Statue of Millicent Fawcett

The bronze statue portrays Dame Millicent at the age of 50, when she became president of the National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies (NUWSS). The artist integrated the pattern and texture of the tweed fabric into the bronze of the suit. List of engravings The names and images of 59 women and four men who supported women's suffrage appear on the statue's plinth. They are as follows: ==The campaign for a woman on Parliament Square==

The feminist campaigner and journalist Caroline Criado Perez began a campaign to install a statue of a woman in Parliament Square on 8 March (International Women's Day) 2016, after noticing while jogging that day that all the existing statues on the square were of men. Criado Perez had initiated the 2013 campaign to add a woman to British banknotes, after Elizabeth Fry was replaced by Winston Churchill on the £5 note, and soon thereafter the Bank of England announced that Jane Austen would appear on the new £10 note. The campaign called for a statue of a suffragette to be placed in Parliament Square in time for the centenary of the Representation of the People Act 1918. Following some research, Criado Perez discovered that only 2.7 percent of the statues in the United Kingdom were of individual women who were not members of the British royal family. On 10 May 2016, to launch the campaign, an open letter was written to the new Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, signed by 42 prominent women, requesting a statue of a suffragette in Parliament Square by February 2018. Khan quickly agreed to a new suffragette statue, but did not commit to Parliament Square and instead said that the authorities would "explore a suitable site for the statue". An online petition for the suffragette statue received 74,000 signatures. This was presented to Parliament on 7 June, in an event hosted by the Fawcett Society. At the same time, Criado Perez stated that she backed Millicent Fawcett as the subject of the statue, adding that "It's shocking that she doesn't already have a statue of her own – and Parliament Square is the obvious place for her to be. Not round the corner, or up the road. Nothing less than Parliament Square will do." On 2 April 2017, it was announced that a statue of Fawcett would be erected in Parliament Square. The Prime Minister, Theresa May, said following the announcement, "The example Millicent Fawcett set during the struggle for equality continues to inspire the battle against the burning injustices of today. It is right and proper that she is honoured in Parliament Square alongside former leaders who changed our country." The Suffrage Statue Commission selected Gillian Wearing, a former Turner Prize winner, to create the statue with it funded from the Government's Centenary Fund. The statue was part of the 14-18 NOW series of artistic commissions that marked the centenary commemorations of World War I. Rival campaigns in Victoria Tower Gardens in 2015 In addition to the campaign for a statue of Fawcett, a rival campaign existed to install a statue of Emmeline Pankhurst in Parliament Square, which had begun in 2014. This campaign was backed by the former Prime Minister David Cameron, the former MP Neil Thorne, the Leader of the House of Commons Andrea Leadsom and the first female Speaker of the House of Commons Betty Boothroyd. Other statues of Thatcher exist in London: the one in the Guildhall was decapitated in 2002, and the following year another was commissioned for the interior of the Palace of Westminster. Others commented that the location was the appropriate one, but that the statue should be of someone more radical: Mary Wollstonecraft, Sylvia Pankhurst or Emily Davison. ==Unveiling==

On 24 April 2018, the statue was unveiled in an hour-long ceremony featuring the Prime Minister, the Mayor of London, schoolchildren and choirs. The unveiling itself was performed by three generations of women and girls: Jennifer Loehnis (a descendant of Fawcett), Criado Perez, Justine Simons (Deputy Mayor for Culture and Creative Industries) and two schoolgirls from Millbank Academy in Westminster, and Platanos College, Lambeth. At the event, May credited the work of Fawcett not only achieving votes for women but for allowing her and other female MPs to take their positions in Parliament. Poet and former Young People's Laureate for London, Theresa Lola, also performed her commissioned poem, 'For Those Who Listen When Courage Calls,' to commemorate the unveiling of the statue. Criado Perez called the unveiling of the statue "one hell of a start" in increasing the representation of women across Britain in both cultural and political spheres. Similar views were supported by Khan, the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and the former Labour deputy leader Harriet Harman, who suggested that the square's male statues be temporarily moved elsewhere in London to allow there to be only female statues in this prominent location. ==Reaction and commentary==

The arts editor for BBC News, Will Gompertz, gave the statue five stars in his review. He said that prior to the unveiling, the only statues which stood out in the square were those of Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George, but that has changed with the arrival of the Fawcett statue. He credited the campaign of Criado Perez, and said that the Wearing's execution of the brief was "exceptional". Gompertz praised the overall conception of the design and said that the banner was compelling. He suggested that the design was influenced by Wearing's early 1990s work Signs That Say What You Want Them To Say And Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You To Say in which she took a series of photographs of strangers holding up their personal thoughts on pieces of white card. Overall, he felt that the statue had such impact that it changed the context of Parliament Square, saying that "The Fawcett statue makes most of the others look ridiculous, or pompous or both" (excepting its immediate neighbour, the statue of Gandhi) and that it gave the area a focal point lacking since the end of Brian Haw's peace protest. June Purvis, emeritus professor of women's and gender history at the University of Portsmouth, criticised some elements of the statue, saying that while the message on the banner was indeed written by Fawcett about Emily Davison, it was not written at the time of her death but instead in the "relative safety" of 1920. At the time of Emily Davison's death, Fawcett's NUWSS refused to take part in the funeral and did not send a wreath. Purvis also highlighted that the image of Emily Davison is on the rear of the statue, and that the campaign was launched with the intention of commemorating a suffragette, not a suffragist, in Parliament Square. ==See also==