A Vindication for Mary Wollstonecraft - Feminism Set Back Centuries.

On Tuesday 10th November, a statue was unveiled of legendary ‘Mother of Feminism’; Mary Wollstonecraft.

The sculpture was created by artist Maggi Hambling and displayed on Newington Green, Islington, where Wollstonecraft opened a girl’s school 200 years ago. The unveiling was the culmination of a decade of campaigning to raise £143,000 to create the statue.

The unveiling ceremony was live-streamed, and the statue revealed supposedly portrays a silver female figure emerging from a swirling mingle of female forms. It all sits on a black base engraved with a famous Wollstonecraft quote: "I do not wish women to have power over men, but over themselves."

No sooner has the statue been erected that we are figuratively tearing it down. However, it may need to be.

Maggi Hambling said that her work "involves this tower of intermingling female forms culminating in the figure of the woman at the top who is challenging, and ready to challenge, the world." But does this statue challenge anything, or does it re-establish the very force that Wollstonecraft was trying to liberate women from?

While Hambling wanted the statue to “rise together as if one, culminating in the figure of a woman standing free,” the actual sculpture has conceived a lot of backlash. It was intended to challenge the traditional statue format by “elevating an idea, personifying the spirit, rather than depicting the individual.” However, this is problematic in itself. Why should one woman represent all of the achievements of women in a city where 90 percent of monuments celebrate the men's accomplishments? Is this a one size fits all situation? Do people think that other legendary and powerful women don’t need representation?

The figure is supposed to represent an “everywoman," according to Hambling, but does it? Does it represent transgender women, plus size, and more?

She also stated that it is not "the" Wollstonecraft but "for" Wollstonecraft. But why shouldn't this woman's achievements be achieved?

After two centuries, a statue of Wollstonecraft stands amongst London’s men, but is it even her?

Who was Mary Wollstonecraft?

Wollstonecraft was a radical intellectual who challenged the patriarchy and the subservient role of women in society. Her feminist text, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792), was revolutionary in its thinking as she aspired to liberate women. It was such a challenging text that numerous attempts were made to discredit the author, and her name was wiped from the history books.

Wollstonecraft and her mother were often abused by her drunken father. As a woman, she received little education but was determined to educate herself. At 25, she opened a girls’ boarding school.

She mixed with the intellectual radicals of the day - debating with Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine and Joseph Priestley.

She died aged 38 following the birth of her daughter, the author Mary Shelley, known for creating Frankenstein and being the pioneer of Science Fiction.

The statue itself looks nothing like her and does not begin to celebrate her. She was a rebel and a pioneer and deserved something pioneering to match her. Her legacy was buried in a misogynistic attack, and it feels like it continues to be so.

The diminutive dimensions of the statue also add insult to injury. The woman is tiny at the top of this wave of other women and embodies all the damaging beauty standards that have been thrust upon women for millennia. She appears to have had a personal trainer for the looks of things. She is in perfect proportion, with no hip dips, no body rolls or anything.

If a statue of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, can have stomach rolls, why can’t Mary Wollstonecraft?

This illustrates how women are slaves to their bodies and how there is still a nurtured culture of celebration of the body rather than a woman's mind. It should not need saying that women are more than their bodies.

The question is, would a man be honoured with this depiction? A statue of them naked in a park for people to gawk at? Would we see figures of Winston Churchill or Dickens depicted in this way?

It begs the question as to why are women’s bodies still depicted as public property? Why is she placed naked in a park for people to look at?

I go back to the theorist Laura Mulvey where she theorizes that women are positioned in such a way as to be enjoyed by a male spectator. While this is mainly in films, it can be applied here. The statue echoes how the female body has long been objectified and idealised by male artists. and offering little in the way of innovation or commentary on the ground-breaking work of the woman hailed as the “mother of feminism."

Mary Wollstonecraft has been reduced to her sum parts and placed back into the position that she sought to liberate women from.

It is an insult to her and has set us back centuries.

I think this tweet is sufficient to summarise this article: