After years of campaigning and fundraising by the campaign group Mary on the Green, a statue of the iconic women’s rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft was unveiled at the beginning of this month. It is situated in Newington Green in North London, near to where the ‘mother of feminism’ lived and worked. It shows a female figure emerging from the top of a wave-like swirl of female bodies, and the entire memorial is silver. Inscribed on the statue are Wollstonecraft’s words, ‘I do not wish [women] to have power over men but over themselves.’

Mary Wollstonecraft was a writer and philosopher, born in London. She is known particularly for her manifesto, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman published in 1792: in it, she imagines a world in which women and men receive the same educational opportunities and live as partners in society. Published almost a century before the beginnings of the female suffrage movement in the UK, it is considered one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. 

As Mary on the Green points out, over 90% of London’s statues commemorate men. For some, Wollstonecraft’s new memorial is a refreshing change to the stuffiness of other statues, as much in its modern design as the figure it represents. The British artist Maggi Hambling was commissioned to produce the work, having previously completed works in memorial to Oscar Wilde and Benjamin Britten. As the world’s only memorial to the feminist icon, it has certainly attracted attention, however not all of this attention has been positive. One aspect of the statue has attracted much of this attention, and indeed, controversy – the small figure on top of the memorial to Wollstonecraft is naked. 

Critics have expressed concern over the decision to include nudity in the statue as male statues are clothed by default. Writer Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett sums up what many feel is the issue with the work, saying that ‘it is hard to imagine a male writer or thinker being “honoured” by a sculpture of a tiny naked man.’ Emblematic of a societal problem in which women are reduced to their anatomy or physical appearance, the statue has also been criticised for depicting a slim and objectively conventionally attractive form that doesn’t represent the diversity of the female body. Maggi Hambling has stated this figure is an ‘everywoman’, which is perhaps problematic given the few women it represents in its physical appearance.

Maybe we can interpret the sculpture differently though. The habit of making a spectacle of the female body is, unfortunately, deeply woven into the fabric of our society. It often becomes a canvas for the opinions or feelings of others to be projected upon, rather than simply an autonomous human body. Perhaps this is exactly what Maggi Hambling was trying to point to by including nudity in her work: we could see the statue as a reclamation of the female form, produced by a female artist in memory of a feminist icon, outwith the clutches of the male gaze. It is so important to criticize the treatment of the female body in culture, but in a perfect world, we would all be able to see beyond the image of a woman’s naked body. Maggi Hambling has commented on the criticism received, reiterating that the statue is not ‘of’ Wollstonecraft, but ‘for’ her, and, drawing on the statement made by Mary on the Green, that the naked figure represents a woman who is ‘ready to confront the world.’

Depending on your view of the statue, the meaning behind it changes dramatically. Despite all the controversy surrounding Hambling’s artistic decisions, feminists and all those devoted to the representation of the marginalised surely must be able to unite through the fact that it is inherently positive that Wollstonecraft has finally been given recognition amongst London’s world-famous statues. Some may say that the fact she is now represented alone just is not good enough and that her commemoration should have been handled more respectfully. But it is also worth saying: Mary Wollstonecraft is a figure that has been historically overlooked, so the very fact that this sculpture has sparked such controversy may have increased awareness of who she is, and therefore (hopefully) her achievements, which cannot be a bad thing. The appropriateness of the artist’s methods for gaining recognition for the icon, however, is still up for debate.

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