I hear the criticism, I feel the criticism, about the new #Wollstonecraft statue - naked Mary objectifies her, truncates her personhood, focuses us on her body when she was a great philosopher alongside Rousseau & Paine, who get to keep their clothes on/ THREAD

Male thinkers are allowed to transcend their bodies, to produce great work; female thinkers are pulled back down to earth - to their lives, their loves, their tragedies. As Chris Kraus writes: 'the poet-men, presenters of ideas, and actress-women, presenters of themselves'/

The statue is supposed to be Everywoman - but there is no such thing as Everywoman. Women are diverse; any idea, any image, of everywoman, except the very vaguest, will therefore be exclusionary & tend to reinforce punitive gender norms about what women are & should look like/

But this is not a statue of Mary Wollstonecraft. It is a statue for Mary Wollstonecraft. It says so very explicitly on the plinth./

It strikes me that Hambling is drawing on what Wollstonecraft herself said about statues: that they are 'not modelled after nature', but are rather projections of the imagination, that it is not the 'mechanical selection of limbs and features' that gives them their power... /

'but the ebullition of an heated fancy that burst forth, and the fine senses and enlarged understanding of the artist selected the solid matter, which he drew into this glowing focus'/

When Wollstonecraft wrote about women's bodies, she disdained 'the graces of helplessness', urging us instead to 'respect the human body as a majestic pile fit to receive a noble inhabitant'/

. @maryonthegreen has worked tirelessly & joyfully; as @FernRiddell says, they've navigated hard choices; they've striven for a democratic, consultative & deliberative process. Their pulling this off, putting this up, from the grass roots, is a huge win for women in public space/

Anyway, I felt sad and confused about the public reaction, and sad about my own confusion, so I went to see the statue with my own eyes, and found this completely beautiful sculpture in the setting sun, surrounded by such life and bursting conversation.