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Words by Abby Louise Woodman
Edits by Jillian Ducker
Special thanks to Anya Pearson and MaryAnningRocks!
Anya Pearson is on a mission to redress the fact that whilst 85% of statues in Great Britain celebrate the achievements of men, only 3% commemorate named women. She began in 2018 when she and her daughter, then 11-year-old Evie, were inspired to start a campaign to raise a statue to Mary Anning in their community. Anning was a pioneering palaeontologist who spent her life collecting, identifying and selling fossils in Lyme Regis, a town on the Jurassic Coast, in Dorset. Mary Annning Rocks says that ‘It is important to remember and acknowledge Mary in a visual sense because she needs to have a tangible and physical presence put back in Lyme Regis.’ The initial campaign succeeded in their original mission of getting a statue of Mary Anning (and Tray the dog) installed on the 21st May 2022, the 223rd anniversary of Anning’s birth.
Mary Anning Rocks continues with the Mary Anning Learning Legacy, and the campaign itself has grown into a nationwide community led by Anya called VISIBLEWomenUK. Inspired by the efforts of Anya and the team in Dorset, campaigns working for a visual commemoration of women and their contributions to history have gained traction throughout the UK, including at home, in Dorset. Some of these movements include campaigns to raise statues to the Match Girls, in Bow, and Aphra Benn, in Canterbury.
I’ve followed Mary Anning Rocks from afar, and recently came across an article about Anya’s newest project, the Dorchester Sheroes. Last year, Anya was approached to advise on the raising of a statue to the man who invented the compostable toilet. She replied with what she describes as her usual polite rejection, listing the facts and statistics about women’s representation. To her surprise, the campaign organisers replied, well, then this needs to be a female campaign. Since then, Anya and the team have worked to find women who deserve a statue in Dorchester that will better represent and commemorate the women and people who have lived there. At the start of this year, they asked for ideas of the women they might feature, and in the end received over 48 submissions. Following the early success of the campaign, Anya is writing a book to spotlight as many of these women as she can.
In March 2024, I was lucky enough to meet Anya via video call to talk about all things Mary Anning, Dorchester Sheroes and what motivated her to activism.
About Mary Anning
Mary Anning, a Victorian woman whom you may know from the rhyme ‘She Sells Seashells by the Sea Shore’. Anning was born in 1799 in Lyme Regis, a small town in Dorset in the southwest of England, an area commonly referred to as the Jurassic Coast for its abundance of prehistoric fossils. It was common practice for locals to sell small fossils to tourists to supplement their income, something which Mary and her family participated in throughout her childhood. However, Mary’s dedication to and understanding of the pieces she found quickly made her a fundamental part of the development of palaeontology. Mary was 12 when she, and her brother Joseph, discovered the skeleton of an Ichthyosaur and by her twenties, Mary had taken on the leading role in the family’s fossil business. In 1826, aged 26, Mary opened her shop, Anning’s Fossil Depot, in which she displayed another Ichthyosaur she had found. She would continue to find and sell fossils, to tourists, wealthy collectors, and museums throughout her life. Mary taught herself much of the complex science and geology behind her finds, becoming (justifiably) resentful when the male geologists who published her findings did not mention her name in their work. Anning’s findings and scientific understanding of the fossils she uncovered contributed to significant developments about prehistoric life and the history of the planet. Mary Anning has come in and out of popular recognition from the time of her own life through to the present, often in children’s literature and recently, in a 2020 film starring Kate Winslet. Yet, on the coast where she spent so much of her life, Anning was unseen.
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Why don’t we start with your background and how you found Mary Anning?
We did the Mary Anning Rocks campaign five years ago, and the statue [of Anning] was raised in 2022. [The reason] I came to that campaign; well it was a couple of things and it was the perfect storm.
I’ve always considered myself a feminist, and a bad feminist. Because I always talked the talk, but I never really walked the walk. I was really inspired by Caroline Criado Perez’s campaign, [The Women’s Room Project], she’s amazing. It was following Perez’s journey on social media, and seeing the vitriol, and the negativity, and the quite hideous things that were happening to her, from mainly men. I just thought, wow, there’s nothing I can do about that. I’m never going to change that mindsight, it’s broken, those men are broken and there isn’t anything ever that we’re going to be able to do to change their perceptions. For me, as an educator, I thought, right, let’s look at the next generation.
When I started looking around Dorset, I mean, I do like the odd fossil, but it was really –if I’d been living in Manchester at the time, it would have been Emmeline Pankhurst, if I was living in Edinburgh, it would have been Doctor Elsie Inglis. I’d have been championing whoever that woman was that was in the town that I was living in. Mary Anning was in the right place at the right time for me and her to connect. But the main corner of the Learning Legacy – and it still is – is that it’s about working with children. From the get-go, with all the local schools and a local artist we wrote this creative project for them about women in science, and the outcome of that was designs to how they thought the statue could look, and ultimately those pictures, the ones we picked, led the artist.
That’s really amazing.
Yeah! It meant that they had that connection, they can look at it and know, I did that, that was my idea. All the fossils that are all over her skirt, that was a child’s idea, the overall composition of her striding out, that came from a child. Every single child put the dog in, so there was no way the dog wasn’t going in, even though the mayor of Lyme Regis wasn’t so keen. – Honestly, I could tell you some stories…
Go for it.
Well first he tried to argue that there were so many more just as important people who deserve statues in Lyme Regis, not just Mary, and I thought I wonder if he’s going to give me a list – course he did – and he listed out all these men – men, men, men, men, men, men, men. They were all about war, army generals, or seafaring captains, and I just thought oh my god. He ended the email by saying that he considered her [Mary Anning] street furniture and that she would spoil the view.
No, no that’s disgusting, are you serious?
Oh yes. On the Maquette day, a year before the statue was unveiled [the model of the statue] so many amazing people came for the unveiling, all gathered around with the artist. He walked in in his regalia and said ‘it’s really beautiful.’ And this was in front of everybody. He said, ‘I’m really really disappointed that you’ve included the dog’ and everyone just started laughing because they thought he was joking, it’s like Punch and Judy, there’s no Mary without Tray. I knew he wasn’t joking, and I just lost it, and I said ‘why on earth would you say something like that? The dog’s even in her portrait! How could you not have the dog? Even the Natural History Museum does Christmas decorations with the dog!’ And do you know what his response was? ‘We’ve got a dog fouling problem on the beach.’
I just walked away because I didn’t even know what to respond, and I said to the artist after the event, can we put a little copalite, a little fossilised poo, by the back of Tray’s paw, as a joke? She said brilliant, yeah let’s do it.
Oh my goodness, I love it.
That was Mary. Then last year, I got an email from the Dorchester heritage committee asking if I would help mentor and advise them on a statue campaign that they’d like to do in the town. They wanted to raise a statue to Reverend Henry Mule, who invented the compostable toilet.
Of course.
I thought, great that he invented the compostable toilet, but another man, and I just thought no. And I began this mentoring group about four years ago, called VISIBLEWomenUK, I mean we now have fifteen campaigns across the country, raising statues across the country. – one is for the Match Girls in Bow.
Oh wow, okay, I’m in Southeast London so that’s so close to me, actually.
Oh amazing! – They’ve been working on other ways of remembrance whilst they work on the statue, like Blue Plaques and things like that. And those girls [the Match Girls] were instrumental to changing employment laws. I’m used to getting people emailing me about statue campaigns and if it’s a woman I’m like, great, join the fold! But if it’s a man, I mean I’m polite about it, and I will reply with statistics – I’ve had two separate groups over the years approach me about [Percy Bysshe] Shelly, and I always go back with, but what about Mary? She wrote one of the most famous books in the whole world, but is there a statue for Mary Shelley, no, there bloody isn’t.
So anyway, this email came through and I replied with the statistics, expecting not to hear anything back, because you often don’t, you’ve put people’s noses out of joint, you know? But this bloke did respond, he said ‘oh my god, I had no clue. That’s awful. Right, then this needs to be a female project then.’
The Dorchester Sheroes campaign are working to raise a statue to a woman from the area, they have recently shortlisted the suggested women to six, one of whom will be the subject of the statue. Touched by the volume of women submitted, Anya is also writing a book about the women nominated.
I find it a bit mental that a man’s actually listened and changed - and it sounds awful but I’m a bit impressed?
Yeah, and he’s a very educated man, he’s a minority himself and therefore aware, so he got it. I had one meeting with him and we just got on like a house on fire and now we’re a team of four – initially the roll out was us asking, right who are these women in Dorchester?
I swear I saw the number 48? Maybe this is me being a bit ignorant, but I didn’t really think there would be that many, it was a surprise when I read that in the article.
Yeah yeah, well there was a criterion, of a 25-mile radius to Dorchester, which is the capital, and Dorset being the wider county. And that they needed to be inspiring and uplifting. Because, well, we have an awful history of hanging and burning women in Dorchester, and they’re crucial stories which shine a light on the judicial systems of the past. But we wanted this to be celebratory. The 48 includes women a bit wider than the initial parameters, there are some large hubs in Dorset so there’s a lot of history here and people are really excited by it. The book is going to be the Dorset Sheroes, to include as many of the women nominated as we can.
And do you have a favourite? Who are you most excited to write about?
Well, because we’re focusing just on Dorchester at the moment, [for the statue], we’ve got the final six and I’ll be happy if one of those wins. I think the one I’m most looking forward to, -she wasn’t born in Dorset, but she spent most of her life in Bournemouth - was the first ever black army officer to be made a major in the army – I, to be honest it’s so fresh I haven’t even done that much reading on her as she’s just popped into the inbox! I’m looking forward to digging deep with her. But the two, the favourites that I’ve got are quite personal. I’m in the fashion industry, so I really love the button makers, because that really celebrates a whole raft of women across two centuries and a really beautiful piece of art to commemorate what those women achieved with being able to forge their own careers and money, but also having something which marks the making, and the craft of their work. The other one I really love, and I am really hoping that she’ll win, is Sylvia Townsend Warner. Just because, I’ve read a couple of her books, and I mean, you have to stop yourself and remember the time she was writing these books. She was just a young woman when she wrote her first book, Lolly Willowes, and it’s just brilliant. It’s about witches, but it’s a metaphor about women’s roles, and women’s sexuality – and of course, she’s a massive LGBTQ pioneer too. She openly lived with her lover, Valentine Ackland. It’s a really lovely inclusive thing.
I think it’s really interesting that women always go back to making things, producing things, and how society ignores that, even though it’s so fundamental. Like the way that embroidery at every level is often looked down on, especially in modern portrayals of history, as if that didn’t really matter. But, in reality, every single thing that they would have worn would have been entirely handmade, by a woman who had such incredible mastery of her craft, so I really think it’s important to focus on those women because craft is still looked down on as this arbitrary or artificial thing.
Yeah, and it wasn’t until Ruskin, William Morris that these art schools really changed – things like embroidery and knitting were really seen as art.
When men get involved.
Yes, and it goes hand in glove, doesn’t it. It’s a woman’s thing, so it’s not considered real, or important.
I’m really excited to read more about them when it comes out.
One of the women that came out in the submissions was a woman named Rina Gardener, and she was a one-woman powerhouse. She was an artist and she ran her own publishing house from her kitchen table. Her books now sell for £3000.
Oh my god.
Yeah! I wanted to get one of her books because I’m fascinated by her and I managed to find one at an auction, and that’s not an original, it’s a reprint from the early noughties, and even that was forty quid. That was a £12.99 book when it was first published.
She lived in Dorset, and she would walk all around an area, and in her books, she’d talk about all of it, not just Corfe Castle but the village, the farriers, the little church. She would hand paint and screen print, create these little illustrative books with chunks of writing about why we should be looking at this. I thought, this is what the Dorset Sheroes book should be, very visual and collaborative.
How many women are you going to include in the book itself do you think?
Well, I think I’m going to try and group them as much as possible, so Crime & Punishment, Makers & Creators, Theatre & Stage. But they’ll be callouts to the real important people, definitely the final six.
What motivated you to do this yourself? Firstly how did you learn about her and second why did you decide to do it yourself rather than just campaigning?
If I’m honest, and hand on heart, the reason I got all into this was the menopause.
I woke up one morning and I was so angry, and so pissed off. I thought, I’m done. I was done with the erosion. Seeing what was happening, with the gender pay gap, what you could see coming with Roe vs Wade. I was done with it. I can’t do anything about that but from an educational point of view I can change how these kids see the world, from a different point of view, not just a male lens, constantly.
I think that says a lot about women’s experiences in society if I’m honest. I know quite a few women with huge health changes, like menopause, endometriosis, etc. So many things change when a woman’s health alters, both with the woman and how she exists but also in the way she’s treated. It’s something that’s not talked about enough.
I’m a very positive person, and we all get blue, a bit down, but I lost my confidence. I had anxiety. It manifested physically, I got electric shocks. And no one would listen to me, the GP’s, my husband, couldn’t understand.
Speaking specifically about Mary Anning, when I was researching this issue, I really struggled with it. If it was up to you, what content or media would you put out there about Mary or any of the other women?
I just want to see these women talked about more in conversation.
They are visually annihilated. When we launched the sheroes campaign it went into our local paper, and the first comment – I screen grabbed it because it was so excellent – the first comment was from Ron. Ron was obviously in his 60s, and he basically said it’s a false thing to retrospectively try to change history by forcing a statue when women didn’t really do anything of note until the twentieth century. And he genuinely believes that.
We’re doing this event with a load of authors and writers from the area, as a fundraiser, and I’m going to invite Ron. I really want to change his opinion, but me saying anything on the internet isn’t going to change that.
They [women in history] should be normalised in a way?
Yes! I’m having the most unreal email conversation with the Manchester Museum at the moment. I’m originally from there so I was there recently visiting a friend, so we went and their display is great, they’ve got fossils, Ichthyosaurs. There’s this timeline on this cabinet and I’m going down, they’ve got [Henry] De la Beche [friend of Mary Anning], and all the usual suspects, but not one mention of the woman that found marine reptiles, nowhere.
I was going to say that’s baffling, but I work in museums and there are always women involved but they’re never written into the history properly.
I mean, even when I’ve said, we’re looking at pioneers for the first issue, so many people have said, well you can’t be writing that much then.
There’s so much!
Manchester Museum – it gets better. I emailed as part of the Mary Anning Learning Legacy, we’ve got quite a sizable fund that we can use to promote her. I said that I’d like to offer up some funding to help them promote her, because I know museums struggle for money. I heard nothing. Forwarded again a month later. Would be great to have an answer. I called them, I’m offering funding. Who do I need to talk to, to give you money?
A curator, quite aggressively, as if I’d said something personal, told me that they’re very proactive about putting women in the displays. But I hadn’t said that? I said, look I’m so glad you’re getting back to me, it’s great to talk to a female curator… She said, basically no.
Why?
We don’t own any of Anning’s fossils. But do they own any of [Georges] Cuviers? Do they own any of De la Beche’s? If you do, Mary Anning probably collected them anyway.
And you don’t need items in your collection to say the reason we know about this is because of this person.
You cannot have 3D Ichthyosaurs hanging from your ceiling without giving the person who discovered them credit.
I asked what about the timeline? She said that’s not part of her remit. But it’s a decal, it’s a modern sticker that you’ve put on in maybe the last five years.
There’s a huge issue across a lot of museums at the moment, there’s just no money there, and what suffers is the women.
The maquette has been on tour for a few years now, it’s booked until 2025 – a lot of the museums don’t even have fossils, but they’ve taken her and made these huge, amazing displays and Mary is the centrepiece.
It's fascinating that places that don’t have any connection to her want to give her a space but places that do, just nothing? Is there anything at the Natural History Museum?
She’s named, there’s a wall of her and her findings, but it’s by a huge Plesiosaur which wasn’t hers, it was actually found in Yorkshire. It’s the same sediment, the same coast but it’s not hers!
About five years ago they renamed the private members wing the Mary Anning Wing, and it’s got some of her archival work there too.
At Lyme Regis Museum they added a members wing there too named after her. Dorset Museum have a big display as well. They had a load of lottery money recently and they added her and Elizabeth Philpott.
Have you seen Ammonite (the 2020 film about Annings, starring Kate Winslet), and what did you think?
Okay first of all, go and listen to my episode on the Cosmic Shed. In a nutshell, I think it was a lost opportunity, and I was disappointed that it wasn’t more about her achievements and how important she was scientifically. I read an interview with Francis Lee before the premiere, and they asked him where he got his inspiration for the character in the film the way that he did, and he had read two historical accounts from the time, one which described her as a vinegar face, pinched nosed, by Owens. Really awful and misogynistic. The other was in the diary of Lady Harriet, who had visited her, and she said that she had never met a young woman with such a glowing mind, self-educated who can hold her own in any male-dominated space. When you read it… Acknowledging that she’s working class and self-educated but can spin circles around these men of learning? Guess which one he went with?
For me, she’s just always seen in the male lens, according to this recent book she was a failure because she never married and had children.
Mary Anning, and women are so much more than that.
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Ongoing VisibleWomenUK campaigns you can support
The Sylvia Pankhurst Memorial Committee – www.sylviapankhurst.gm.apc.org
The Elizabeth Elmy Group – www.elizabethelmy.com/
A is for Aphra – www.aisforaphra.org
More than a Cell: The Legacy of Henrietta Lacks - www.bristol.ac.uk/research/impact/stories/hela-cells/
Friends of the Factories - www.friendsofthefactories.com/
The Matchgirls Memorial - https://www.matchgirls1888.org/the-story-of-the-strike
Ada Nield Chew – www.statueforada.com
Useful sources:
Mary Anning Rocks, www.maryanningrocks.co.uk
Denise Dutton (the artist), www.denisedutton.co.uk
Mary Anning Goes on Tour! www.geologistsassociation.org.uk/maryanning/
Mary Anning, short film by Natashia Mattocks, www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1UOOC5zu1I
Anya’s episode on the Cosmic Shed, www.thecosmicshed.com/e/ammonite-1620737252/
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