Woman
Imagine you've created something so important that it would alter the understanding of humanity, an invention so revolutionary that it would come into use worldwide, a concept so unique that even 50 years later it would be not only still in use but would still be pretty much in its original format. Now imagine that even after all of this you would receive little recognition or reward; in fact, you would consider yourself fortunate that you were even allowed to present such an idea...and you, yourself, would feel that you were lucky to have had this chance even if you didn't get much credit or pay, certainly nothing like that of most of your colleagues. At first, you might think that all of this was in reference to the group of black women so instrumental to the math and engineering at NASA when manned space exploration was just beginning, a subject of the bestselling book and movie, Hidden Figures. And you'd be partially right. But you'd have to go back to the late 1800s, when white immigrant women were working as maids in many homes, and there you'd find someone as brilliant as the stars she would discover, one Williamina Fleming.
Women have had a hard time. In many countries and areas of the world, the rule of men has not faded and in some cases has grown even stronger. Some of this is culture, and some of this is possibly a fear as men grow older or begin to lose control. This takes nothing away from all the inroads and progress women have so desperately fought for; but on the other hand why is the male contraceptive pill taking so long? If you are a male, think of your image of women in general (and I'm generalizing here as a statistical and corporate view)...what ten words would you use to describe your impressions? A world leader or CEO? A sexy fashionista? A competitive athlete that could add to a male sport (football, tennis, martial arts, etc.)? A stay-at-home mom and wife? You could do much the same with writing your general impressions of the male for we tend to lock both genders into separate roles despite the efforts of trying to shed the blue-pink barrier; girls should grow up with dolls and boys with toy pistols, or so the thinking goes at the major toy manufacturers. As it is often said, never the 'twain shall meet. But would you include this impression as reported by author May Jeong in The London Review of Books: On the morning of 25 September 2006, Safia, the first head of the women’s affairs department in Kandahar, was climbing into a rickshaw to go to work when two men on a motorcycle drove by and shot her three times. Safia’s death was the first I heard about, but I soon learned of twelve other women who had been murdered since the Nato invasion of Afghanistan in 2001...After Safia, there was Hossai, a 19-year-old worker for a private military contractor, who also died on her morning commute. In September 2008, Setara, a provincial council member, and Malalai, a police officer, were both shot in front of their homes. Then Zarghona, a doctor, was murdered; and in 2013 another Zarghona, a police officer, was killed on duty. The murder rate accelerated in 2015: Raheela, another police officer, was gunned down on the job; Torpikai, a political affairs assistant for a local United Nations office, was assassinated while driving to work. Nargis, a health worker, was shot and killed while giving out vaccines. In March 2016, Fawzia, an administrative clerk for the provincial passport office, was shot in the head and died. In May, Nasrin, a police officer, was shot but survived. A week later, Leila, a 25-year-old student, was kidnapped while walking to school, supposedly because her sister, a well-known poet, was ‘too loud’. It was rumoured that Leila had also been raped. Half of her body was found 15 days later; the other half had been eaten by dogs...In Afghanistan, men go to work and women stay at home with the children...
All of this went on to report the influx of money coming into the country, an effort to eradicate or diminish this gender bias --an estimated $100 billion. But author Jeong goes on to write: The money encouraged some women, mostly the daughters of already enlightened families, to go out into the world. A quarter of parliamentary seats were reserved for women. The police and the army recruited women officers, at the prompting of Western countries who insisted on gender parity as a prerequisite for funding. (Between 2005 and 2013, the number of policewomen rose from 180 to 1551.) Women became mayors, then ministers, then presidential candidates. Abroad, this was hailed as progress. Meanwhile, less powerful women were being assassinated. The Taliban was blamed. But the people I spoke to in Kandahar saw things differently. Many of the women appeared to have been killed not by the Taliban, but by their own relatives.
So jump back to Williamina. In another LRB review*, the struggles of gaining recognition are shown as mentioned in a letter she wrote about her rather progressive employer, a courageous Charles Pickering who defied convention and hired many women "computers": He seems to think that no work is too much or too hard for me, no matter what the responsibility or how long the hours. But let me raise the question of salary and I am immediately told that I receive an excellent salary as women’s salaries stand...Sometimes I feel tempted to give up and let him try someone else, or some of the men to do my work, in order to have him find out what he is getting for $1500 a year from me, compared with $2500 for some of the other [male] assistants. Does he ever think that I have a home to keep and a family to take care of as well as the men? But I suppose a woman has no claim to such comforts. And this is considered an enlightened age! Women's salaries do still lag behind men when it comes to performing the same work, not so much in Europe says The Economist, but pretty much everywhere else in the world says the Catalyst (now in its 50th year). In the U.S. men basically work 44 days less than women (not really, but that example shows the average difference in pay or how much more men currently make for doing the same job). But little of that really mattered to Williamina or likely to many other women. She and many others like her simply weren't recognized. Nice job, but you pretty much can't get the credit, even if you did discover that a star's brightness and color determines its distance and life and allows satellites such as Hubble to probe deeper and deeper into space and relay that information back to us. The technique she used --studying photographic plates rather than looking directly at the sky-- was a change in astronomy comparable to the use of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in molecular biology, which by multiplying copies of DNA sequences allowed genes to be studied in ways never possible before. With the increase in raw data as well as precision, Fleming was able to develop a much more sophisticated star classification system than the four-type arrangement then dominant; her later colleague, Annie Jump Cannon, developed a system even more evolved, one that is still in use today. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say these women’s classification work was like replacing Fire, Air, Earth and Water with the periodic table. Fleming had just one word put on her gravestone: ‘astronomer’.
International Women's Day was March 8th, and women came out in vast numbers worldwide to show their unity seeking equal rights. From voting to driving to wearing what clothes they want, women across the globe are growing more vocal in their quest for recognition. And I won't be so presumptuous as to even attempt to encapsulate such a large subject as women into such a small post; but as John Lennon wrote: ...woman, I will try to express my inner feelings and thankfulness for showing me the meaning of success. Abortion and sexuality (LGBT) alone are divisive issues, although both still have to do with women's bodies being governed with rules made by men. Yikes, getting into deeper water here. But it all boils down to what the late Joseph Campbell used to reiterate in his best selling book and PBS series, The Power of Myth, that prior to the introduction of Christianity and the mostly male religions that would follow, the female was revered and respected...a goddess.
So here's another name...Rosalind Franklin. Ever heard of her? What about the famous DNA double helix, that twisted chain of our genetics that would go on to win the team of Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins a Nobel Prize? Turns out, their "discovery" was pretty much based on work by Rosalind Franklin, for it was her meticulous study of a photograph, one considered "the finest image of a DNA molecule at the time." She was close to publishing her findings but showed her colleague (Wilkins) her image of the now-famous photograph #51 who later took it to Watson, and soon Crick was handed some of her unpublished data from earlier. They beat her to publishing, giving her credit only as a "supporting" study that added to their report. She left the King's Medical Research Council and went on to discover other key findings such as the tobacco mosaic virus but due to her earlier work with X-rays, contacted ovarian cancer and died at 37. She was never credited with the actual discovery by either the trio or by the Nobel committee. A more detailed report of both sides of this ongoing argument was posted on a blog by Discover Magazine which wrote about Crick & Watson;s published paper: Toward the end of their paper, they flatly state that “We were not aware of the details of the results presented [by the King’s scientists] when we devised our structure, which rests mainly though not entirely on published experimental data and stereochemical arguments.” Yet they go on to write in an acknowledgment, three paragraphs later: “We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College, London.” The sentences seem to contradict each other, and in any case Watson made a point, in his book The Double Helix, to describe the pivotal moment when he saw Photo 51. Add to Rosalind Franklin the name of Celia Payne who (from the LRB review): ...made the (to many unwelcome) discovery that the stars weren’t made of the same stuff, more or less, as Earth, as was previously assumed: hydrogen, she determined, was about a million times more plentiful on the stars. It’s difficult to overstate how alien this finding was. Even Payne, in publishing it, wrote that it was ‘almost certainly not real’. Her finding came out at around the same time that Edwin Hubble, building on Leavitt’s work, made the (also to many unwelcome) discovery that ours was not the only galaxy, and another, Andromeda, was more than a million light years away.
Grand discoveries all, and courageous and frustrating ones for the women involved. There are and will likely always be the those who go unrecognized and unappreciated, from the single mom to the career scientist; and there are the Sheryl Sandbergs and Mary Barras reaching and breaking the glass ceilings. But overall, the road for women is still rather littered with debris and far from a smooth road. Author Rivka Galchen perhaps gave a poignant summary of it all as she closed her review: Perhaps for many women (and men?) there will be something as maddening as there is appealing in reading about Miss This and Mrs That...I’m not proud of this --or ashamed really, or immune from unpleasant gender norms of more modern vintage-- but I note it, because The Glass Universe reminded me that this aversion isn’t due to some defect in storytelling, or even subject matter, but instead is connected to an irrational if predictable fear that reading this stuff might somehow result in having to live alongside these people. One admires but doesn’t want to be the women in this book. Such lowbrow self-centered sympathetic reading habits are more common with novels. It’s not quite right to say that the women of the Harvard College Observatory were treated poorly...it’s true that Annie Cannon’s classification system was universally adopted, it came to be known as the Harvard Classification System. The Bruce Medal, founded in 1898 and specified to be available to both women and men, didn’t go to a woman until 1982.
*Search for reviews of Dava Sobel's book The Glass Universe and you'll receive dozens if not hundreds of summaries about this belated period of recognition for these women only now (posthumously) breaking the "glass ceiling."
-- Another reminder: currently out there is a Fake Flash Update 5 for Firefox users citing a "critical update;" this is anything but and is yet another attempt to hack into your computer so beware!
Women have had a hard time. In many countries and areas of the world, the rule of men has not faded and in some cases has grown even stronger. Some of this is culture, and some of this is possibly a fear as men grow older or begin to lose control. This takes nothing away from all the inroads and progress women have so desperately fought for; but on the other hand why is the male contraceptive pill taking so long? If you are a male, think of your image of women in general (and I'm generalizing here as a statistical and corporate view)...what ten words would you use to describe your impressions? A world leader or CEO? A sexy fashionista? A competitive athlete that could add to a male sport (football, tennis, martial arts, etc.)? A stay-at-home mom and wife? You could do much the same with writing your general impressions of the male for we tend to lock both genders into separate roles despite the efforts of trying to shed the blue-pink barrier; girls should grow up with dolls and boys with toy pistols, or so the thinking goes at the major toy manufacturers. As it is often said, never the 'twain shall meet. But would you include this impression as reported by author May Jeong in The London Review of Books: On the morning of 25 September 2006, Safia, the first head of the women’s affairs department in Kandahar, was climbing into a rickshaw to go to work when two men on a motorcycle drove by and shot her three times. Safia’s death was the first I heard about, but I soon learned of twelve other women who had been murdered since the Nato invasion of Afghanistan in 2001...After Safia, there was Hossai, a 19-year-old worker for a private military contractor, who also died on her morning commute. In September 2008, Setara, a provincial council member, and Malalai, a police officer, were both shot in front of their homes. Then Zarghona, a doctor, was murdered; and in 2013 another Zarghona, a police officer, was killed on duty. The murder rate accelerated in 2015: Raheela, another police officer, was gunned down on the job; Torpikai, a political affairs assistant for a local United Nations office, was assassinated while driving to work. Nargis, a health worker, was shot and killed while giving out vaccines. In March 2016, Fawzia, an administrative clerk for the provincial passport office, was shot in the head and died. In May, Nasrin, a police officer, was shot but survived. A week later, Leila, a 25-year-old student, was kidnapped while walking to school, supposedly because her sister, a well-known poet, was ‘too loud’. It was rumoured that Leila had also been raped. Half of her body was found 15 days later; the other half had been eaten by dogs...In Afghanistan, men go to work and women stay at home with the children...
All of this went on to report the influx of money coming into the country, an effort to eradicate or diminish this gender bias --an estimated $100 billion. But author Jeong goes on to write: The money encouraged some women, mostly the daughters of already enlightened families, to go out into the world. A quarter of parliamentary seats were reserved for women. The police and the army recruited women officers, at the prompting of Western countries who insisted on gender parity as a prerequisite for funding. (Between 2005 and 2013, the number of policewomen rose from 180 to 1551.) Women became mayors, then ministers, then presidential candidates. Abroad, this was hailed as progress. Meanwhile, less powerful women were being assassinated. The Taliban was blamed. But the people I spoke to in Kandahar saw things differently. Many of the women appeared to have been killed not by the Taliban, but by their own relatives.
So jump back to Williamina. In another LRB review*, the struggles of gaining recognition are shown as mentioned in a letter she wrote about her rather progressive employer, a courageous Charles Pickering who defied convention and hired many women "computers": He seems to think that no work is too much or too hard for me, no matter what the responsibility or how long the hours. But let me raise the question of salary and I am immediately told that I receive an excellent salary as women’s salaries stand...Sometimes I feel tempted to give up and let him try someone else, or some of the men to do my work, in order to have him find out what he is getting for $1500 a year from me, compared with $2500 for some of the other [male] assistants. Does he ever think that I have a home to keep and a family to take care of as well as the men? But I suppose a woman has no claim to such comforts. And this is considered an enlightened age! Women's salaries do still lag behind men when it comes to performing the same work, not so much in Europe says The Economist, but pretty much everywhere else in the world says the Catalyst (now in its 50th year). In the U.S. men basically work 44 days less than women (not really, but that example shows the average difference in pay or how much more men currently make for doing the same job). But little of that really mattered to Williamina or likely to many other women. She and many others like her simply weren't recognized. Nice job, but you pretty much can't get the credit, even if you did discover that a star's brightness and color determines its distance and life and allows satellites such as Hubble to probe deeper and deeper into space and relay that information back to us. The technique she used --studying photographic plates rather than looking directly at the sky-- was a change in astronomy comparable to the use of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) in molecular biology, which by multiplying copies of DNA sequences allowed genes to be studied in ways never possible before. With the increase in raw data as well as precision, Fleming was able to develop a much more sophisticated star classification system than the four-type arrangement then dominant; her later colleague, Annie Jump Cannon, developed a system even more evolved, one that is still in use today. It’s only a slight exaggeration to say these women’s classification work was like replacing Fire, Air, Earth and Water with the periodic table. Fleming had just one word put on her gravestone: ‘astronomer’.
International Women's Day was March 8th, and women came out in vast numbers worldwide to show their unity seeking equal rights. From voting to driving to wearing what clothes they want, women across the globe are growing more vocal in their quest for recognition. And I won't be so presumptuous as to even attempt to encapsulate such a large subject as women into such a small post; but as John Lennon wrote: ...woman, I will try to express my inner feelings and thankfulness for showing me the meaning of success. Abortion and sexuality (LGBT) alone are divisive issues, although both still have to do with women's bodies being governed with rules made by men. Yikes, getting into deeper water here. But it all boils down to what the late Joseph Campbell used to reiterate in his best selling book and PBS series, The Power of Myth, that prior to the introduction of Christianity and the mostly male religions that would follow, the female was revered and respected...a goddess.
So here's another name...Rosalind Franklin. Ever heard of her? What about the famous DNA double helix, that twisted chain of our genetics that would go on to win the team of Francis Crick, James Watson and Maurice Wilkins a Nobel Prize? Turns out, their "discovery" was pretty much based on work by Rosalind Franklin, for it was her meticulous study of a photograph, one considered "the finest image of a DNA molecule at the time." She was close to publishing her findings but showed her colleague (Wilkins) her image of the now-famous photograph #51 who later took it to Watson, and soon Crick was handed some of her unpublished data from earlier. They beat her to publishing, giving her credit only as a "supporting" study that added to their report. She left the King's Medical Research Council and went on to discover other key findings such as the tobacco mosaic virus but due to her earlier work with X-rays, contacted ovarian cancer and died at 37. She was never credited with the actual discovery by either the trio or by the Nobel committee. A more detailed report of both sides of this ongoing argument was posted on a blog by Discover Magazine which wrote about Crick & Watson;s published paper: Toward the end of their paper, they flatly state that “We were not aware of the details of the results presented [by the King’s scientists] when we devised our structure, which rests mainly though not entirely on published experimental data and stereochemical arguments.” Yet they go on to write in an acknowledgment, three paragraphs later: “We have also been stimulated by a knowledge of the general nature of the unpublished experimental results and ideas of Dr. M. H. F. Wilkins, Dr. R. E. Franklin and their co-workers at King’s College, London.” The sentences seem to contradict each other, and in any case Watson made a point, in his book The Double Helix, to describe the pivotal moment when he saw Photo 51. Add to Rosalind Franklin the name of Celia Payne who (from the LRB review): ...made the (to many unwelcome) discovery that the stars weren’t made of the same stuff, more or less, as Earth, as was previously assumed: hydrogen, she determined, was about a million times more plentiful on the stars. It’s difficult to overstate how alien this finding was. Even Payne, in publishing it, wrote that it was ‘almost certainly not real’. Her finding came out at around the same time that Edwin Hubble, building on Leavitt’s work, made the (also to many unwelcome) discovery that ours was not the only galaxy, and another, Andromeda, was more than a million light years away.
Grand discoveries all, and courageous and frustrating ones for the women involved. There are and will likely always be the those who go unrecognized and unappreciated, from the single mom to the career scientist; and there are the Sheryl Sandbergs and Mary Barras reaching and breaking the glass ceilings. But overall, the road for women is still rather littered with debris and far from a smooth road. Author Rivka Galchen perhaps gave a poignant summary of it all as she closed her review: Perhaps for many women (and men?) there will be something as maddening as there is appealing in reading about Miss This and Mrs That...I’m not proud of this --or ashamed really, or immune from unpleasant gender norms of more modern vintage-- but I note it, because The Glass Universe reminded me that this aversion isn’t due to some defect in storytelling, or even subject matter, but instead is connected to an irrational if predictable fear that reading this stuff might somehow result in having to live alongside these people. One admires but doesn’t want to be the women in this book. Such lowbrow self-centered sympathetic reading habits are more common with novels. It’s not quite right to say that the women of the Harvard College Observatory were treated poorly...it’s true that Annie Cannon’s classification system was universally adopted, it came to be known as the Harvard Classification System. The Bruce Medal, founded in 1898 and specified to be available to both women and men, didn’t go to a woman until 1982.
*Search for reviews of Dava Sobel's book The Glass Universe and you'll receive dozens if not hundreds of summaries about this belated period of recognition for these women only now (posthumously) breaking the "glass ceiling."
-- Another reminder: currently out there is a Fake Flash Update 5 for Firefox users citing a "critical update;" this is anything but and is yet another attempt to hack into your computer so beware!
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