Hail Mary! The statue that’s divided the ‘woke’ brigade
A nude tribute to Mary Wollstonecraft has north London hot under the collar, says Eleanor Steafel
Some hate that her breasts are on show, others that her stomach is toned. Many feel she represents everything that is iniquitous about how women have been portrayed in art for centuries: “nude, nameless and conventionally attractive”, as one person wrote on Twitter. A minority have hailed her rather prominent body hair as a symbol of female liberation.
The statue commemorating Mary Wollstonecraft, the “mother of feminism”, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Women in 1792 and once described as a “hyena in a petticoat”, has been in situ on Newington Green in north London for five days.
Movements among key Downing Street players have generated less criticism this week than the silvered bronze, unveiled on Tuesday after 10 years of campaigning and hard-won fundraising to the tune of £143,000. It is the first known tribute to Wollstonecraft in Britain and, as such, had been eagerly anticipated.
Yet, in a year when a light has been shone on the political power a statue can hold, this depiction of womanhood as a sort of Barbie doll has, put simply, gone down badly.
“It’s a disgrace to the women in this borough,” said an onlooker on Newington Green yesterday, just one of those who have seen fit to preserve the statue’s modesty by bringing her items of clothing.
“If I was a little girl, I’m not sure I’d be like, ‘Who’s that Mum?’ and want to find out more about her, would you?” muses another woman.
Given the memorial was originally pitched as a chance to have “a tangible way to share Wollstonecraft’s vision and ideas”, it’s a fair question.
Andy Pakula, atheist minister at the Newington Green Unitarian Church, which Wollstonecraft herself attended in the 18th century, says many among his congregation have been horrified.
The square has always been a pilgrimage site for Wollstonecraft disciples, and Pakula’s church bears a stencil of her on its external wall that fans travel to be photographed with.
Locals have very mixed feelings about the statue, he says. “There’s anger, there’s ‘this is a travesty and ‘this is an insult to Mary’. How is this going to help the disparate communities in this area to focus more on women’s rights? There’s a lot of domestic abuse round here. To what extent can people come together around this?”
Pakula adds that the original design looked vastly different from the finished product. “The maquette was smooth and lacking in … specific features,” he says, carefully. “The nipples and the pubic hair and probably the bum looked different.”
While some consider it a thoroughly modern depiction of a liberated woman, others feel her nudity demeans her achievements. As Pakula shrewdly points out, it “divides woke culture”.
But the anger runs deeper than a conversation around the appropriateness of commemorating a feminist hero with a naked statuette. Liz Vater, who runs the local literary festival, says the panel that selected the artist Maggi Hambling’s submission (and encouraged the community to
spend time and effort fundraising) has neglected their duty to locals.
“The result is a public art project delivered by people who don’t even live here, but paid for by a community who weren’t adequately consulted, whose shared values it doesn’t represent and who largely loathe it,” she says.
“The message now coming out of the campaign is: ‘If you don’t like this, then get behind some other campaigns for statues of other women’, which feels like a real slap in the face for people who’ve been suckered into paying for this one.”
Vater adds that a certain amount of snobbery has accompanied the debate. “The inference is that if you don’t like the statue, you don’t understand it,” she says. “I’ve had art explained to me by men from all corners of the internet who don’t seem to appreciate that women can understand conceptual art, yet still have issues with it politically and contextually.
“To reject it as a meaningful and inspiring interpretation of Wollstonecraft’s life doesn’t mean we don’t understand it. We just think it’s a poor response to a fantastic brief.”
The other shortlisted contender, by artist Martin Jennings, offered a very different depiction – Wollstonecraft fully clothed, with a bonnet, pile of books and a bench for people to sit on.
“There were two maquettes that the sculptors put forward,” says Pakula. “There was a consultation. People could choose between them. They chose the other one, they preferred the Jennings.
“The panel had said from the beginning that the consultation was advisory and they also had sculptors and artists on the panel, and other people who were raising money – they chose the other one.”
Why? “They would have been skewered if they had chosen one made by a man. People would have said this is an insult to women.”
Bee Rowlatt, a writer who was at the heart of the fight to get the statue erected, says the decision among the panel was “unanimous”.
“It’s fair to say that overall in the consultation a preference was there for Jennings, but the favouring of Jennings was greater outside of London than it was among people more local to the green, where it was a very close run,” she explains.
Julia Long, a researcher who lives nearby, says the statue is “so insulting”.
“We were looking forward to it,” she explains. “We thought this is going to be a statue of Mary to commemorate her, and that will inspire girls to find out about her. How can you do that from a tiny, really oddly proportioned, naked female body? It just reduces her to a pair of breasts and a really odd shaped pubic area. It doesn’t say anything about what she achieved.
“Can you imagine if they did that to Karl Marx? Had a sculpture of him with his penis out? It would never happen.
“They should have gone for the one that served the purpose, and it’s very sad that the other one was done by a man and this one by a woman.”
Hambling has shrugged off the criticism, pointing out the statue isn’t supposed to be a faithful depiction of Wollstonecraft but an “everywoman” that captures her “spirit”.
She told one newspaper: “The point is she has to be naked because clothes define people. We all know clothes are limiting and she is everywoman… As far as I know, she’s more or less the shape we’d all like to be.”
Rowlatt added: “Maggi Hambling is a pioneering artist, and we wanted to do something different to putting people on pedestals. We could have done something really, really boring and ordinary, and very Victorian and old-fashioned. It’s a challenging artwork, and it’s meant to be.”
When the campaign for the statue was first established, its aim was clear: “Just as the image of Churchill’s memorial statue is used in debates on his legacy, the same is needed for Mary Wollstonecraft.”
To be fair to its creator, it has done exactly that in the few days it has been on display.
Dissenters have come to lay their own tributes at her feet, while on Twitter (where, in 2020, every public statement is put on trial), spoof videos and satirical memes have been circulating all week.
Perhaps the “hyena in a petticoat” would have approved after all.
‘It just reduces her to a pair of breasts. It says nothing about her work’