There’s a new face in London’s Parliament Square, and for the first time, it’s of a woman. A statue of British suffragist and feminist icon Millicent Fawcett was unveiled in the northwest area of London on Tuesday alongside 11 other statues of historic male figures. The bronze statue portrays a 50-year-old Fawcett (around the age she became the leader of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies) with her hair pulled back, wearing an unassuming dress and holding a banner that reads, “Courage calls to courage everywhere.”“I wanted her to be standing there not at all sexualized, but statesmanlike,” Caroline Criado-Perez, the freelance writer who created the petition last year to erect a statue in Fawcett’s honor, told The New York Times. Fawcett is the first statue of a woman and the first statue designed by a woman in the city’s historic Parliament Square. The iconic women’s rights activist joins the company of statues that include former British Prime Ministers Winston Churchill and David Lloyd George, alongside other international figures like Abraham Lincoln and Mahatma Gandhi.

Source: Huffington Post April 26, 2018 16:30 UTC