Category: Herstory

Mythconception #6: The free press was a man’s game

This is not so much a myth as a surprisingly unknown fact.

Ask who created the first daily newspaper . . . and you are likely to draw a blank. It was, in fact, established in 1702 by a woman named Elizabeth Mallet, who assembled and published it at her printing house on Black Horse Alley, near Fleet Bridge in London. In the first edition of what was known as the Daily Courant, Mallet wisely asserted that she would: “Relate only matter of fact; supposing other people to have sense enough to make reflections for themselves.”

Mythconception #7: Women in medicine started with the Lady with the Lamp

For many, the story of women and medical care begins with Mary Seacole and Florence Nightingale, who are rightly remembered for their pioneering work in reforming 19th-century nursing. But, as medical practitioners, women have a rich and varied history that stretches much further back than the 1800s – from the groundbreaking medical writings and practices of the 12th-century abbess Hildegard of Bingen and the astonishing career of Dr Laura Bassi, who held the position of professor of anatomy at the University of Bologna in 1732, to the hundreds of everyday medical practitioners conducting blood-letting, prescribing treatments, examining urine and conducting abortions and surgery during the early modern period.

Mythconception #10: The Victorians were prudes

As the historian Fern Riddell notes: “The Victorians were the opposite of prudes, this is the era of women publishing guides to contraception, and a belief that female sexual pleasure was paramount to a healthy and happy relationship. Too often we have only looked at the Victorians through legal, medicinal or scientific attitudes to sex, but every day sexual culture was vastly different.”

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2018/jan/17/mythconceptions-10-things-from-history-everyone-gets-wrong?

Ben Barres, a neuroscientist who did groundbreaking work on brain cells known asglia and their possible relation to diseases like Parkinson’s, and who was an
outspoken advocate of equal opportunity for women in the sciences, died on Wednesday at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 63. Dr. Barres was transgender, having transitioned from female to male in 1997,when he was in his 40s and well into his career.

He did not disagree that there are differences between male and female brains,but did object to the interpretation.“People are still arguing over whether there are cognitive differences between men and women,” he told The Times. “If they exist, it’s not clear they are innate, and if they are innate, it’s not clear they are relevant.”

Or, as he put it in a 2015 letter to The Times prompted by an article about Caitlyn Jenner, “The question is not whether male or female brains are different, but why society insists on labeling male brains as better.”

https://genderidentitywatch.files.wordpress.com/2018/01/ben-barres-neuroscientist-and-equal-opportunity-advocate-dies-at-63-the-new-york-times.pdf

Hedy Lamarr was a successful actress in the ’40s and 50s starring alongside some of Hollywood’s biggest leading men, but it was her other contribution that continues to have a long lasting impact on us today – An invention that contributed to the early creations of bluetooth and WiFi technology.

Not widely known until recently, Lamarr’s ‘second life’ as a clever and innovative inventor is now the subject of a new Susan Sarandon co-produced documentary Bombshell: The Hedy Lamarr Story.

Lamarr’s involvement in the technology remained relatively unknown until more than 50 years after their invention, when the pair were honoured with an Electronic Frontier Foundation award.

In 2014, she was finally inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, the year she would have turned 100.

https://www.mamamia.com.au/hedy-lamarr/?

The male icons of the early-20th-century Bauhaus school, like Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy, and Paul Klee, are some of the most celebrated pioneers of modern art. But the women artists who taught, studied, and made groundbreaking work with them are often remembered in history books as wives of their male counterparts or, worse, not at all.

While women were allowed into the German school—and its manifesto stated that it welcomed “any person of good repute, without regard to age or sex”—a strong gender bias still informed its structure. Female students, for instance, were encouraged to pursue weaving rather than male-dominated mediums like painting, carving, and architecture. Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius encouraged this distinction through his vocal belief that men thought in three dimensions, while women could only handle two.

The year 2019 will mark the 100th birthday of the Bauhaus. As that date approaches, this bias toward the school’s male students is being revised, and its many integral female members recognized by scholarship and institutional exhibitions. Weavers, industrial designers, photographers, and architects like Anni Albers, Marianne Brandt, and Gertrud Arndt not only advanced the school’s historic marriage of art and function; they were also essential in laying the groundwork for centuries of art and design innovation to come after them.

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-women-bauhaus-school

Women have been brewing beer since the days of ancient Egypt, and it was only after the Black Plague that it fell into the hands of men.

In ancient Egypt, beer was traditionally brewed by women, giving them a way to earn extra cash and bartered goods. The gods were often given offerings of beer, especially Tjenenet, the ancient Egyptian goddess of both beer and childbirth. Though they argue over the ancient origins, archeologists who study fermentation do agree on one thing: the vast majority of ancient brewers were women.

So how did the brewster’s image become likened to our ideas of a witch? Images of frothing cauldrons, broomsticks (to hang outside the door to indicate the availability of ale), cats (to chase away mice), and pointy hats (to be seen above the crowd in the marketplace) endure today.

By the early 17th century, all beer across Europe had been hopped, thanks to the help of a German nun. Five centuries earlier, Hildegarde von Bingen, an esteemed natural scientist and herbalist, was the first to discover that adding hops to beer radically increased its shelf life.

“In a culture where beer defines part of the national character, the question of who controls the brew is paramount,” observes a writer for the German Beer Institute. “He who has his hand on the levers of power, also has his thumb in the people’s beer mug.” By 1700, European women had all but stopped brewing.

http://www.ancient-origins.net/history-ancient-traditions/bubbling-brews-and-broomsticks-how-alewives-became-stereotypical-witch-021539
https://brewhoppin.com/2015/10/the-truth-of-women-and-beer-witches/
http://hiddenhistoryofbusiness.com/index.php/2016/03/15/ep-42-irish-beer-alewives-witches/
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/kitchener-waterloo/halloween-witch-beermaker-1.3289646
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6lC7FbVhuM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_brewing
https://beerandbrewing.com/how-women-brewsters-saved-the-world/

In memory of the achievements of Nellie Bly.

https://www.facebook.com/RevealedMysteries1/videos/10155689210061103/?