First female statue goes up in square

LONDON: After 11 male statues — mostly of white, middle-aged men of aristocratic pedigree — and nearly 200 years, the first female figure was unveiled yesterday in London’s historic Parliament Square, the locus of the British establishment.

Hundreds of people, including Prime Minister Theresa May, attended the unveiling of the statue, which depicts Millicent Fawcett, a relatively unsung hero of the feminist movement who led campaigning for women’s right to vote. The bronze statue, which shows a middle-aged Fawcett holding a banner reading “Courage Calls to Courage Everywhere,” was installed in part to celebrate the centenary of women’s suffrage in Britain this year.

“When you think of the great people in Parliament Square, and when you realise that not one of them is a woman, it sort of begs the question,” said the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, whose office agreed to the installation last year after an online petition for such a statue received tens of thousands of signatures. “Are we saying there haven’t been incredible women in the past? That our country hasn’t been built on the back of great women?”

The petition was started by Caroline Criado-Perez, a freelance writer who previously campaigned for an image of Jane Austen to appear on the British £10 note, an endeavour that quickly made her a target of online abuse.

Gillian Wearing, a Turner Prize-winning artist, created the Fawcett statue, becoming the first woman responsible for a statue in Parliament Square.

With her hair swept back in a bun and cloaked in an unassuming coat, Fawcett contrasted with some of her male counterparts on the square, past prime ministers like Benjamin Disraeli and David Lloyd George, who are presented with outstretched hands or flowing robes. The square also features the hunching figure of Winston Churchill, as well as Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Its first statue, of George Canning, another prime minister, was unveiled in 1832.

Criado-Perez said it was important for Fawcett to be depicted at 50, an age when she became the leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, the main suffragist organisation in Britain.