statues in London, 17 were dedicated to women (statuesforequality.com). I’m not really the biggest advocate for statues, but even those stats shocked me. In the last few years there have been a few statues of women unveiled including political activist and councillor Mary Barbour in Glasgow, and leading Suffragist Millicent Garett Fawcett.
So given the desire for more statues commemorating historical woman, and the excitement around Mary Wollstonecraft, why was there such a backlash when it was finally revealed?
The statue was designed and created by artist Maggi Hambling and features a silver figure standing atop a mass of other bodies. My initial issue with the statue was that it looked nothing liked Mary, but later learned that it is not a statue of Mary, but rather to Mary. In an interview with the Evening Standard, Hambling stated that the figure represented ‘everywoman.’
My problem with this though is that the statue seems almost anonymous. Its context as a statue to Mary isn’t obvious enough and doesn’t really appear to commemorate anything. If I did not know it was supposed to be about anyone historical, I fear I would walk past it without a second thought except maybe “that looks a bit naff,” rather than engaging with it in any meaningful way. With so few statues actually depicting historical women the whole endeavour seems like a missed opportunity. Prominent historical men are so often represented as themselves (sometimes more than once), so this idea to have something ‘for’ Mary Wollstonecraft makes her seem lesser than, despite her status as a great radical thinker of her time. If there were more statues of women would I think differently about the way this has been executed? Probably.
The nakedness of the statue also rubbed people the wrong way. Usually I am not one to complain about nudity in statues. But we don’t see many ‘great’ (usually not-so-great) men being represented in this way; you don’t see a statue to Nelson or Wellington with their kit off representing ‘all men.’ More often than not the men are portrayed to reflect their victories and successes. Our “everywoman”, on the other hand, is left looking like the Silver Surfer without a book or pen in sight.
In the context of Mary Wollstonecraft herself the nudity doesn’t make sense. Writing in 1792 Mary herself wrote, “Taught from infancy that beauty is a woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt change, only seeks to adorn its prison.” For Maggi Hambling to then go on to say that the figure is “more or less the shape we’d all like to be” is as insulting as it is untrue. Mary lived an unconventional life for the times she was living in. She didn’t want look like ‘everywoman’, but wished that ‘everywoman’ had the freedom to live the way she believed that they should: with equal opportunity to live without limitations. The celebration of her life with a naked body of an anonymous woman misses the point of Mary’s political and philosophical beliefs completely.
But whilst I don’t personally like the execution of the art work, the point of the artists work is to create a conversation about the life and legacy of Mary Wollstonecraft. Indeed that is something Mary was very good at doing herself. Bringing Mary into a public conversation is a triumph in itself after she was very much left out of the history books and public conversation for so long. It is just a shame that after 200 years the campaign missed such a great opportunity to show off the ‘mother of feminism’ in the way that I believe she deserved.
What do you think of the statue? Leave a comment!
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