Thank you to Annie Tompkins for sharing with me the news that Mary Queen of Scots is to have a public statue in Scotland for the first time. Mary is one of Scotland’s most famous monarchs, and was Scotland’s only crowned queen regnant before her son James inherited the English crown. The 7ft bronze statue will be unveiled this spring at Linlithgow Palace, where Mary was born in 1542. It comes after two years of fundraising and campaigning by the Marie Stuart Society.
It’s particularly good to see a woman honoured in this way – most public statues are of men. Scotland currently has only around 20 commemorating women, five of which are of Queen Victoria and four of which are symbolic and don’t directly represent the women in question, amongst a multitude of male statues. A number of prominent Scots women are missing, including, currently, Mary. In the US, fewer than 8% of the public outdoor sculptures commemorating individuals are of women and since 1960 just 12% of the new ones have been of women. In Central Park there are no statues of real women – there is currently a campaign to erect a statue of two female women’s rights pioneers. In the UK, Manchester has one public statue of a real woman (Queen Victoria again) and fifteen of men, and plans to erect a statue of a Mancunian woman to mark the 100th anniversary of women obtaining the vote. In Glasgow there is a current campaign to erect a statue of Mary Barbour, a prominent socialist who campaigned to help those in poverty.
I’ll look forward to visiting Linlithgow to see the statue, and I hope we’ll see many more women honoured in the future. We are a little more than 50% of the population, but if you were beamed down to earth from another planet you would think we were a tiny minority group mostly made up of Queen Victoria lookalikes.
Image of a model of the sculpture of Mary to be erected at Linlithgow palace © Marie Stuart Society 2015