2020.11.21 裸体女权主义者

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The Naked Feminist
What lies behind the arguments over a Mary Wollstonecraft statue?

By Helen Lewis

Getty / Arsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic
NOVEMBER 21, 2020
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On his wedding night, the Victorian art critic John Ruskin recoiled from his new bride, the attractive 20-year-old Effie Gray, and found himself unable to consummate the marriage. As Effie later wrote to her father, Ruskin “had imagined women were quite different to what he saw I was.” After six unhappy years, their marriage was annulled because of Ruskin’s “incurable impotency.”

But what, exactly, was the problem? The speculation has always been that what so disgusted Ruskin was that—after a lifetime studying classical statues—he’d had no idea that women had pubic hair.


That delusion will not be shared by anyone who has seen a new commemorative statue for Mary Wollstonecraft in North London. The tiny female silver figure at its apex is lavishly endowed with the stuff. The 21st century might be the era of the “landing strip,” but in a corner of this park, it is forever 1975. (That is not even the most baffling decision made by the artist, Maggi Hambling, an honor that goes to the statue’s mismatch of textures—the fungal base, the smooth shaft, the sharp angles of the human figure at the tip—and proportions. This is not, to say the least, how I would choose to be remembered.)

Wollstonecraft was a radical, politically and personally, and she is now seen as the “mother of feminism” thanks to her rebuttals of 18th-century philosophers, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who argued that women were weak and fundamentally unserious. She pushed for better education for girls to counteract society’s tendency to value their looks over their brains. “Taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison,” she wrote in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman.

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.”


Read: The coronavirus is a disaster for feminism

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.”


Aaron Chown (PA Images / Getty)
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?

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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.

Yet feminism has room for them both. In fact, Fawcett helped restore her predecessor’s reputation by contributing an introduction to a new edition of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman in 1891. While praising Wollstonecraft’s possession of a “double-edged knife of a sound heart and clear head,” Fawcett made a moderate case for the revolutionary writer, arguing that she “had a keen appreciation of the sanctity of women’s domestic duties.” Nineteenth-century readers wanted their history to be a mirror too.


Read: When discrimination targets the privileged

The statue has also provided an outlet for arguments about the nature and status of women—something Wollstonecraft might have appreciated. There is clearly an imbalance to be redressed, because fewer than 3 percent of British statues depict a named, nonroyal woman. Women walk through public spaces that reinforce a view of history tilted toward war and politics, two arenas in which their contributions have been discounted. But that very marginalization means that every scrap of new space for women is contested. One evening last week, the Wollstonecraft statue was augmented, or defaced, depending on your point of view, by the addition of black masking tape and, later, a T-shirt that read woman (noun): adult human female. Describing the statue as an “everywoman,” as Hambling did, meanwhile runs headlong into conversations about intersectionality and which women benefit most from feminism. Like glossy magazines, the statue celebrates the right of slim, conventionally attractive women to remove their clothes (still, at least there’s no suggestion that it is “empowering”).

The biggest question—one that applies much more widely than to a single statue of a single feminist—is this: How do we live alongside one another, even when we disagree? Think of that statue as a stand-in for someone who disagrees with you on feminism, on Brexit, on Donald Trump, on whether white privilege is a useful phrase, or whether religion has a place in public life. The arguments over one small square in North London are the same as those over what opinions are compatible with appearances on the BBC, our impartial state broadcaster. They are the same as the fight over what our history curriculum teaches children, or whether the National Trust, the charity that maintains and allows visitors to peer into historic properties, should reassess its links with colonialism, or whether 1619 or 1776 marked America’s “true founding.” In these culture-war skirmishes, each instance might seem trivial—as the Wollstonecraft campaigners have said, maybe detractors should fund more statues of women, so there’s less pressure on this one—but the principle is about as big as you can get. Who’s in control here? Who sets the rules? When it comes to feminism, the debate is particularly fraught, as women are funneled into arguing with one another over a small slice of what has traditionally belonged to men—in this case, the public square.


Read: In search of the first female sports superstar

By the time I left the park, it was getting dark. The winter gloom reminded me of an academic paper that showed that only 15 percent of “public open spaces” such as parks have adequate lights along their paths, deterring girls and young women from using them for exercise. Mary Wollstonecraft wanted women to take up as much space as men. Two hundred years later, they still don’t—not in real life, and not as silver figurines. Until they do, every new statue of a woman risks becoming as contested as Mary on The Green.

Helen Lewis is a staff writer at The Atlantic.



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裸体女权主义者
关于玛丽-沃斯通克拉夫特雕像的争论背后是什么？

作者：海伦-刘易斯

Getty / Arsh Raziuddin / The Atlantic
2020年11月21日

在新婚之夜，维多利亚时代的艺术评论家约翰-罗斯金对他的新婚妻子--20岁的迷人的艾菲-格雷--感到反感，并发现自己无法完成这段婚姻。正如艾菲后来在给她父亲的信中所说，罗斯金 "想象中的女人与他看到的我完全不同"。经过六年的不愉快，他们的婚姻因罗斯金的 "无法治愈的阳痿 "而被取消。

但是，问题到底出在哪里？人们一直猜测，让罗斯金如此厌恶的原因是--在研究了一辈子的古典雕像之后，他不知道女人有阴毛。


任何看过伦敦北部新的玛丽-沃斯顿克拉夫特纪念雕像的人都不会有这种错觉。雕像顶端的小女性银像被赋予了丰富的东西。21世纪可能是 "起落架 "的时代，但在这个公园的一个角落，它永远是1975年。(这还不是艺术家Maggi Hambling做出的最令人费解的决定，这个荣誉要归功于雕像的错位纹理--真菌的底座、光滑的轴、顶端人形的锐角和比例。至少可以说，这不是我选择被记住的方式）。

沃斯通克拉夫特在政治上和个人上都是一个激进分子，她现在被视为 "女权主义之母"，因为她反驳了18世纪的哲学家，如让-雅克-卢梭，后者认为妇女是弱者，根本不严肃。她推动为女孩提供更好的教育，以抵制社会上重视她们的外表而忽视她们的头脑的倾向。"她在《为妇女权利辩护》中写道："从婴儿时期起，人们就被灌输了美貌是女人的权杖的观念，心灵就会随着身体的变化而变化，在镀金的笼子里游荡，只想装饰自己的监狱。

1790年，在《维护男性权利》中，她抨击了贵族阶层，将自己与法国大革命背后的思想联系在一起，这一事件令英国当局感到恐惧。在她的整个成年生活中，她都是一个有争议的人物，但在她38岁去世后的一年里，也就是在生下未来的玛丽-雪莱11天后，她变得声名狼藉。在他的回忆录中，她的伴侣威廉-戈德温披露了她的情史，她早先的私生女，以及她的自杀企图。诗人Robert Southey谴责戈德温，说他 "把他死去的妻子剥得一丝不挂，表现得毫无感情"。


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现在沃斯顿克拉夫特又被剥光了。自上周雕像揭幕以来，最大的问题是。为什么要用一个裸体女人的雕像来纪念这位 "女权主义之母"？而且不仅仅是一个裸体女人，而是一个从六英尺高的银色漩涡中走出来的女人，就像一个粘在融化的冰棍上的芭比娃娃，其雕塑家描述为一个令人向往的身体？"38岁的露丝-麦基(Ruth McKee)告诉我，"这实际上是非常不尊重人的，她亲自来看这个雕像。"男人应该有自己的实际体型，穿着衣服，看起来像他们自己。" 那些为艺术品辩护的人--包括那些花了十年时间为其创作筹集资金的可怜人--坚称这不是沃斯通克拉夫特的作品，而是为了她。他们说，它已经 "开始了一场对话"。


亚伦-乔恩（PA Images / Getty）。
在这后一点上，他们是正确的。当我在一个潮湿的星期六参观雕像时，雕像周围充满了节日气氛。它的基座上摆放着一束鲜花，基座上还有一束紫、白、绿等女权主义色彩的鲜花。自制的纸板标牌散落在周围，上面写着她作品中的语录。人们骑着自行车，拖着大狗，用塑料杯喝苹果酒和咖啡。每个人都站在雕像周围，认真地讨论父权制、物化和男性凝视，还有具象艺术与表现艺术的优点。这是相当令人不安的。我想，这算什么--法国？

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但不是，这里是英国。在过去的几年里，这个国家和美国一样，对其公共纪念碑展开了一轮反思。雕像让我们面临着不可避免的问题，即我们重视什么，重视谁。他们用石头--或者说用青铜--镶嵌着我们喜欢讲述的关于自己的故事。以沃斯通克拉夫特的选择为例。许多现代女权主义者以她曾经被嘲笑的同样原因将她作为偶像。她是一个典型的 "混乱"--一个有着混乱的个人生活的杰出女性--而不是像19世纪女权主义者米利森特-加勒特-福塞特（Millicent Garrett Fawcett）那样的好孩子，她在议会广场上受到了纪念。后者提交了无尽的请愿书，举行了数百次公开会议，并从未失去信心，认为可以通过非暴力手段为妇女投票。她还充当了她丈夫的秘书，她的丈夫在一次枪击事故中失明。福塞特似乎是坚定的维多利亚主义者，而沃斯顿克拉夫特以精神健康为代价与社会习俗进行的不懈斗争则更接近现代理想。

然而，女权主义对她们两人都有空间。事实上，福塞特在1891年为新版《妇女权利辩护》撰写了一篇序言，帮助恢复了她前辈的声誉。福塞特称赞沃斯通克拉夫特拥有一把 "心地善良、头脑清晰的双刃刀"，同时为这位革命作家做了一个温和的辩护，认为她 "对妇女的家庭责任的神圣性有着敏锐的认识"。十九世纪的读者也希望他们的历史是一面镜子。


阅读。当歧视针对特权阶层时

这座雕像还为有关妇女性质和地位的争论提供了一个出口--沃斯顿克拉夫特可能会欣赏这一点。显然，有一种不平衡需要纠正，因为只有不到3%的英国雕像描绘了一个有名字的、非皇室的女性。妇女走过的公共空间强化了向战争和政治倾斜的历史观，在这两个领域，她们的贡献被低估了。但是，这种边缘化意味着为妇女提供的每一个新空间都是有争议的。上周的一个晚上，沃斯通克拉夫特的雕像被增加了，或者说被玷污了，这取决于你的观点，增加了黑色的遮蔽胶带，后来又增加了一件T恤，上面写着女人（名词）：成年女性。像汉布林那样将雕像描述为 "每个女人"，同时又一头撞上了关于交叉性和哪些女性从女权主义中受益最多的对话。就像光鲜亮丽的杂志一样，这座雕像颂扬了苗条的、有传统吸引力的女性脱掉衣服的权利（至少没有暗示这是 "赋权"）。

最大的问题--一个比单个女权主义者的雕像更广泛适用的问题--就是这个。我们如何与对方并肩生活，即使我们有不同意见？把这座雕像看作是在女权主义、英国脱欧、唐纳德-特朗普、白人特权是否是一个有用的短语、或宗教是否在公共生活中占有一席之地等问题上与你意见相左的人的替身。关于伦敦北部一个小广场的争论，与关于什么意见可以在我们公正的国家广播公司BBC上出现的争论是一样的。它们与关于我们的历史课程教给孩子们什么的争论是一样的，或者国民信托基金（维护并允许游客窥视历史遗产的慈善机构）是否应该重新评估其与殖民主义的联系，或者1619年还是1776年标志着美国的 "真正建国"。在这些文化战争的短兵相接中，每一个例子都可能显得微不足道--正如沃尔斯通克拉夫特运动者所说，也许反对者应该资助更多的女性雕像，所以在这个问题上的压力较小，但原则是你可以得到的最大限度。这里谁在控制？谁来制定规则？当涉及到女权主义时，争论尤其激烈，因为妇女们被卷入到对传统上属于男性的一小块东西的争论中--在这种情况下，就是公共广场。


阅读：寻找第一位女性体育巨星

当我离开公园时，天已经黑了。冬天的阴霾让我想起了一篇学术论文，该论文显示，只有15%的 "公共开放空间"，如公园，沿路有足够的灯光，使女孩和年轻女性不敢利用它们来锻炼。玛丽-沃斯顿克拉夫特希望妇女能像男人一样占据更多空间。两百年后，她们仍然没有--在现实生活中没有，在银质雕像中也没有。除非她们这样做，否则每一座新的女性雕像都有可能变得像绿地上的玛丽一样有争议。

海伦-刘易斯是《大西洋》杂志的一名工作人员。