Hidden Figures

One of the best films I have seen for ages, Hidden Figures (2016) tells the story of the computers whose calculations gave the early space-race a significant boost. In those days, a ‘computer’ wasn’t a PC or a laptop, but a human mathematician.

The three heroines of Hidden Figures are Dorothy Vaughan, Mary Jackson, and Katherine Johnson. In the early days of their employment at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, when it was part of National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), the facilities were racially segregated, and the characters are shown overcoming the systemic barriers put in place by the practice of segregation. When NACA was absorbed into National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the facilities were desegregated.

Eventually it all comes to a head when Katherine is forced to run half a mile across the campus to the segregated bathroom, and Kevin Costner’s character smashes the ‘Colored Bathroom’ sign. This didn’t actually happen in real life, as in reality she just used the nearest bathroom and got away with it, but it’s a visually satisfying shorthand for the dismantling of systemic oppression.

Halfway through the film, human computers are replaced by electronic computers, and Dorothy Vaughan teaches herself and her staff FORTRAN so that they won’t be made redundant. She had a 28 year career at Langley, and was the first African-American woman to hold a supervisory post there.

Katherine Coleman Goble Johnson is a mathematician whose calculations of orbital mechanics were critical to the success of the first and subsequent U.S. space-flights. During her 35-year career at NASA and NACA, she used her exceptional ability to perform complex calculations of trajectories, launch windows and emergency return paths for space-flights, the space shuttle, and a planned mission to Mars. In 2015, President Barack Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Mary Jackson was initially a mathematician working alongside Dorothy Vaughan and Katherine Johnson, but then took advanced engineering classes and became NASA's first Black female engineer in 1958. To qualify as an engineer, she needed graduate-level qualifications in physics and mathematics. She had to petition the City of Hampton to allow her to attend the courses, which were at an all-white school. She analyzed data from wind tunnel experiments and aircraft flight experiments at Langley. The results improved the scientific understanding of air flow, thrust and drag forces.

These days, people tend to think of computing as a male-dominated field, but in the early days, it was predominantly a female area of employment.

I find it incredibly inspiring that these women overcame all sorts of obstacles to become top mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists.

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.

Women inventors

The Women Inventors page at About.com has a huge selection of biographies and resources.

Women Inventors A to Z
Women Inventors A-Z the biographies - inventions and photos of inventors from Randi Altschul to Mary Walton.

Randi Altschul

Randice-Lisa Altschul invented the world's first disposable cell phone.

Dr. Betsy Ancker-Johnson

Dr. Betsy Ancker-Johnson was the third woman inventor elected to the National Academy oF engineering.

Mary Anderson

Mary Anderson invented the windshield wiper. Anderson was issued a patent for the wipers in 1905.

Virginia Apgar

Apgar invented a newborn scoring system or "Apgar Score" for assessing the health of newborn infants.

Barbara Askins

Developed a totally new way of processing film.

Patricia Bath

The first African American woman doctor to receive a patent for a medical invention.

Miriam E. Benjamin

Ms. Benjamin was the second black woman inventor to receive a patent. She received a patent for an invention she called a "Gong and Signal Chair for Hotels".

Patricia Billings

Patricia Billings invented a indestructible and fireproof building material called Geobond®.

Katherine Blodgett

Invented the non-reflecting glass.

Bessie Blount

Blount invented a device to help disabled people eat with less difficulty.

Sarah Boone

An improvement to the ironing board was invented by African American Sarah Boone on April 26, 1892.

Rachel Fuller Brown

Rachel Brown co-invented Nystatin, the world's first useful antifungal antibiotic.

Josephine Garis Cochran

In 1886, Josephine Cochran invented the first practical dishwasher.

Martha J. Coston

Martha Coston invented a pyrotechnic signaling system known as maritime signal flares.

Dianne Croteau

Invented Actar 911, the CPR mannequin.

Marie Curie

Marie Curie also known as Madame Curie discovered radium and furthered x-ray technology.

Marion Donovan

The convenient disposable diaper was invented by New Yorker Marion Donovan in 1950.

Gertrude Belle Elion

Elion invented the leukemia-fighting drug 6-mercaptopurine, drugs that facilitated kidney transplants and other drugs for the treatment of cancer and leukemia.

Edith Flanigen

Flanigen was the inventor of a petroleum refining method and is considered one of the most inventive chemists of all time.

Helen Free

Free was the inventor of the home diabetes test.

Sally Fox

Sally Fox invented naturally-colored cotton.

Frances Gabe

Gabe invented the "Self Cleaning House".

Lillian Gilbreth

Lillian Moller Gilbreth was an inventor, author, industrial engineer, industrial psychologist, and mother of twelve children.

Sarah E. Goode

Sarah Goode was the first African American women to receive a U.S. patent.

Bette Nesmith Graham

Graham invented liquid paper, also known as White-Out™.

Temple Grandin

Temple Grandin invented livestock-handling devices.

KK Gregory

KK Gregory is the ten-year old inventor of Wristies®.

Ruth Handler

The Barbie doll was invented in 1959 by Ruth Handler.

Elizabeth Lee Hazen

Elizabeth Hazen co-invented Nystatin, the world's first useful antifungal antibiotic.

Beulah Henry

All told, Henry made about 110 inventions and holds 49 patents.

Dorothy Crowfoot Hodgkin

Hodgkin used x-rays to find the structural layouts of atoms and to discover the overall molecular shape of over 100 molecules including: penicillin, vitamin B-12, vitamin D and insulin.

Krisztina Holly

Co-invented the telephony software called Visual Voice.

Erna Schneider Hoover

Hoover invented the computerized telephone switching system.

Grace Hopper

Grace Hopper was a computer inventor best known for the Mark computer series.

Mary Phelps Jacob

Mary Phelps Jacob invented the bra.

Amanda Theodosia Jones

Jones re-invented American food production by inventing vacuum packed canning.

Marjorie Stewart Joyner

Joyner invented a permanent wave machine that would allow a hairdo to stay set for days.

Anna Keichline

Architect, Anna Keichline created inventions for the home.

Mary Kies: Patenting Pioneer

Kies was the first women to receive a U.S. patent on May 15, 1809.

Gabriele Knecht

Patented the Forward Sleeve design for creating clothing.

Margaret Knight

Margaret Knight was an employee in a paper bag factory when she invented a new machine part to make square bottoms for paper bags. Knight can be considered the mother of the grocery bag, she founded the Eastern Paper Bag Company in 1870.

Stephanie Louise Kwolek

Kwolek invented a material five times stronger than steel called Kevlar.

Hedy Lamarr

Lamarr was a movie star and inventor.

Ada Lovelace

Wrote a scientific paper in 1843 that anticipated the development of computer software artificial intelligence and computer music.

Sybilla Masters - First American Woman Inventor

Masters was the first American female inventor in recorded history, but no doubt women have been inventing since the dawn of time without the deserved recognition.

Ann Moore

Invented the Snugli baby carrier.

Krysta Morlan

Krysta Morlan invented a device that relieves the irritation caused by wearing a cast - the cast cooler.

Ellen Ochoa

Ochoa invented optical analysis systems and was the world's first Hispanic female astronaut.

Alice Parker

Alice Parker invented a new and improved gas heating furnace.

Betty Rozier and Lisa Vallino

Rozier and Vallino, a mother and daughter invention team, invented the intravenous catheter shield.

Patsy Sherman

Patsy Sherman invented Scotchgard™.

Valerie Thomas

Received a patent in 1980 for inventing an illusion transmitter.

Ann Tsukamoto

The co-patenter of a process to isolate the human stem cell.

Harriet Tubman

Harriet Tubman was considered the "Moses of the Civil War" for her work on the underground railroads.

Madame Walker

Madame Walker was a St. Louis washerwoman-turned-entrepreneur, who in 1905 invented a method to soften and smooth African American hair.

Mary Walton

Walton invented several anti-pollution devices during the Industrial Revolution.

Carol Wior

Invented the Slimsuit, a slimming swimsuit.

Women alchemists

Women alchemists were not just the soror mystica of their male counterparts, but researchers in their own right. For instance, the bain-marie was invented by a female alchemist, though exactly which one is disputed:

According to culinary writer Giuliano Bugialli, the term comes from the Italian bagno maria, named after Maria de'Cleofa, who developed the technique in Florence in the sixteenth century.
Alternatively, the device's invention has been popularly attributed to Mary the Jewess, an ancient alchemist traditionally supposed to have been Miriam, a sister of Moses. The name comes from the medieval-Latin term balneum (or balineum) Mariae—literally, Mary's bath—from which the French bain de Marie, or bain-marie, is derived.
According to The Jewish Alchemists, Maria the Jewess was an ancient alchemist who lived in Alexandria—although this would seem to contradict the tradition that she was Moses' sister: Alexandria was founded by Alexander the Great in 334 BC, while Moses is thought to have lived around 1450-1200 BC.

There is a website devoted to women alchemists, including Sophie Brahe, Anna Maria Zieglerin, Marie Meurdrac, Katherine Boyle Jones and Margaret Cavendish. The author of the website, Robin L Gordon, also has a forthcoming book, Searching for the Soror Mystica.

Lesbian separatist ants

Mad Science reports that there is a female-only species of ant.

Technically these ants reproduce asexually, not through some kind of Nicola Griffith-style lesbian parthenogenesis. They are, however, one of the only known all-female animal species. Who is to say whether it wasn't some lesbian urge that caused them to diverge from other ant species and give up sperm altogether?

I am reminded of the ant society in T H White's The Once and Future King.
Males = Not-Done.

There were no words for happiness, for freedom, for liking, nor were there any words for their opposites — there were only two words for qualifications, Done and Not-Done — which applied to all questions of value... Their life was not questionable, it was dictated...

science fiction

I love science fiction. All of it. From space opera all the way to hard SF, stopping off at planetary romance, what-if scenarios, alternative histories, and social science SF, and so on and so forth.

Science fiction is a great way to think about the world in a different way - imagining what it would be like if this or that aspect of society, or evolution, or the environment, were different. You might think it's about the future, but it's actually a commentary on the present.

SF is a wide-ranging genre which includes a number of different approaches. Essentially the question being posed by an SF novel is "What if...?" This may be speculation about the possible impact of a certain technology, as in Ursula K le Guin's stories of the Ekumen, where nearly-as-fast-as-light space travel is possible, and she explores the socio-psychological impact of time dilation, amongst many other issues. It may be the socio-psychological impact of a different social, psychological, or economic state of affairs than exists at present, as in Ursula K le Guin's The Dispossessed, the story of an anarchist planet. It might be an alternative history, as in the excellent Years of Rice and Salt by Kim Stanley Robinson, which explores a reality in which Europe is Muslim.

SF is much more than merely nerdy "toys-for-the-boys" space opera - it is a literary form in its own right, and one which mainstream writers are increasingly exploring. For example, Kazuo Ishiguro's novel, Never Let Me Go, is about clones; Margaret Atwood's classic The Handmaid's Tale, and her more recent novel, Oryx and Crake, are clearly SF, even though their authors deny it. Many SF writers are beginning to be taken seriously as literati, for example Neil Gaiman's excellent book American Gods has received favourable attention from critics.

Reading SF (especially Ursula Le Guin) pretty much formed my entire world-view.

There are many other fine female SF authors. Here are just a few book reviews to whet your appetite.

• Parable of the Sower, Octavia Butler (1993)
• Natural History, Justina Robson (1993)
• The Sparrow, Mary Doria Russell (1996)
• The Speed of Dark, Elizabeth Moon (2003) - reading group guide
• Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, Kate Wilhelm (1976)
• Up the Walls of the World, James Tiptree Jr / Alice Sheldon (1978)
• The Telling, Ursula Le Guin (2000)
• Empire of Bones, Liz Williams (2002)

More bluestocking heroines

More suggestions from Brass Goggles aficionados:

• Emily Warren Roebling - Co-builder of Brooklyn Bridge with husband Washington Roebling.
  
• Edith Cowan - Feminist, fought for suffrage, then first woman elected to an Australian parliament. 
  
• Annie Oakley - Famous trick sharpshooter of Old West. 
• Mary Anning - a fossil collector that discovered a dinosaur species or two.
• George Sand: novelist, feminist, bon-vivant and quite possibly the first openly-acknowledged "Drag King."
• Rear Admiral "Amazing Grace" Hopper: co-developer of the UNIVAC I, inventor of the compiler, pioneer in the development of computer systems standards and the FORTRAN and COBOL languages, and the Data Processing Management Association's first "Man of the Year."
• Hedy Lamarr: co-inventor of frequency-hopped spread-spectrum radio communication, which is the basis for nearly all modern radio data communications systems.
  
• Beatrix Potter studied lichen and presented a paper to the Linnean Society in London.
  
• Isabella Bird - Traveller and explorer
  
• Sarah Guppy, the inventor of the suspension bridge (also a woman); she is featured in Local Heroes by Adam Hart-Davis.
  
• Grace Darling - a girl who rowed out with her father to rescue people from a sinking boat 
  
• Emilie du Chatelet - Enlightenment mathematician and physicist (and Voltaire's lover) rigged lotteries and used mathematics to win the card games that upper class women played in those days. 
• Elizabeth Fulhame - author of An Essay on Combustion, 1794, a landmark text on Catalytic Chemistry and Colloidal Photochemistry.
• Female explorers:
  • Jane Griffin (Lady Franklin)
  • Marie-Anne Gaboury
  • Barbara Hillary (North Pole)
  • Margaretha Heijkensköld
  • Helen Thayer