Necessity is the mother of invention

International Women's Day is marked on March 8 every year and celebrates the cultural, social, economic, and political achievement of women around the world. Women of all walks of life have contributed to the development of science, technology, engineering, and medicine. Here are a few examples.

Sarah Goode (1855-1905), Inventor of the Folding Cabinet Bed

Goode was an entrepreneur who had many customers with very small apartments. She invented the folding cabinet bed to save space. It was a desk by day and a bed by night. When Goode registered her patent for the folding cabinet bed in 1885, she became the first Black American woman ever to get a United States Patent.

Her aim was to balance out the weight of the folding of the bed so that it could be easily lifted up, folded and unfolded, and to secure the bed on each side so that it would stay in place once it was folded. She provided supplementary support to the centre of the bed when it was unfolded.

Mary Golda Ross (1908-2008), engineer

Mary Golda Ross was the first known Indigenous female engineer, and the first female engineer in the history of Lockheed. She was Tsalagi (Cherokee). She was one of the 40 founding engineers of the Skunk Works project at the Lockheed Corporation. She worked at Lockheed from 1942 until her retirement in 1973. She is best remembered for her work on aerospace design – including the Agena Rocket program – as well as many "design concepts for interplanetary space travel, crewed and uncrewed Earth-orbiting flights, the earliest studies of orbiting satellites for both defense and civilian purposes."

Asima Chatterjee (1917-2006), chemist

Asima Chatterjee was a chemist who is greatly renowned for her contributions to organic chemistry and phytomedicine. She developed cancer medicines, anti-epileptic and anti-malarial drugs. She was the first woman to be named a Doctor of Science by an Indian university. She studied at the University of Calcutta and wrote several volumes of work on the medicinal plants of the Indian subcontinent. She was nominated by the president of India as a member of the Rajya Sabha.

Bette Nesmith Graham (1924-1980), Inventor of Liquid Paper

After she got divorced in 1946, Bette took a job as a secretary. Typewriters with carbon ribbons had just come into widespread use, and the old erasers that were previously used just smudged the paper. So, Bette, who had trained as an artist, came up with a mix of tempera paint to paint out her mistakes. Her boss never noticed the corrections. Soon other secretaries wanted a bottle of her special paint, and she realized that she had come up with something that would sell. When Liquid Paper (also known as Tippex and White-out) became a multi-million dollar company, she created two foundations to help women find new careers, especially unmarried mothers. The foundations also created college scholarships for older women and gave shelter and counselling to battered women. She described herself as a "feminist who wants freedom for myself and everybody else."

Fun fact: she was also the mother of Robert Michael Nesmith, the guitarist in the band The Monkees.

Frances Gabe (1915-2016), Inventor of the Self-Cleaning House

Before there was the Roomba, there was the self-cleaning house, with resin walls, waterproof furniture, no carpets, and a device in the ceiling that emits a jet of water, soap, and hot air to dry everything in the room after it has cleaned it. These labour-saving devices were invented by Frances Gabe, who went partially blind for 18 years after the birth of her first child, and grew up accompanying her architect father to work.

Lynn Conway (born 1938), inventor of new computer chip designs

Lynn Conway invented scalable, dimensionless design rules which hugely simplified chip design and design tools; and a new form of internet-based infrastructure for rapid-prototyping and short-run fabrication of large numbers of chip designs.

She was born in 1938 and transitioned to female in 1968. She was fired by IBM but went on to work for Xerox and DARPA.

She has five patents to her name, and retired to Michigan, USA. In Fall 2012, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers published a special issue of the IEEE Solid-State Circuits Magazine devoted to her career, including an autobiographical account of her career, and commentaries by the former Director of Engineering at HP, a Professor of EECS at U.C. Berkeley, and a Professor of Electrical Engineering and Biomedical Engineering at Columbia University.

Women's history 101

People often ask, why are there so few famous women writers, artists, scientists, and intellectuals?

They seem to be forgetting that, in previous centuries, it was rare for women to be educated. Women also often died younger due to infections contracted in childbirth.

Women were not allowed to attend university until the 1870s, and even then they were not allowed to graduate.

At the beginning of the 20th century it was very difficult for women to obtain a university education. In 1870 Emily Davies and Barbara Bodichon helped to set up Girton College, the first university college for women, but it was not recognised by the university authorities. In 1880 Newnham College was established at Cambridge University. By 1910 there were just over a thousand women students at Oxford and Cambridge. However, they had to obtain permission to attend lectures and were not allowed to take degrees. 

Without a university degree it was very difficult for women to enter the professions. After a long struggle the medical profession had allowed women to become doctors. Even so, by 1900 there were only 200 women doctors. It was not until 1910 that women were allowed to become accountants and bankers. However, there were still no women diplomats, barristers or judges. (John Simkin)

The first social groups to routinely educate their daughters were the Unitarians and the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), starting in the 1840s.

When women did succeed in producing literature or scientific research, quite often someone else got the credit for it, or their contribution or achievement was minimised. Even now, there are people who dispute that Ada Lovelace wrote programs for Babbage's calculating engine, and want to impute authorship of the Brontë sisters novels' to their brother Branwell. The scientific achievements of Lise Meitner, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Hedy Lamarr, Dorothy Hodgkin, Rosalind Franklin, Katherine Jones, Jocelyn Bell-Burnell, Caroline Herschel, and many others, are forgotten or sidelined. I did not learn about any of these women at school - I found out about them by researching on the internet, and reading blogposts from the Finding Ada project.

Many nineteenth-century female scientists and mathematicians were told that their scientific and mathematical activities were bad for their womb. Many were prevented from attending university, or not allowed to graduate, or made to work in a separate laboratory from the men.

The work of female writers, poets, artists, composers, and playwrights suffered a similar fate. Artemisia Gentileschi's paintings were attributed to her father. The Nobel Prize for Jocelyn Bell Burnell's discovery of pulsars went to her male PhD supervisor. The work of the women Pre-Raphaelite and Impressionist artists is largely forgotten.

A similar fate happens to Black & minority ethnic (BME) and LGBT scientists, authors, and heroes. And if you are a woman and BME and LGBT, then you are doubly or triply doomed to be sidelined. Just look at the marginalisation of Mary Seacole, Edward Carpenter, Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson, and many another BME and/or LGBT person.

Even today, women's novels are marketed as less serious than novels by men. They also receive less reviews in serious journals.  The novels of white male authors are taught on English literature courses; the novels of female authors are taught on courses of women's studies or women's literature. Maureen Johnson writes:

For much of history, women read the works of men. Every once in a while we see a woman cracking through, maybe changing her name, maybe hiding her work, or maybe breaking through the strength of her genius or good luck or both. Then we see a huge break in the early 20th century, a flux of brilliant women. Women start to climb into the bestseller charts, but not so much into the reading lists.

There is no doubt that women (despite massive disadvantages) have achieved great things in every field of artistic, literary, and scientific endeavour, but all too often, they are forgotten, sidelined, their achievements dismissed or diminished, their work not taught in schools or universities. The corpus of literature that is considered "the canon" is overwhelmingly by white men (usually dead white men, usually heterosexual). No-one is saying that these authors should no longer be taught; just that "the canon" should include women, BME people, and LGBT people.

Inspirational women

All my Finding Ada blogposts in one place:

Katherine Jones, Viscountess Ranelagh, sister of Robert Boyle. She conducted chemistry experiments.

Wendy Hall, computer scientist

Anita Borg, computer scientist

Caroline Arms, metadata pioneer

Hedy Lamarr, inventor

Lisa Barone, SEO expert

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin (May 10, 1900 – December 7, 1979) was an English-American astronomer who in 1925 was first to show that the Sun is mainly composed of hydrogen, contradicting accepted wisdom at the time.

Her name was Reeva Steenkamp

The other day, I attended a talk on feminism, and one of the women on the panel described how South Africa was gearing up for a major campaign on rape and violence against women, when (and I quote) "a fluffy two-dimensional model got murdered and it was all over the news" (thus knocking the campaign out of the headlines).

Her name was Reeva Steenkamp. She was a lawyer as well as a model. She was a feminist. She had tweeted support for the anti-rape and anti-violence campaign. It was not her fault that she was killed. It's not her fault that the media were more interested in her good looks and her modelling career than in the fact that she was a lawyer and a feminist.

As feminists, we should look behind the headlines and the media hype to see what is really going on, and not mistake the sexist and patriarchal nonsense peddled by the tabloids for anything resembling reality. And we should not refer to other women with the sort of insults that patriarchy dishes out.

I would have challenged the woman on the panel who said this, were it not for the fact that a woman in the audience had said something even more outrageous, which I also felt the need to challenge.

Your privilege is showing

So apparently some of those upper-class gels over at the posh school think that the rest of us are not clever enough to understand the word intersectionality, and they are upset that what they thought was their exclusive little club is being overrun by All the Wrong Sort.

Well, here at Bluestocking central, we pride ourselves on being the Wrong Sort, and we don't think it's very hard to explain intersectionality – all one has to say is that women can also be working class, people of colour, LGBTQ, older people, a different religion, disabled, etc and that these groups’ concerns intersect with feminist concerns. I figured this out well before anybody coined the word intersectionality to describe it, and I am sure lots of other bluestockings did too. I knew that my privileged existence was only one tiny corner of the giant tapestry of feminism. I also knew that my concerns about how I might be marginalised for my gender intersected with my concerns about how I might be marginalised for other reasons.

Isn't intersectionality exactly what third-wave feminism concerns itself with? Or perhaps the posh gels over at Vagenda Towers haven't heard of third-wave feminism?

Black feminists have been there from the beginning, but apparently some hoity-toity types haven't noticed. Ladies, your privilege is showing. Perhaps you should tuck it back in. It's not very lady-like.