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Women of the 18th century faced many obstacles to becoming artists. The area of art women found most difficult to get in to was sculpting. Historian Amanda Vickery tells us women were thought to lack the strength and intelligence to do it. Anne Seymour Damer became the first recognised female sculptor in Britain. Women were not allowed to study the male form in detail as it was thought not proper and immoral. Anne Seymour Damer had wealthy parents who hired a surgeon to help her understand the male form so she could study sculpting. Damer decided to make sculptures in a neo-classical style similar to Roman and Greek.

Damer wrote on the side of a marble bust of actress Elizabeth Allen in Greek and signed it to show other people she was a well educated woman. Newspaper columnists and commentators made fun of her for being too butch or manly because she was doing sculpting which people thought was men鈥檚 work. Images of a bust of Admiral Nelson and a statue of King George III show that important people liked her work and hired her to sculpt for them. Amanda Vickery praises Anne Seymour Damer for overcoming and ignoring prejudice and becoming a successful sculptor at a time when it was thought women could and should not do that. Vickery points out that this was only possible because she had a lot of support and encouragement from her parents and money to hire teachers. Other women would have found it impossible to be successful as sculptors without these advantages.