For years people asked when I was going to have a baby and then once I had them I was discriminated against
Yes, this is my experience too. I suffered infertility too Lionel for many, many years (my sympathies as I know how shit it is) and at the time I felt that I was a non-person because I couldn't do the one thing women were supposed to be able to do.
I thought once I was a mother things would improve but no. I realised how little that mothering is valued and how you are reduced to 'only' that. Just like mumsnet is derided and dismissed because it's 'only' a load of mums.
Basically, misogyny lives and women are still seen as barely human by many. Reduced either entirely to one biological function, or dismissed as the clothes and make-up we're supposed to wear. So much discomfort if we can't be neatly labelled and put in a box.
Which is why the Wollstonecraft statue is so awful. In so many spheres women are reduced to something without depth, without inner lives, without minds of their own, without complexity. And this statue kind of sums that attitude up really. How about actually reflecting the extensive writings of Wollstonecraft - their depth breath and influence? Celebrating the utterly radical, independent free thinker she was - how unique in her time? Nah, a young nude body that isn't even that female really but is somehow supposed to be 'everywoman'.
My response to that is - FUCK OFF. An insult to women everywhere but especially Wollstonecraft herself.