Not exactly The Unknown Feminist...
Apparently there is a good deal of furore going on about the recently unveiled Mary Wollstonecraft Memorial in Stoke Newington.
Some of us wish to remark that, it may not be spectacular, but there is a memorial of kinds, I guess these days probably a cenotaph, and also probably no longer actually the site upon which Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin donated her virginity to PB Shelley, according to lore and legend, on account of the upheaval of Old St Pancras Churchyard by the Midland Railway.
I suppose, says I, that remembers the 70s and the rediscovery of the great feminists of the past, and who had, in fact, heard about Mary Wollstonecraft well before then, possibly even before encountering her in my teens in the pages of V Woolf's Common Reader ('we think back through our mothers'), that maybe a decade or so ago was a really bad period for the general knowledge of women's history and feminist thought? Rowlatt recalled a decade ago becoming “fixated” on why Wollstonecraft wasn’t better known and what could be done to make her place in the canon more secure.
Ummm: I can think of lots of other 'forgotten feminists' who are genuinely a lot more neglected than Mary, before and after her day.
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