Respect Equality

Why some feminists are upset about a new sculpture of the ‘mother of feminism’

by Anagha Srikanth | Nov. 10, 2020 | Nov. 10, 2020

A picture shows a detail of a naked lady at the top of a new sculpture cast in silvered bronze honouring 18th century British author and feminist icon Mary Wollstonecraft by British artist Maggi Hambling after it was unveiled in north London’s Newington Green on November 10, 2020 close to where Wollstonecraft lived and worked

Story at a glance

  • Mary Wollstonecraft was an English writer known to some as the “mother of feminism.”
  • A campaign to honor her raised money to install a memorial sculpture near a school Wollstonecraft founded.
  • Some people were offended by the artist’s choice of portraying her naked.

More than two centuries after the English writer Mary Wollstonecraft died and nearly a decade after a campaign to honor her memory first started, the long-awaited “Mary on the Green” was revealed in north London on Nov. 10. 

And, well, she was naked. 

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Critics were quick to question the decision to remember the woman some call the “mother of feminism” without clothes. 

“The point is that she has to be naked because clothes define people. We all know that clothes are limiting and she is everywoman,” artist Maggi Hambling told the Evening Standard. “As far as I know, she’s more or less the shape we’d all like to be.”

The statue is on display on Newington Green in Islington, London, by the school Wollstonecraft opened at 25, according to the campaign. A staunch advocate for equal rights, her life was nontraditional, to put it simply, with much attention on her relationships with the American spy Gilbert Imlay and journalist William Godwin, with whom she had one child: Mary Shelley, the author of “Frankenstein.”

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“She’s everywoman and clothes would have restricted her. Statues in historic costume look like they belong to history because of their clothes,” Hambling told the Evening Standard. “It’s crucial that she is ‘now’. The whole sculpture is called ‘for Mary Wollstonecraft’ and that’s crucially important. It’s not an idea ‘of’ Mary Wollstonecraft naked… the sculpture is for now… the sculpture is for now.”

As quickly as criticism travels on the Internet, it’s important to note that some people really liked the statue. On Twitter, British historian Fern Riddell noted that of two potential designs for the sculpture, this one was created by a woman.    

“I love it because to me it’s a massive combination of themes, I love the water like a raging wave, I like the mechanical aspect of the figure, it reminds me of how women are created in images that never match their thoughts,” Riddell said in a Twitter thread. At the end of the day, discussion was the point of the campaign, which decried the lack of female statues in London (more than 90 percent of them commemorate men, according to the campaign’s website). 

“It will definitely start a conversation,” writer Bee Rowlatt, who led the campaign, told the Guardian. “It will definitely promote comment and debate and that’s good, that’s what Mary did all her life.”  

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