Mary Wollstonecraft as silvery naked Everywoman
I’d be curious to see David Hume or Voltaire done up like this but it's hard to picture for some reason...
This statue doesn't represent Mary Wollstonecraft as the singular woman she was, of course. She gets the swirly, silvery, de-individualized full-frontal nudity treatment, complete with blank blank eyes.
Thus even the most exceptional women in history get reduced to allegories. There's a theme here of denying the individuality of female people. Our heroines get flattened into allegories or stripped naked as "everywomen" or recast as "really men" all along, misgendered in their own time (Joan of Arc, Athena, Hatshepsut, Viking warriors...).
But of course, if women are complicated human individuals who happen to be female, our identities aren't so easy to appropriate and our experiences aren't so easy to dismiss. What would it mean to "identify as a woman" if we stripped away the sexist mystique?