Crash-test dummies based on the ‘average’ male are just one example of design that forgets about women – and puts lives at risk
Category: Herstory
Women at the Helm
Project Managers Winters, Dodd lead New Horizons and Voyager – Humankind’s Two Most Distant Missions
These missions are not only setting records for distant exploration; both have female project managers. Helene Winters of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, serves as the project manager for the New Horizons mission. Suzanne Dodd of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, is project manager for Voyager and has also managed NASA’s NuSTAR and Spitzer space observatories.
Source: New Horizons: News Article
The nation-builders we constantly fail to recognise
If it’s late enough in summer that we’ve grown exhausted of complaining about the weather, it must be time to have a few too many beers and start punching We all know of the great men who shaped Australia, but what of the great women — women like John Macarthur’s wife, who ran the farm while he was off fighting, feuding and facing charges on the other side of the world
From Chinese spies to award-winning geologists, we’re making women visible on Wikipedia
Just 3,541 Wikipedia editors are considered “very active”, and very few of them are female. But this can change.
Source: From Chinese spies to award-winning geologists, we’re making women visible on Wikipedia
5 Indigenous women who didn’t get the credit
Natalie Cromb writes for NITV:
It is no secret where we —Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women— are placed on the scale of relevance and importance in this country. We are last, always.
We are also tireless in our pursuit of rights and betterment for our people, which is why individual achievements are rarely important and why we are often overlooked and don’t receive credit where credit is due. There are countless examples of this and we bring you five cases of incredible Indigenous women achieving great things and not getting near enough credit for their achievement.
https://www.sbs.com.au/nitv/article/2018/07/12/5-indigenous-women-who-didnt-get-credit
[category Aust, feminism, herstory]
Spanish academic gets €1.5m EU grant to rescue ‘women’s writing’
A Spanish academic has embarked on a five-year quest to rescue the works of female writers from the margins of European thought and give them the recognition they have been denied for centuries.
Carme Font, a lecturer in English literature at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, has been awarded a €1.5m (£1.35m) grant by the European Research Council to scour libraries, archives and private collections in search of letters, poems and reflections written by women from 1500 to 1780.
www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/27/spanish-academic-gets-15m-eu-grant-to-rescue-womens-writing [category global, herstory]
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A Computer of One’s Own
Pioneers of the Computing Age.
Source: A Computer of One’s Own – Medium
Evelyn Berezin, 93, Dies; Built the First True Word Processor
Evelyn Berezin, a computer pioneer who emancipated many a frazzled secretary from the shackles of the typewriter nearly a half-century ago by building and marketing the first computerized word processor, died on Saturday in Manhattan. She was 93.
In an age when computers were in their infancy and few women were involved in their development, Ms. Berezin (pronounced BEAR-a-zen) not only designed the first true word processor; in 1969, she was also a founder and the president of the Redactron Corporation, a tech start-up on Long Island that was the first company exclusively engaged in manufacturing and selling the revolutionary machines.
“Why is this woman not famous?” the British writer and entrepreneur Gwyn Headley asked in a 2010 blog post.
“Without Ms. Berezin,” he added enthusiastically, “there would be no Bill Gates, no Steve Jobs, no internet, no word processors, no spreadsheets; nothing that remotely connects business with the 21st century.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/10/obituaries/evelyn-berezin-dead.html
[category global, herstory]
The Season of the Witch – Max Dashu On Why We Sexualize, Trivialize, and Fear the Witch
There’s a large and complex cultural history about this. We are at the end of a long process of demonization of witches. Most people have heard of the witch hunts, but most people don’t know what that was about, what it was like, how long it went on.
People tend to get taught witches were devil worshipers, and that’s a demonization of these wise women. But actually what we’re seeing in that description is they are practicing land veneration, veneration of the water, similar to the belief ‘water is life.’
The witch is a counselor. The church didn’t want this because they wanted to have a religion centered around a patriarchal concept of god, and it did not take nature in. Nature-connected ceremonies were threatening, so they demonized the witch.
There’s an idea that everything has to be in the hands of this all-male priesthood, so anything else has to be illegitimate.
To get back to the theme of misogyny, witch persecution became a convenient way of suppressing female power. That’s still with us in the archetype in the witch — the powerful woman is a bad woman, the old woman is a bad woman . . .
Read more at https://www.afterellen.com/general-news/565785-the-season-of-the-witch-max-dashu-on-why-we-sexualize-trivialize-and-fear-the-witch#RkGGbcdmLrgKOQwQ.99
Source: The Season of the Witch – Max Dashu On Why We Sexualize, Trivialize, and Fear the Witch – AfterEllen
Misogynist stereotyping in history, Part I: Those prudish Victorian women
culturallyboundgender writes:
Indeed, the prudishness of the Victorian woman is even supposed to reflect on modern political struggles: she is invoked as a grim-faced, disapproving specter of the past, whose ignorance of anatomy (and unpredictable attacks of the vapors) necessitated separate toileting and changing facilities for men and women. In the view of the modern left, desegregating the sexes is merely rectifying the wrong committed in the name of these prim, fragile ladies of leisure.
That was her stereotype. This is an attempt to find something closer to her truth.
Rather, they were arguing in favor of the basic inclusion of women in full public life: until these facilities existed, women simply did not leave the home for long enough to require restroom facilities, unless she had a carriage in which to relieve herself.
These facilities offered women an unprecedented ability to engage in public … which directly resulted in the ability of suffragists to organize the first women’s movement.
It is impossible to understand Victorian women’s attitudes toward sex without a comprehension that in the Victorian era, sex was more dangerous than it had ever been, especially for the exact women most famed for their prudishness.
Childbirth was the leading cause of adult female death in the Victorian era, a situation that was significantly worse than in previous centuries.
Abstinence, of course, is a full pregnancy preventative, but no woman in the world could claim in Victorian times that she had been “maritally raped.” The concept did not yet exist, and men’s legal rights to a woman’s body and sexuality in the context of the marital relationship were nearly boundless.
In fact, the husband’s rights extended to complete ownership and custody of all children born from the relationship.
Sex was the most dangerous activity engaged in by Victorian women, and it showed in the attitudes of women of that time.
The Victorian woman is a target of mockery and derision for her unwillingness to act playful and coquettish about sexuality — for refusing, in other words, to act like sex was no big deal, although even a single act of intercourse could foreseeably lead to her death.
The stereotyping of the Victorian woman, then, is patriarchy whistling the same jaunty tune as ever: Women’s fears are unfounded “prudery,” and women’s “no” is a result of deeply-hidden secret desire — which carries a mysterious, erotic charge.
It’s time to stop looking at the Victorian woman from the gaze of the men who confined her, raped her, shamed her, kept her a non-voter and an invalid imprisoned in her home. They deserve much better from feminists than to be used as an example of “prudes,” rather than one of the first generations of women to feel strong enough to say “no.”
