Why Do We Have Such Trouble Getting Monuments Of Women Right?

Consider, for instance, the new, widely derided “For Mary Wollstonecraft” monument in London. “Why couldn’t a statue of Wollstonecraft, the individual woman, be seen as universally inspiring and iconic? It was hard not to view the monument as a victim of its own good intentions, inadvertently becoming yet another example of a female form as emblem of an abstract idea, such as the Statue of Liberty or Marianne, a symbol of the French Republic, or any number of nameless an