Flashback to the summer of 2015—an unusual summer breeze knocking on the violent storms of history and theory that my professor is brewing with her almost feverish rhapsody on the birth of feminism in the words of Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), the affect of which can be seen in the multitude of excited nodding heads- one of them mine, unaware of my own constituency in continuing the legacy of the largely misunderstood ‘mother of feminism’.

Fast forward – five years later, surviving in a world plagued by disease and death, a statue of Mary Wollstonecraft is unveiled in North London, finally, after a ten years long effort of fundraising – a project that began half a decade earlier than when I first encountered her powerful narrative and realized the gigantic role that it played in creating the life for a ‘free’ 21^st century woman like myself.

I had little idea, however, that for days and weeks to come, my social media and news feed will bleed with the criticisms, rants and harangues against the same sculpture of the woman that led us here, holding the flaming torch of our rights and freedom. From being described as a ‘pippa doll with hair’, ‘a metal shamble’ and ‘a miniature metal sex doll’¹ to being avidly defended by the fundraising community as a sculpture that was made ‘for Mary Wollstonecraft’ and not ‘of her’²; the true nature, objective and motive behind this piece of art AND a collection of metal has, I believe, been displaced and how. The unveiling of the statue indeed roused members of the dozed-off public to look up to the woman in question, her groundbreaking work, her theories and her oeuvre but has successfully been eclipsed by the incessant discussion of her sculpture, a discussion that stems from the very arguments that she had vehemently opposed centuries ago.

A woman whose history and legacy has always already been smeared with critique, personal attacks and bushwhack sadly continues to be the mantelpiece of tweets and TV debates where one party hails the unabashed sexuality of the statue while the other bemoans the bush on her pubic area, its presence, they believe an indication of the sheer absence of elegance and class for a woman like her. ³ Only if the statue had sparked conversations about Wollstonecraft’s entire project, her evidential oeuvre that reflected how she wanted the conversations about the beauty, elegance and appearance of women to be superseded by the conversations about the often times ignored traits of womenkind, traits that she revered like understanding, wit and virtue.

I wish to show that elegance is inferior to virtue, that the first object of laudable ambition is to obtain a character as a human being, regardless of the distinction if sex […].⁴

Erecting statues and public memorials, the purpose of which itself is an issue for another day, themselves are not enough to venerate or to ensure legacies and neither is to erect them and dip the materialistic structure in the ice cold tea of contempt and debate centering around the absence of clothes, the pubic hair or perhaps even the glue that helped erect it (or no glue, I am no expert of sculptor to comment on it). The misplaced state of our present times are reflected in the continuous debate about the appearance of the sculpture and the uncalled-for sexuality it drips; we are unknowingly and unkindly indulging ourselves in the very conversations about a woman that Wollstonecraft so avidly denounced; reducing the woman to the uncontained hairy bush and the loss of her checkered skirt. Only if we would have led the charge of the conversations and debates up and above from the point where she left it, steering clear of the very descriptions that Wollstonecraft so ardently despised; only if the discourse would have been successful in etching Wollstonecraft’s works and theories in our minds and perhaps even tweets, sculpting the actual statue, the incomplete statue for vindicating the rights of women. Perhaps one will have to wait another decade or so to have an actual discourse about Wollstonecraft come alive, a discourse and a conversation that truly matters, without the ceremonies of memorials, tweets and misplaced arguments.

What but a pestilential vapour can hover over a society when its chief director is only instructed in the invention of crimes, or the stupid routine of childish ceremonies. ⁵