| A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft | |
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| Artist | Maggi Hambling |
| Medium | Bronze, granite |
| Subject | Mary Wollstonecraft |
| Location | London, United Kingdom |
| 51°33′06″N0°05′06″W / 51.55153°N 0.08511°W | |
A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft is a public sculpture commemorating the 18th-century feminist writer and advocate Mary Wollstonecraft in Newington Green, London. A work of the British artist Maggi Hambling, it was unveiled on 10 November 2020. [1] [2]
The work is a representation of a naked female figure, emerging out of organic matter [3] which the BBC described as "a swirling mingle of female forms". [4] Wollstonecraft's most famous quotation, "I do not wish women to have power over men but over themselves", is inscribed on the plinth. [3] The sculpture is inspired by Wollstonecraft's claim to be "the first of a new genus".
The sculpture is sited opposite the Newington Green Unitarian Church that Wollstonecraft attended. [5]
The "Mary on the Green" group [6] was founded in 2010 to campaign and raise money for a statue of Wollstonecraft on Newington Green. The group reached its target of £143,300 in 2019. [6] The campaign was chaired by Bee Rowlatt who is a writer and journalist. [7] Rowlatt is also the founding trustee of the Wollstonecraft Society, a human rights education charity. [7] Hambling was commissioned to create the work in 2018. [3] [8] [9]
Hambling's design for the sculpture was selected unanimously by a panel of curators and the public, and chosen over the design of artist Martin Jennings. [10]
Some critics perceived the figure as a depiction of Mary Wollstonecraft, however the campaign behind it describes it as "a sculpture of an idea". [11] [12] Hambling intended the figure to represent an everywoman, signifying the birth of the feminist movement, rather than Wollstonecraft herself. [11] The campaign describes the sculpture's form as a deliberate opposition to "traditional male heroic statuary" of the Victorian era, instead showing a small figure who "has evolved organically from, is supported by, and does not forget, all her predecessors". [13]
The sculpture was criticised for its depiction of nudity and objectification of the female form, [14] with some considering it inappropriate to represent a feminist figure in such a light. Hambling defended her work by saying that the figure was not created in the historical likeness of Wollstonecraft, [13] and that she felt as though "clothes would have restricted her. Statues in historic costume look like they belong to history because of their clothes. It's crucial that she is 'now'." [15] Other hostile responses wrote that many personifications of pure womanhood already existed in classic statuary in various nameless angels or characters like Marianne, and that a new sculpture directly of a successful female figure such as Wollstonecraft would have been preferred rather than yet another abstract woman. Other criticisms simply thought that the sculpture was ugly and generic, making the figure come across as a blank robot. [16]
A crowd-funded campaign was launched shortly following the reveal of Hambling's sculpture to create a statue based on Martin Jennings' alternate design. [17]
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792), written by British philosopher and women's rights advocate Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), is one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. In it, Wollstonecraft responds to those educational and political theorists of the eighteenth century who did not believe women should receive a rational education. She argues that women ought to have an education commensurate with their position in society, claiming that women are essential to the nation because they educate its children and because they could be "companions" to their husbands, rather than mere wives. Instead of viewing women as ornaments to society or property to be traded in marriage, Wollstonecraft maintains that they are human beings deserving of the same fundamental rights as men.
Mary Wollstonecraft was a British writer, philosopher, and advocate of women's rights. Until the late 20th century, Wollstonecraft's life, which encompassed several unconventional personal relationships at the time, received more attention than her writing. Today Wollstonecraft is regarded as one of the founding feminist philosophers, and feminists often cite both her life and her works as important influences.
Margaret J. Hambling is a British artist. Though principally a painter her best-known public works are the sculptures A Conversation with Oscar Wilde and A Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft in London, and the 4-metre-high steel Scallop on Aldeburgh beach. All three works have attracted controversy.
Newington Green is an open space in North London between Islington and Hackney. It gives its name to the surrounding area, roughly bounded by Ball's Pond Road to the south, Petherton Road to the west, Green Lanes and Matthias Road to the north, and Boleyn Road to the east. The Green is in N16 and the area is covered by the N16, N1 and N5 postcodes. Newington Green Meeting House is situated near the park.
Mary Hays (1759–1843) was an autodidact intellectual who published essays, poetry, novels and several works on famous women. She is remembered for her early feminism, and her close relations to dissenting and radical thinkers of her time including Robert Robinson, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Godwin and William Frend. She was born in 1759, into a family of Protestant dissenters who rejected the practices of the Church of England. Hays was described by those who disliked her as 'the baldest disciple of [Mary] Wollstonecraft' by The Anti Jacobin Magazine, attacked as an 'unsex'd female' by clergyman Robert Polwhele, and provoked controversy through her long life with her rebellious writings. When Hays's fiancé John Eccles died on the eve of their marriage, Hays expected to die of grief herself. But this apparent tragedy meant that she escaped an ordinary future as wife and mother, remaining unmarried. She seized the chance to make a career for herself in the larger world as a writer.
Mary: A Fiction is the only complete novel by 18th-century British feminist Mary Wollstonecraft. It tells the tragic story of a woman's successive "romantic friendships" with a woman and a man. Composed while Wollstonecraft was a governess in Ireland, the novel was published in 1788 shortly after her summary dismissal and her decision to embark on a writing career, a precarious and disreputable profession for women in 18th-century Britain.
The nude, as a form of visual art that focuses on the unclothed human figure, is an enduring tradition in Western art. It was a preoccupation of Ancient Greek art, and after a semi-dormant period in the Middle Ages returned to a central position with the Renaissance. Unclothed figures often also play a part in other types of art, such as history painting, including allegorical and religious art, portraiture, or the decorative arts. From prehistory to the earliest civilizations, nude female figures were generally understood to be symbols of fertility or well-being.
The Women's Art Collection is a permanent collection of modern and contemporary art by women artists, at Murray Edwards College, Cambridge, England.
Newington Green Unitarian Church (NGUC) in north London is one of England's oldest Unitarian churches. It has had strong ties to political radicalism for over 300 years, and is London's oldest Nonconformist place of worship still in use. It was founded in 1708 by English Dissenters, a community of which had been gathering around Newington Green for at least half a century before that date. The church belongs to the umbrella organisation known as the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches, and has had an upturn in its fortunes since the turn of the millennium.
Barbara G. Taylor is a Canadian-born historian based in the United Kingdom, specialising in the Enlightenment, gender studies and the history of subjectivity. She is Professor of Humanities at Queen Mary, University of London.
Andrew Pakula is an atheist Unitarian minister. He was elected in 2009 to serve on the executive committee of the General Assembly of Unitarian and Free Christian Churches, the umbrella body for British Unitarians. He is the minister of two neighbouring congregations in north London: Unity, on Upper Street in the heart of Islington; and Newington Green Unitarian Church, on the village green of that name about two kilometres north.
To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction is a collection of essays by Joanna Russ, published in 1995. Many of the essays previously appeared as letters, in anthologies, or in journals such as Science Fiction Studies, Extrapolation, and Chrysalis. Topics range from the work of specific authors to major trends in feminism and science fiction. Through all of these different topics, Russ underlines the importance of celebrating the work of female authors and turning a critical eye on the commentaries and work produced by men.
A Conversation with Oscar Wilde is an outdoor sculpture by Maggi Hambling in central London dedicated to Oscar Wilde. Unveiled in 1998, it takes the form of a bench-like green granite sarcophagus, with a bust of Wilde emerging from the upper end, with a hand clasping a cigarette.
White feminism is a term which is used to describe expressions of feminism which are perceived as focusing on white women but are perceived as failing to address the existence of distinct forms of oppression faced by ethnic minority women and women lacking other privileges. Whiteness is crucial in structuring the lived experiences of white women across a variety of contexts. The term has been used to label and criticize theories that are perceived as focusing solely on gender-based inequality. Primarily used as a derogatory label, "white feminism" is typically used to reproach a perceived failure to acknowledge and integrate the intersection of other identity attributes into a broader movement which struggles for equality on more than one front. In white feminism, the oppression of women is analyzed through a single-axis framework, consequently erasing the identity and experiences of ethnic minority women the space. The term has also been used to refer to feminist theories perceived to focus more specifically on the experience of white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied women, and in which the experiences of women without these characteristics are excluded or marginalized. This criticism has predominantly been leveled against the first waves of feminism which were seen as centered around the empowerment of white middle-class women in Western societies.
Frances "Fanny" Blood was an English illustrator and educator, and longtime friend of Mary Wollstonecraft.
Rise up, Women, also known as Our Emmeline, is a bronze sculpture of Emmeline Pankhurst in St Peter's Square, Manchester. Pankhurst was a British political activist and leader of the suffragette movement in the United Kingdom. Hazel Reeves sculpted the figure and designed the Meeting Circle that surrounds it.
The Women's Rights Pioneers Monument is a sculpture by Meredith Bergmann. It was installed in Central Park, Manhattan, New York City, on August 26, 2020. The sculpture is located at the northwest corner of Literary Walk along The Mall, the widest pedestrian path in Central Park. The sculpture commemorates and depicts Sojourner Truth, Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906), and Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902), pioneers in the suffrage movement who advocated women's right to vote and who were pioneers of the larger movement for women's rights.
Scallop is a 2003 work by British artist Maggi Hambling. It is located on Aldeburgh beach, Suffolk, in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty and is a tribute to composer Benjamin Britten.
But Rowlatt says a lot of the criticism comes from a place of misunderstanding. "That's the mistake that pretty much everyone has made," she said. "This is not a statue of Mary Wollstonecraft. It's a sculpture of an idea."
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