Tuesday 21 April 2015

Women geniuses - have there been any new ones discovered in the past fifty years?

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It is a tenet of feminist 'scholarship' that there were women geniuses who were neglected; and a large part of feminist scholarship has been dedicated to raising awareness of women geniuses.

That there are women geniuses is clear - examples abound especially in literature; but I do not think feminist scholarship of the past fifty years has come up with a single 'neglected' example of a woman genius.

Instead there has been a combination of the pretence that real women geniuses were 'previously neglected' until feminism came along; plus the hyping of women non-geniuses (such as Hildegard of Bingen as a composer and spiritual writer, the DNA scientist Rosalind Franklin, and playwright Aphra Benn).

But I ask - are there any examples of

1. real women geniuses, who were

2. indeed neglected or unknown, and were

3. re-discovered by feminist scholarship of he past half century?

"I ask merely for information" - as Algernon said in The Importance of Being Earnest; when enquiring why his butler, Lane, had been drinking so much of his master's champagne. Having acted both Lane and Algy, this is a line I recall well.

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