While Alan Turing was decrypting Nazi communication across the Atlantic, some eleven thousand women were breaking enemy code in America.
Their story, as heroic as that of the women who dressed and fought as men in the Civil War, as fascinating and untold as those of the “Harvard Computers” who revolutionized astronomy in the nineteenth century and the black women mathematicians who powered space exploration in the twentieth, is what Liza Mundy tells in Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II (public library).
https://www.brainpickings.org/2017/12/11/code-girls-liza-mundy/
Category: Herstory
The creepy history behind why women give birth lying down.
[A]ccording to a paper written by Professor Lauren Dundes and published in the American Journal of Public Health, women didn’t always give birth lying down. It’s a relatively new concept.
“Since Louis XIV reportedly enjoyed watching women giving birth, he became frustrated by the obscured view of birth when it occurred on birthing stool, and promoted the new reclining position,” Professor Dundes wrote in the American Journal of Public Health.
During her research Professor Dundes found the French obstetrician, François Mauriceau, also played a role in making the lying down position more popular as he thought it was more “convenient”.
According to a 2013 survey, conducted by Evidence Based Birth, 78 per cent of Australian women now choose to give birth lying down.
https://www.nowtolove.com.au/parenting/pregnancy-birth/lying-down-birth-history-45385
https://www.mamamia.com.au/why-women-give-birth-lying-down/?
https://theconversation.com/stand-and-deliver-upright-births-best-for-mum-and-bub-13095
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1647027/pdf/amjph00256-0102.pdf
Hannah Gadsby on the male gaze in art: ‘Stop watching women having baths. Go away.’
“Just because it’s been around for centuries, doesn’t mean it’s cool to be a creepy old man. Stop watching women sleeping; stop watching women having baths. Go away.”
For Gadsby, the male gaze in art history is directly related to the male gaze in Hollywood, and society at large.
“We’re not seeing anything new,” she reiterates. “The art world doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Being an object, being objectified, [creates] a toxic culture, because we don’t have the same cultural influence as men do. They’ve written the story, they have the power.
When asked if Nakedy Nudes is about asserting a feminist, queer voice within art history, she says: “That’s been going on for a while – it’s just that no one’s been listening. What the Guerrilla Girls were saying in the 1980s is still what we’re battling today, and that’s just ridiculous to my mind. The new story is the same story.”
Nakedy Nudes premieres on the ABC on Tuesday 27 February.
Stella prize: longlist for $50,000 award includes Alexis Wright and Michelle de Kretser
A literary portrait of Helen Garner, a memoir of poetry and mental illness, and a novel about the erotic encounters of a robot feature in the books in contention for this year’s $50,000 Stella prize.
The Stella prize is open to books from Australian women who are “excellent, original and engaging”, with fiction, narrative nonfiction, memoir and journalism all qualifying for the award.
The Stella prize was first awarded to Carrie Tiffany in 2013 for her novel, Mateship with Birds. Last year’s winner was Heather Rose for her novel based on the artwork of Marina Abramović, The Museum of Modern Love.
In 2018, the prize is worth $50,000 to the winner, with $1,000 being awarded to every author on the longlist. The winner will be announced in Sydney on 12 April.
Stella prize: longlist for $50,000 award includes Alexis Wright and Michelle de Kretser
A literary portrait of Helen Garner, a memoir of poetry and mental illness, and a novel about the erotic encounters of a robot feature in the books in contention for this year’s $50,000 Stella prize.
The Stella prize is open to books from Australian women who are “excellent, original and engaging”, with fiction, narrative nonfiction, memoir and journalism all qualifying for the award.
The Stella prize was first awarded to Carrie Tiffany in 2013 for her novel, Mateship with Birds. Last year’s winner was Heather Rose for her novel based on the artwork of Marina Abramović, The Museum of Modern Love.
In 2018, the prize is worth $50,000 to the winner, with $1,000 being awarded to every author on the longlist. The winner will be announced in Sydney on 12 April.
Stunning Cyanotypes of Sea Algae by the Self-Taught Victorian Botanist Anna Atkins, the First Woman Photographer and a Pioneer of Scientific Illustration
English botanist and photographer Anna Atkins (March 16, 1799–June 9, 1871) is considered the first woman to take a photograph and the first person to publish a book illustrated with photographic images. This she accomplished in an era when women’s formal foray into science was yet to come.
Less than a year after the great polymath Sir John Herschel invented the cyanotype photographic process — one of the 100 ideas that changed photography, which was originally used for architectural sketches and which lent its azure tint to the origin of the word “blueprint” — 44-year-old Atkins began applying the technique to sea algae, determined to overcome “the difficulty of making accurate drawings” of these marine species and ushering in a whole new medium for scientific illustration. In October of 1843, she self-published the resulting images in the pioneering volume Photographs of British Algae: Cyanotype Impressions.
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/04/08/anna-atkins-algae/
Do the hard things and set ambitions as bold as ‘leapfrogging’ a global industry
Professor Michelle Yvonne Simmons’ Australian of the Year win could help close the gender gap in the Australian science industry, according to a leading education advocate.
Prof Simmons is a pioneering physicist who leads the quantum physics department at the University of New South Wales.
During her acceptance speech, Prof Simmons said her industry is male-dominated and she hoped the win would shatter expectations of what careers women should pursue and achieve.
https://womensagenda.com.au/uncategorised/hard-things-set-ambitions-bold-leapfrogging-global-industry/
https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/politics/nsw/we-must-set-the-bar-high-and-tell-students-we-expect-them-to-jump-over-it-michelle-simmons-20180126-h0olnh.html
https://www.sbs.com.au/news/australian-of-the-year-win-will-help-close-science-gender-gap-education-advocate
No equality in the honours: two-thirds of Australia Day awards go to men
The gender imbalance in Australia Day honours continues, with only a third of 2018’s awards going to women.
This proportion in the general division of the Order of Australia has remained relatively similar for the past 20 years, according to figures available from the the governor general’s office, with no apparent trend toward equality.
Since the awards began in 1975, men have outnumbered women in almost all categories, with the exception of the library and disability categories.
The journalist Tracey Spicer, whose investigations have highlighted sexual harassment in the media and entertainment industries, said the honours imbalance demonstrated that society needed to value women’s work equally to men’s. She also pointed the finger at the gender mix within the Council for the Order of Australia, “which is by no means gender-balanced”.
“It’s disappointing … we need to nominate more women,” Spicer said. “After all, women do the bulk of society’s unpaid labour and volunteer work.”
The process for awarding honours is notoriously secretive and there have been numerous calls for increased transparency. In 2012 the federal court rejected a freedom-of-information request for documents pertaining to policy and criteria used in the awards process.
The Victorian government on Friday announced it would appoint a dedicated awards officer who will be tasked with putting forward an additional 200 nominations of Victorian women each year to address the gender imbalance.
Ursula K Le Guin: US fantasy author dies at home in Oregon
Ursula K. Le Guin, the award-winning and best-selling science fiction writer who explored feminist themes and was best known for her Earthsea books, has died at 88.
She gained fame in 1969 with The Left Hand of Darkness, which involves a radical investigation of gender roles.
Her feminist-themed 1983 “Left-Handed Commencement Address” at Mills College was ranked one of the top 100 speeches of the 20th century by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and Texas A&M University.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-42798654
https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/books/2018/01/23/science-fiction-writer-ursula-k-le-guin-has-died/1059967001/
A suffragist statue in Parliament Square would write Emmeline Pankhurst out of history
The suffragettes, led by the charismatic Pankhurst and her eldest daughter, Christabel, believed in direct action.
The suffragists, under Millicent Garrett Fawcett, adopted constitutional, legal tactics, such as writing letters to MPs and peaceful demonstrations. Fawcett loudly condemned the actions of the militants, arguing that they were hindering the women’s cause. After Emily Wilding Davison was fatally injured at the 1913 Epsom Derby when she tried to grab the reins of the king’s horse, biographer David Rubinstein records that Fawcett made no public comment publishing a tribute several years later in 1920. So the news that Westminster council has granted planning permission for a statue of the liberal feminist Fawcett in Parliament Square has not made me rejoice.
