In a quiet corner of Margravine Cemetery is the unmarked grave of Jeanne Deroin, a heroine of the 19th Century women’s struggle for social justice.  She was buried there on 2nd April 1894 with great ceremony by a large crowd of respectful admirers including William Morris, together with members of his Socialist Society, among them Emery Walker, Anne Cobden-Sanderson, WB Yeats and other well-known figures.  Jeanne’s daughter, Cecile Desroches, was there too together with Jeanne’s grandchildren, the son and daughters of her youngest child Caroline, who had died just the year before.

Born into poverty in Paris, self-educated, Jeanne was a founding member of the early feminist press in France. In 1849, she attempted to stand, illegally, in the elections to the French Legislative Assembly. Arrested and imprisoned for organising a federation of Workers’ Co-operatives, she was forced to flee or face exile by Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the self-proclaimed Emperor of the 2nd French Empire.

Settled with her family in Hammersmith, Jeanne joined William Morris’s Socialist League. Her activism and her journalism together with her formidable political reputation made her a source of inspiration to the growing international feminist movement which became the Suffragette movement. Her daughter, Cecile Desroches, a leading suffragette, is buried alongside her mother.

The Friends of Margravine Cemetery were awarded £500 by the LBHF Women’s History Fund, opening their fund appeal towards the cost of a headstone to mark Jeanne Deroin’s grave. 

Bren Simson    

[News of this fund will be published later]