Still waiting

Who made man the exclusive judge, if woman partake with him of the gift of reason? [Mary Wollstonecraft, Dedication to [i]Vindication of the Rights of Woman[/i]]

It's International Women's Day and many of Mary Wollstonecraft's words still seem relevant. Shockingly, there is as yet no public memorial to this philosopher and first feminist writer, but this is about to be remedied in Newington Green, north London, by the Newington Green Action Group. My friend N with whom I stayed when I was in London last month is a very active member and I was so pleased to hear that, following the complete renovation of the Green, there is now a campaign to commission a sculpture in Wollstonecraft's memory here (a very informative site). Mary Wollstonecraft ran a girls' school here before going on to lead a revolutionary life in France and then back in London.

As Miriam Brody says in her introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of Vindication of the Rights of Woman, this work, 'written when the issue of the rights of man was bringing revolution to the United States, to France, and threatening even to shake the venerable English Parliament, is the feminist declaration of independence'. Janet Todd wrote in the preface to her biography of Wollstonecraft: 'In Wollstonecraft's writings a new female consciousness comes into being'.* I feel I have a lot to be grateful to her for, that she worked so hard and wrote so much in her short life.

Sadly, she died aged 38 of septicaemia following the birth of her second daughter who became the novelist Mary Shelley.


* Janet Todd, Mary Wollstonecraft: a Revolutionary Life, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2000.

(Thanks to LoJ for the 'empty plinth' idea and the loan of the plinth itself!)