Mary Wollstonecraft, the “Mother of Feminism” is honored with a statue on Newington Green, near where she lived in North London, sculpted by artist Maggi Hambling. And much like Wollstonecraft herself during her lifetime, the silver nude form chosen by the artist and the committee who labored for ten years to fund it has brought shock, consternation, and considerable hum-humming. (Photo Jill Mead/The Guardian)

It has been described as a “silvery naked everywoman figure emerging free and defiantly from a swirling mingle of female forms”. And if art is intended to elicit discussion and interpretation, it seems to have achieved that, with comments of “insulting”, “bad” and “bizarre”, though I’m sure somewhere it might be called “inspiring”.  The statue unveiled on Tuesday, November 9, 2020, cost £143,000, raised by volunteers of the Mary on the Green Campaign.

Since its unveiling, the statue has been mistakenly confused with Wollstonecraft’s daughter, Mary Shelley in some comments and hearty discussion of its merits, something which its sculptor is apparently used to. The sculpture is said by its creator as not intended to be a likeness of its honoree, and it clearly is not, though one wonders what Wollstonecraft herself would think of a statuesque nude with a decidedly pinched face as a representation of feminism. If a sculptor wanted to provide a likeness, there are several portraits of Wollstonecraft painted in her lifetime.

She certainly felt freedom in representing the nature of womanhood, causing a sensation with her writing of breastfeeding her daughter, Fanny Imlay, while touring Norway. She possibly posed for the reclining nearly nude female figure in Fuseli’s famous painting “Nightmare”, originally inspired by an earlier relationship, but later painted in different versions. The revelation of her affair with the artist in William Godwin’s biography of her, which also revealed a suicide attempt, caused her to be ridiculed and relegated to near obscurity by proper English society after her death from complications in the birth of her daughter, Mary (Shelley). Mary Shelley would choose to take her mother’s name, Wollstonecraft, as an identity, rather than her father’s, Godwin, even though they had married by the time of her birth.

In ‘Secret Memoirs of Mary Shelley” this relationship to her mother is explored in Mary’s search for understanding of her mother’s life, one of the driving emotions which took her to Paris in the elopement with Percy Shelly in 1814. Her mother had written first-hand accounts of the French Revolution and had conceived her half-sister Fanny in a romance with American Gilbert Imlay while living in Paris. Mary would also discover pride in her mother that, though Wollstonecraft was obscured in England, her ideas of freedom for women had gained recognition abroad among women of the upper-class society, most affected by arranged marriages and the codified laws of male primacy.

It was her argument for the education of women to free them from the bonds of reliance on marriage for economic sustenance in the “Vindication of the Rights of Women” that made her the mother of feminism. One wonders if that idea can be seen in the rather forthright yet sterile form of a gleaming nude figure in a park where kids might point and ask “who’s that naked lady” as their mothers might be more motivated to cover their eyes than begin a discussion of the concepts of the equal rights of women.

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