The Naked Feminist

In 1790, in A Vindication of the Rights of Men, she attacked the aristocracy, associating herself with the ideas behind the French Revolution, an event that terrified the English establishment. Throughout her adult life, she was a controversial figure, but in the year following her death at the age of 38—only 11 days after giving birth to the future Mary Shelley—she became infamous. In his memoirs, her partner, William Godwin, revealed her love affairs, her earlier illegitimate daughter, and her suicide attempts. The poet Robert Southey condemned Godwin, saying he had shown a “want of all feeling in stripping his dead wife naked.”

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Now Wollstonecraft has been stripped again. Since the statue’s unveiling last week, the biggest question has been: Why honor the “mother of feminism” with a statue of a naked woman? And not just a naked woman, but one emerging from six feet of swirling silver, like a Barbie glued to a melted popsicle, with what its sculptor described as an aspirational body? “It’s actually very disrespectful,” 38-year-old Ruth McKee, who had come to see the statue for herself, told me. “Men get to be their actual size, clothed, and look like themselves.” Those defending the artwork—including the poor souls who spent a decade fundraising for its creation—respond by insisting that it is not of Wollstonecraft, but for her. It has, they say, “started a conversation.”

On this latter point, they are correct. When I visited the statue on a damp Saturday, a festival atmosphere surrounded it. A bouquet of flowers had been placed on its plinth, with another in the suffragette colors of purple, white, and green at its base. Homemade cardboard signs lay scattered around it, covered in quotations from her work. The crowd came on bicycles, trailing large dogs, drinking cider and coffee from plastic cups. Everyone stood around the statue, earnestly discussing patriarchy, objectification, and the male gaze, plus the merits of figurative versus representational art. It was quite disconcerting. What is this, I thought—France?

But no, this is Britain. In the past few years, this country, like the United States, has embarked on a round of soul-searching about its public monuments. Statues confront us with unavoidable questions about what, and whom, we value. They set in stone—or rather, bronze—the stories we like to tell about ourselves. Take the choice of Wollstonecraft. Many modern feminists idolize her for the same reasons she was once derided: She is the prototypical “hot mess”—a brilliant woman with a chaotic personal life—not a Goody Two-shoes like the 19th-century suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett, who is commemorated in Parliament Square. The latter delivered endless petitions, held hundreds of public meetings, and never lost faith that votes for women could be delivered through nonviolent means. She also acted as a secretary for her husband, who had been blinded in a shooting accident. Where Fawcett seems stoutly Victorian, Wollstonecraft’s restless struggle against social conventions, at the cost of her mental health, is closer to the modern ideal.