Emma Watson has urged the new Mayor of London to put a statue of a suffragette outside parliament.
The actor, feminist campaigner and UN ambassador has signed an open letter calling on Sadiq Khan to erect a statue in Parliament Square by February 2018.
Writing in an open letter in The Telegraph today, Caroline Criado-Perez, who launched the campaign back in May, explained that all eleven statues in Parliament Square were men and argued the suffragettes needed to be honoured in front of the institution they were barred from.
The open letter has been signed by a number of high-profile women, such as JK Rowling, Caitlin Moran, Bridget Christie and Alison Moyet and also has the support of a number of female MP’s such as Jess Philips, Caroline Lucas and Stella Creasy.
Criado-Perez described the day she decided to launch the campaign while jogging through central London.
“It was only when I reached St James’s Park, that I realised I was already composing the petition text in my head,” she writes. “I accepted a tweet wasn’t going to be enough. I couldn’t let this lie”.
“In two years time, it will be nearly 100 years since women won the argument that our sex does not render us incapable of participating in the running of our country,” she added. “Nearly a century has gone by, and yet Parliament Square continues to tell us that democracy is a man’s world”.
The campaign has not specified which particular Suffragette they want to stand outside parliament.
