Saeed Ahmed and Emanuella Grinberg for CNN write:
Katherine Johnson, the woman who hand-calculated the trajectory for America’s first trip to space, turns 100 today.
Before the arrival of electronic data processors, aka, computers in the 1960s, humans — mainly women — comprised the workforce at NASA known as the “Computer Pool.”
Black women, especially, played a crucial role in the pool, providing mathematical data for NASA’s first successful space missions, including Alan Shepherd’s 1961 mission and John Glenn’s pioneering orbital spaceflight.
Principal among them was Johnson. But her work — and that of the “Computer Pool” — barely earned a mention in pop culture space tributes.
That changed, thanks to “Hidden Figures,” a best-selling novel later turned into an Oscar-nominated movie.
She worked on trajectories for Shepard’s Mercury flight, America’s first manned spaceflight, and earned a measure of fame as “the girl” — as female mathematicians were called — who double-checked the output for Glenn’s spaceflight.
Her work helped map the moon’s surface ahead of the 1969 landing and played a role in the safe return of the Apollo 13 astronauts. She retired in 1989, and in 2015, she was awarded the National Medal of Freedom.
https://edition.cnn.com/2018/08/26/us/katherine-johnson-hidden-figure-birthday-trnd/
Category: Herstory
Malta car bomb kills Panama Papers journalist – "One-woman Wikileaks"
The journalist who led the Panama Papers investigation into corruption in Malta was killed on Monday in a car bomb near her home.
Daphne Caruana Galizia died on Monday afternoon when her car, a Peugeot 108, was destroyed by a powerful explosive device which blew the vehicle into several pieces and threw the debris into a nearby field.
A blogger whose posts often attracted more readers than the combined circulation of the country’s newspapers, Caruana Galizia was recently described by the Politico website as a “one-woman WikiLeaks”. Her blogs were a thorn in the side of both the establishment and underworld figures that hold sway in Europe’s smallest member state.
Her most recent revelations pointed the finger at Malta’s prime minister, Joseph Muscat, and two of his closest aides, connecting offshore companies linked to the three men with the sale of Maltese passports and payments from the government of Azerbaijan.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/16/malta-car-bomb-kills-panama-papers-journalist
A Conversation with the Women of WikiLeaks
Whatever your thoughts on WikiLeaks, it’s undeniable that it is perhaps one of the most game-changing institutions of this century. Women, Whistleblowing, WikiLeaks, published by OR Books, at least attempts to throw some of the spotlight back onto the women who have had an active and prominent role in the unfolding of events that have changed national security discourse today.
When it comes to women, the discussants agree that their contributions are often dismissed. This ironically plays into their favor, because it gives them greater room to act. Conversely it also means their sacrifices are not acknowledged.
Avila says that “in my country, the fight against the mining industry is led by women community leaders, and there are now attempts to charge them with sabotage and terrorism just for defending their territories … The story is not covered by the media because reporting on women fighting against mining corporations conflicts with the corporate capture of the media.”
The premise of the conversation also highlights a key point: The fact that women are excluded from media conversations about WikiLeaks is another symptom of the endemic problem of social and economic inequality that sidelines women along with many other traditionally marginalized groups – minorities, those in the developing world, the poor. Ideas that appear to be solving problems, like WikiLeaks, need to be proactively inclusive, otherwise they could end up harboring those same inequalities.
https://www.fairobserver.com/region/north_america/women-whistleblowing-wikileaks-julian-assange-edward-snowden-news-87121/
When the Personal Became Too Political: ASIO and the Monitoring of the Women’s Liberation Movement in Australia
In the official history of the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), there is only one mention of the women’s liberation movement . . . However, we know from files released by the National Archives of Australia that ASIO heavily monitored the women’s liberation movement in Australia . . . This article examines the ASIO files on the Australian women’s liberation movement and the anxiety that the authorities felt about the ‘threat’ of the personal becoming too politicised.
‘Because of its relentless critique of the existing social order, and the unique nature of its critique,’ ASIO stated, the women’s liberation movement was ‘a fertile field for communist activity’ The report continued…
Women’s Liberation is engaged in the same process of dismantling existing institutions that the communists engage in AFTER the revolution (and, of course, continuously attempt). The communists are delighted to have a ‘captive audience’ which can be mobilised against the capitalist system…
From the Women’s Liberation social analysis, then, it is a short step to the communist analysis of political and social power in capitalist societies.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/08164649.2018.1498733?
https://hatfulofhistory.wordpress.com/2017/03/08/asio-and-surveillance-of-the-womens-liberation-movement-in-australia-in-the-1970s/
Using Artificial Intelligence to Fix Wikipedia's Gender Problem
The world’s fifth most-visited website has a long-running problem with gender bias: Only 18 percent of its biographies are of women. Surveys estimate that between 84 and 90 percent of Wikipedia editors are male.
Quicksilver uses machine learning algorithms to scour news articles and scientific citations to find notable scientists missing from Wikipedia, and then write fully sourced draft entries for them.
Quicksilver has already produced 40,000 summaries like that—some are longer and minor glitches are the norm—for both men and women scientists missing from Wikipedia. Primer released a sample of 100 today. The bot doesn’t automatically add its output to Wikipedia. Rather, the summaries it generates are intended to provide a starting point for Wikipedia editors, who can clean up errors and check the sources to prevent any algorithmic slip-ups contaminating the site.
Quicksilver can also help editors keep existing Wikipedia articles up to date. An early version was tested in New York City this spring at an edit-a-thon aimed at improving entries on women scientists hosted by the American Museum of Natural History. Quicksilver provided facts it had scraped from the web, including links to the sources, on women scientists with sparse Wikipedia bios. Maria Strangas, the museum researcher who organized the event, says it helped the 25 first-time editors update the pages for roughly 70 women scientists in just two hours. “It magnified the effect that event had on Wikipedia,” Strangas says.
https://www.wired.com/story/using-artificial-intelligence-to-fix-wikipedias-gender-problem/?
Beatrix Potter, Mycologist: The Beloved Children’s Book Author’s Little-Known Scientific Studies and Illustrations of Mushrooms – Brain Pickings
At a time when women had no right to vote and virtually no access to higher education, very rarely owned property and were themselves considered the property of their husbands, Potter became a commercially successful writer and artist, using the royalties from her books to purchase her famed Hill Top Farm, where she lived simply and with great love for the land for the remaining four decades of her life.
But no aspect of Potter’s kaleidoscopic genius is more fascinating than her vastly underappreciated contribution to science and natural history, which comes to life in Linda Lear’s altogether magnificent Beatrix Potter: A Life in Nature (public library).
The pervasive Victorian enthusiasm for natural history produced quite a few female amateur scientists, including ornithologist Genevieve Jones, lepidopterist Maria Merian, and fossil-hunter Mary Anning — “amateur” being not a reflection of their scientific rigor and dedication, which were formidable, but of the fact that a formal scientific education was virtually inaccessible to women, except for the rare Ada Lovelace or Maria Mitchell, and membership in scientific societies was strictly reserved for men. But Potter’s scientific work was exceptional in that she deliberately tried to penetrate the very institutions that dismissed women’s scientific labor solely on the basis of gender.
By her early twenties, Potter had developed a keen interest in mycology and began producing incredibly beautiful drawings of fungi, collecting mushroom specimens herself and mounting them for careful observation under the microscope.
But her interest went far beyond the mere aesthetics or symbolism of mushrooms — she was studious about their taxonomy, taught herself the proper technique for accurate botanical illustration, and worked tirelessly to get an introduction to the eminent mycologist Charles McIntosh.
Potter soon began conducting her own experiments with spores she had germinated herself. She was particularly captivated by lichens, considered at the time the “poor peasants of the plant world,” in the words of the great botanist Linnaeus — a statement itself belying the dearth of scientific understanding at the time, for lichens are not plants but a hybrid of fungi and algae.
This hybrid nature, first proposed by the Swiss botanist Simon Schwendener in 1869 and believed by no one else for decades, seemed so laughable a concept that “Schwendenerist” became a term of derision. But young Beatrix’s experiments convinced her that Schwendener was on to something with his “dual hypothesis.” She set down her theories and empirical findings in a paper titled “On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae,” accompanied by her breathtakingly detailed illustrations.
But between her and the acceptance of the truth stood formidable sociocultural forces: London’s Linnean Society, the bastion of Victorian botany, was exclusively male and barred women from membership, denied them access to the research library, and wouldn’t even allow them to attend the presentations of scientific papers.
A century later, the Linnean Society issued an apology of sorts for its historic sexism — its executive secretary formally acknowledged that Potter’s research had been “treated scurvily.” And yet to this day, Potter’s remarkable fungi illustrations are studied for their scientific accuracy and consulted by mycologists all over the world in identifying mushroom species. And, who knows, perhaps one day a kindly mycologist will discover a new species and name it after Potter.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/28/beatrix-potter-a-life-in-nature-botany-mycology-fungi/
Meet the female codebreakers of Bletchley Park
Deciphering enemy code during the second world war was arguably the first role for women in tech.
What saddens all of the women is that their families died without ever knowing what they achieved during the war. “Both sets of my family – my family and my husband’s – died without knowing, which makes me feel sad,” says Joslin. “I could never tell my mother anything.”
Given the nature of their work, which involved cracking foreign military codes, this top-secret process was a typical way those selected to work at Bletchley Park, a mansion in Buckinghamshire, were enlisted. All were bound by oath to never speak about their roles.
It wasn’t until the mid-1970s, when wartime information became declassified, that people were allowed to talk about their time there.
https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2018/jul/24/meet-the-female-codebreakers-of-bletchley-park?
Female Historians Try to End the I-Didn’t-Know-Any-Women Excuse for Men-Only Panels
It got a little bit harder this week to include only white men on syllabi, panels, or in articles.
Following in the footsteps of other disciplines, a group of female historians unveiled a searchable online database on Tuesday listing their peers’ areas of expertise and contact information. The site — called Women Also Know History — is meant to make it abundantly easy to find female historians to invite to speak at conferences, quote in articles, or add to a syllabus.
The question of who gets called on to be an expert has been in the news recently. Several reporters have analyzed their articles and found that only about a quarter of the people they quoted were women, even though they knew about representation issues. In March, the issue boiled over when an invitation-only history conference hosted by Niall Ferguson, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, was publicized on social media. The conference included 30 panelists, all of whom were white and male — a stark example of what’s become known as a manel.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/Female-Historians-Try-to-End/243626?
How the bicycle set women free
What it the most important invention in the fight for women’s rights? The pill? The Rampant Rabbit? The TaTa Towel? How about the humble bicycle? The role of the bicycle in the emancipation of women is often overlooked, but it allowed women a freedom they had never experienced before. And not only the freedom to travel, but the bicycle liberated women’s bodies from the tit-crushing corset and billowing skirts.
Read more at: https://inews.co.uk/opinion/columnists/how-the-bicycle-set-women-free/
Biography – Julia Margaret (Bella) Guerin – Australian Dictionary of Biography
Julia Margaret (Bella) Guerin (1858-1923), feminist, political activist and teacher, was born on 23 April 1858. . . . Having studied at home to pass matriculation in 1878, Bella became the first woman to graduate from an Australian university when she gained her B.A. from the University of Melbourne in December 1883, becoming M.A. upon application in 1885.
As vice-president of the Women’s Political Association in 1912-14 Bella Guerin co-authored Vida Goldstein‘s 1913 Senate election pamphlet, but dual membership of non-party feminist and Labor Party organizations proved untenable. From 1914 she wrote and spoke for the Labor and Victorian Socialist parties and the Women’s League of Socialists, and was recognized as a ‘witty, cogent and instructive’ commentator on a range of controversial social issues; they included the rights of illegitimate children, ‘brotherhood and sisterhood without sex distinction’ and defence of English militant suffragettes. An ardent anti-war propagandist, she led the Labor Women’s Anti-Conscription Fellowship campaign during the 1916 referendum and spoke in Adelaide, Broken Hill and Victorian metropolitan and country centres against militarism and in defence of rights of assembly and free speech.
Appointed vice-president of the Labor Party’s Women’s Central Organizing Committee in March 1918, she aroused censure and controversy for describing Labor women as ‘performing poodles and packhorses’ under represented in policy decisions and relegated to auxiliary fund raising roles
http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/guerin-julia-margaret-bella-6503
