"For her part, Charlesworth sees the Wollstonecraft statue as a “lost opportunity”. “I mean, the flowing forms and things, that was fine, but you didn’t have to have a naked woman. That’s not something that [Wollstonecraft] would have done, that’s not something most women would want to do – just stand up there: ‘Oh, look at me, I’ve got no clothes on’. It’s demeaning.
In a more crowd-pleasing, if not necessarily critic-pleasing fashion, Charlesworth was determined to depict as true a likeness of Davison as possible, “sitting on a bench so you can sit beside her, not standing on a big tall pedestal thing”. The mortarboard she used to wear on marches lies next to her; pinned to her jacket is a suffragettes medal with seven bands signifying the number of times she was imprisoned.
“She was force-fed 49 times, she had her teeth knocked out and was paralysed on one side of her mouth. It’s why in photographs she often looks dour,” explains Charlesworth, who worked from the few photographs of her that exist.
“Quite often she’s wearing her mortarboard or she’s looking very grim, and I didn’t want people to think ‘I’m not going to sit next to that bad-tempered woman’. Reading books about her, what really struck me was that she had the sort of personality that, when she walked in the room and smiled, it lit up the whole room.” "