The war over Mary Wollstonecraft
It took 200 years to install a statue honouring the pioneering feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, said Alexandra Topping in The Guardian. Last week, a permanent memorial to her was finally unveiled on north London’s Newington Green (near the school that she set up) after a ten-year, £143,000 fundraising campaign. Unfortunately, it was met not with delight but with raised eyebrows, “dismay and bafflement”. Created by Maggi Hambling, an “important” but “divisive” artist, the silvered bronze sculpture consists of a “swirling” abstract “mingle of female forms” topped by an idealised effigy of a naked woman, who bears scant resemblance to Wollstonecraft herself. The plaque clearly states that the statue is “for Wollstonecraft, not of her”. Nevertheless, critics were quick to pounce, questioning why the “mother of feminism” should have been celebrated with a nude figure. “I honestly feel that actually this representation is insulting to her,” campaigner Caroline Criado Perez commented. “I can’t see her feeling happy to be represented by this naked, perfectly formed wet dream of a woman.”
Hambling has “laughed off the criticism”, said Robert Dex in the London Evening Standard. “She’s everywoman and clothes would have restricted her,” the artist declared. “Statues in historic costume look like they belong to history because of their clothes.” I’m not convinced, said Caitlin Moran in The Times. It’s ludicrous that a “long-awaited” monument to this “intellectual and grandmother of feminism” should depict “a tiny, super-hot naked bird with cracking tits”. This kind of stuff never happens to men: just imagine if a new statue of, say, Churchill “depicted a tiny, hot, naked young man with proudly shining testicles”. We would, “I think, regard it as a bit weird and demented”. No wonder feminists have been covering up the figure and even knitting her a “tiny cardigan”. Maybe that’s not quite fair, said Ellen Peirson-Hagger in the New Statesman. As Bee Rowlatt, who chaired the fundraising campaign, points out, the figure, though naked, is challenging, not “inviting”. Ultimately, Rowlatt says, she did it to bring the thinker to public attention – and “it’s been a long time since there’s been this much awareness of Mary Wollstonecraft”.