Possibly, it has been speculated, because the biggest names never open their mouths, the relatively new women’s campaign for more female statuary has attracted some passionate male support.
The discovery, in the approach to the centenary of the Representation of the People’s Act, that only one in five statues in the UK is of a woman, has inspired, for instance, both David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn to commit to building monuments that will make good this particular deficit.
It emerged that Corbyn, though he’s been seen to get on famously with misogynists, was stunned to find that UK memorials were of patriarchal origin. “The overriding bias of statues and memorials towards men in our country is shocking,” he declared. Earlier this year, on International Women’s Day, he joined scores of other men, including Tom Watson, Jeremy Hardy and Vince Cable of the Lib Dems (eight men, four women), in their collective call to memorialise Mary Wollstonecraft, and in that way begin to break the “bronze ceiling”.
The implication of this recent coinage, that lack of inanimate representation is not just unfair to dead high achievers, but a pressing feminist project, has obvious implications for statue design. The monuments must be distinctively female or how will the bronze ceiling get dented? Can a new statue of an inadequately memorialised woman be said compensate for neglect if it does not celebrate her according to convention, as it would if her contemporaries had been immortalising a man? If not, there is a powerful argument for putting at least some of them on top of a horse.
Even adequate representation has its challenges. Jane Austen’s new sculptor, Adam Roud, did her face, he says, by “reading between the lines”; the sole existing likeness, by her sister, was said to be “hideously unlike”. But the proliferation of bronze women schemes, fuelled also by distaste for history’s unworthy male recipients, means it’s probably too soon to suggest that the required subscriptions might be better spent on projects or places that can genuinely conjure up their subjects, such as, in Austen’s case, the wonderful Chawton House.
As it is, to judge by various statues currently proposed, retrospective fairness seems chiefly to ordain a kind of retro, Railway Children aesthetic, as if the women’s significance was indivisible from their trailing skirts.
Unusually, in Wollstonecraft’s case, the proposed memorial, by Maggi Hambling, is described as metaphorical, featuring an “everywoman” emerging from organic matter. A pity, in one way; in a revealing account of Wollstonecraft in his new book, Prime Movers, Ferdinand Mount quotes a lover’s description: “A philosophical sloven, with lank hair, black stockings and a beaver hat.”
David Cameron, having earlier based his male-female cabinet ratio on that of British statuary’s, was, in 2017, among those campaigning for a prominent, representational (hat, flapping skirt) Pankhurst statue. In the event, the final choice for the first woman in Parliament Square was, largely thanks to the efforts of Caroline Criado Perez, for Gillian Wearing’s Millicent Fawcett (also depicted, non-metaphorically, with a placard).
Although the Fawcett statue is already a place of pilgrimage, the decision to pick the suffragist over the suffragette appears to explain a bizarre new variant on statue wars, dominated on one side by a Sir Neil Thorne and his ally, architect Liam O’Connor. They hope, in the face of protests, to marginalise an already venerated, Grade II-listed statue of Pankhurst, commissioned by fellow suffragettes in 1928. The reason? Purely, you gather, to revive their rejected scheme, for a new, improved Pankhurst beside Parliament Square.
As set out to Westminster council in an extended triumph of mansplaining, old Pankhurst would be better off in the grounds of an obscure private college, Regent’s University, quite unconnected with women’s suffrage. Its entrance warns “private property”.
Preposterously – except that Westminster council is actually considering the proposal – the men discern no contradiction between their claim – that they wish to honour an inadequately recognised pioneer for women’s rights – and the reality: that they want to a) disrespect the same pioneer by shunting her into, effectively, a privileged playground b) ignore the countless living women opposed to their scheme, and c) defy the stated intentions of the suffragettes who created the monument.
Mr O’Connor, a professional memorialist, proficient in what Gavin Stamp called “Xerox-Palladian”, tells us that the suffragettes’ “somewhat passive” depiction of “Emmeline” – as he calls her – “is at odds with her strength and militancy that gave so much publicity and energy to the campaign for women’s suffrage”. It takes a man, you learn, to appreciate Pankhurst’s real worth, then to reward her with some lawn space within Regent’s University’s exclusive amenity: “With 11 acres of private gardens, our estate is a quiet, secluded haven in which to live and study.”
The importance of the original site to suffragettes, though it is dismissed by O’Connor, was confirmed in 1955 when, the better to show off Rodin’s The Burghers of Calais, the government approved the relocation of Pankhurst’s statue. “They do not like the idea of this noble lady being pushed around because of The Burghers of Calais and they wish to have a definite assurance that there will be no more pushing around of Mrs Pankhurst,” Jean Mann (one of only 24 women elected in 1945) told the minister of works. He replied: “I have given the most categorical assurance to the Suffragette Fellowship that there is no intention of any kind of moving the statue again.”
Given their demonstrable indifference to women’s wishes, past and present, we can only guess at why men of Thorne or O’Connor’s generations should have become, along with Cameron, Corbyn, Cable et al, suddenly so ostentatiously exercised about female under-representation in statuary. It’s the gowns, isn’t it? Whatever: any feminist project that commands this level of impartial male enthusiasm begins to look like a distraction.
• Catherine Bennett is an Observer columnist
