London schoolgirls bring Wollstonecraft to life: "It's so important to remember great women and their achievements!"
The talented drama students of La Sainte Union created a live performance that they shared on site in New Unity to commemorate the birth of Mary Wollstonecraft. The dance was called Fragment of Feminism. After their performance the girls paid tribute to the mother of feminism by visiting Maggi Hambling’s Sculpture for Mary Wollstonecraft.
Here, Year 12 student Kezia Adewale tells The Wollstonecraft Society’s Bee Rowlatt about the inspiration behind the piece.
Bee: “Why does it matter to remember great women of the past?”
Kezia: “It’s so important to remember great women and their achievements because they paved the way! It matters for all of us, for everyday people and even for people like Malala. Mary Wollstonecraft is someone you can learn about and when you think about her life it makes you feel better. I get inspiration and think - I want to be like that in the future, they are proof of what you can do.”
Bee: “What do you think of when you hear the words human rights?”
Kezia: “To me it means ending discrimination. If I go for a job and someone thinks I’m foreign or ‘other’ then that could go against me. There are many kinds of discrimination and I notice these kinds of comments, I can hear them sometimes. I think the way to learn more about discrimination is by having conversations with people. It is not easy to tackle though. I also think of human rights when I think about education. It is in the news at the moment that girls are being denied an education in Afghanistan, and it makes you think about how we take so much for granted.”
“It’s so important to remember great women and their achievements because they paved the way! [...] I get inspiration and think - I want to be like that in the future, they are proof of what you can do.”
Bee: “What books have inspired your sense of politics?”
Kezia: “We studied Three Women by Chekhov in an adaptation by Inua Ellams and it really moved me. It was very graphic and powerful. Reading and performing in plays are good ways to get inspired by ideas. And I also loved How To Be A Woman by Caitlin Moran!”
Bee: “Tell me about the performance you created inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft!”
Kezia: “It was a journey showing different waves of feminism, moving from Mary Wollstonecraft to Malala, and we brought in and shared some of that journey in the performance. What it showed was the journey to empowerment. We really enjoyed ourselves. It was amazing to perform it in the very place where Mary Wollstonecraft lived, she was part of a community in that same chapel. Afterwards we went and visited the memorial sculpture made by the artist Maggi Hambling. It was all very inspiring and we are developing that performance into part of our A-level project.”
Congratulations to Kezia and her classmates from all of us at The Wollstonecraft Society!
Photos included with permission.