Parliament Square is gaining its first female statue next year, as a bronze casting of suffragette Dame Millicent Fawcett is unveiled by Turner Prize winning artist Gillian Wearing. The statue will commemorate the hundred-year anniversary of women being allowed to vote for the first time.
The statue is scheduled to be erected some time in 2018 to coincide with the centenary of the Representation of the Peoples Act 1918 next February, which at the time granted only some women over 30 the vote. Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, is said to be working closely with communities secretary Sajid Javid to ensure the statue is produced on time, and said that the monument was 'long overdue'.
Khan also said 'As a proud feminist at City Hall, I have given Caroline's campaign my full support', and 'This will be one of the most momentous and significant statues of our time and I know that Gillian Wearing's exceptional talent and unique insight will do great justice to the movement and Millicent Fawcett's legacy.'
The statue was created after a campaign and petition by Caroline Criado-Perez for a female statue in London's Parliament Square went viral and gained over 85,000 signatures. Criado-Perez, who also successfully campaigned for Jane Austen to be featured on the new £10 notes, noticed that there were no women among the 11 male statues in the square while out on a jog in May 2016. She said 'I'm thrilled that we have been given the go ahead to install not only the first statue of a woman in Parliament Square, but also the first statue created by a woman. Let her stand facing Parliament for years to come reminding us all that 'Courage calls to courage everywhere''.
Gillian Wearing, the first female artist to produce a statue in the Square, unveiled her model of the proposed statue yesterday which features the suffragist leader holding a placard reading 'Courage calls to courage everywhere'. The quote is in reference to the speech Fawcett gave following the death of Emily Wilding Davison, who famously died by throwing herself under the king's horse at Epsom Derby in 1913 while campaigning for suffrage. The statue will portray Fawcett at 50, which was her age when the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies was founded. The suffragette was 22 when she made her first public speech, and continued to campaign for over 50 years. The plinth of her statue will be engraved with Fawcett's full name and will also list the names of other suffragettes who fought for women's right to vote.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.