Nonconformist pioneers

First women ministers

Gertrude von Petzold was the first woman to be ordained as a Unitarian minister in England, in 1904. She also campaigned for women's suffrage.

Olympia Brown was the first woman Universalist minister, in 1863.

In the United States, the Congregationalists ordained Antoinette Brown as a minister in 1853, while the Universalists ordained Olympia Brown in 1863. In Australia, Martha Turner was appointed minister to the Melbourne Unitarian church in 1873, and, in Scotland, the Glasgow Universalists ordained Caroline Soule in 1880.
(from an article by Keith Gilley)

First gay ministers

1969 September—LaForet, CO—The Reverend James L. Stoll publicly declares himself to be homosexual at Student Religious Liberals (SRL) Conference.

1979 The Reverend Douglas Morgan Strong called to serve All Souls Church, Augusta, Maine, thus becoming the first out gay man in the UU ministry to be called to serve a congregation.

from History of UU involvement in & support of LGBT issues

Further reading

• Writing Unitarian and Universalist Women Back Into History
  
• List of UU and Unitarian women radicals, feminists, writers, ministers, abolitionists, etc
• Find Her - a massive list of UU women
• Ordination of women
• Homosexuality and Unitarian Universalism

What Fun!

Here is a new toy known as Wolfram Alpha that us gels can horse around with. A computational wizard that can calulate many interesting things such as answers to mathematical, geographical and scientific queries....

If for example, one inputs the question 'what is the meaning of life?' the answer is displayed as '42'.

On the day I was born, (12077 days ago) there was a waning crescent moon, the sun rose at 5:49 and set at 20:47 ....

However, it wasn't much cop at topics such as 'Chicken Breeding' or 'Famous Roses'....

With gleefulness
Blossom.

The fabulous Joanna Lumley

I have always admired Joanna Lumley and regarded her as a bit of an intellectual as well as a fab actress - but now she is the people's heroine as well.

I think it should be completely obvious to the government that they should let all the Gurkhas stay - as someone said, if someone is prepared to die for this country they should certainly be allowed to live here (and the same applies to any other overseas soldiers).  And I think Ms Lumley is doing a great job of getting that across.

Therefore, ladies and gentlemen, I propose a toast:  please be upstanding for the magnificent Ms Lumley, Bluestocking of the Week.  And here's a toast to the Gurkhas too.  Please sign the petition to let them stay in the UK.

And I've just discovered that Camilla Parker-Bowles supports Ms Lumley's campaign too - so I nominate her to be a Bluestocking too.

centenarian bluestockings

Happy birthday to a truly great bluestocking:

"ROME – Rita Levi Montalcini, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist, said Saturday that even though she is about to turn 100, her mind is sharper than it was she when she was 20.

Levi Montalcini, who also serves as a senator for life in Italy, celebrates her 100th birthday on Wednesday, and she spoke at a ceremony held in her honor by the European Brain Research Institute.

She shared the 1986 Nobel Prize for Medicine with American Stanley Cohen for discovering mechanisms that regulate the growth of cells and organs.

"At 100, I have a mind that is superior — thanks to experience — than when I was 20," she told the party, complete with a large cake for her.

The Turin-born Levi Montalcini recounted how the anti-Jewish laws of the 1930s under Benito Mussolini's Fascist regime forced her to quit university and do research in an improvised laboratory in her bedroom at home.

"Above all, don't fear difficult moments," she said. "The best comes from them."

"I should thank Mussolini for having declared me to be of an inferior race. This led me to the joy of working, not any more unfortunately, in university institutes but in a bedroom," the scientist said."

Meanwhile, Margaret Caldwell, who is 102, has expressed interest in Wicca - there must be something about the wisdom of experience that makes one willing to explore new avenues...

An old crone, my dears, is a wise, old woman, one of the four aspects of Mother Earth, young and innocent in the Springs, full of seed and motherly in the Summer, ripe and bursting with produce in the Fall and wise and knowing in the fullness of Winter.

Nerd Girls

Just been alerted by a friend to the Nerd Girl Army (clearly allies of the Bluestockings - perhaps the militant wing). They have created an aetherweb site where you can post your thoughts, contribute blog posts, and generally associate with other Nerd Girls.

Happy Ada Day

Ada Lovelace

In celebration of Ada Lovelace, nearly two thousand bloggers have signed up to a pledge to blog about women in technology.

She is mainly known for having written a description of Charles Babbage's early mechanical general-purpose computer, the analytical engine. She is today appreciated as the "first programmer" since she was writing programs—that is, manipulating symbols according to rules—for a machine that Babbage had not yet built. She also foresaw the capability of computers to go beyond mere calculating or number-crunching while others, including Babbage himself, focused only on these capabilities.

There is a big list of women computer scientists on Wikipedia, so it was difficult to choose, but I have chosen Wendy Hall, Professor of Computing Science at the University of Southampton, because I have actually seen her give a keynote at a conference, and because I was born in Southampton.

She is also a founding director of the Web Science Research Initiative, and is interested in human-computer interaction:

Wendy Hall

Her research interests now include the development of web technologies (particularly the Semantic Web), hypermedia systems and link services, advanced knowledge technologies, digital libraries, decentralized information systems, and human computer interaction. She has published over 350 papers in areas such as hypermedia, multimedia, digital libraries, and distributed information systems.

The UK Fawcett Campaign for equality between men and women named her as an Inspiring Woman in 2005, and the UK Research Centre for Women in Science, Engineering and Technology selected her as one of six world-class Women of Outstanding Achievement in SET in March 2006. In October 2006 she was the first non-US woman to receive the Anita Borg Award for Technical Leadership.

She is particularly prominent as a strong and vocal advocate for women’s opportunities in SET and for the need to ensure that girls are not excluded from participation in science and engineering careers. In her research and her public life she has sought to ensure that women are equal beneficiaries of technological advance, and her example of achievement and dedication has made her a distinguished role model for women.

Happy Ada Day to Wendy and all geeks of whatever gender!

You can read about more women in technology at the Ada Lovelace Day Collection.

All the currently registered posts can be seen:

• in a list
  
• on a map
  
• categorised by subject or
  
• categorised by language. 
  

Spirited women

More bluestockings for your consideration:

• Elizabeth I - she may have had but the feeble body of a woman, but she had the heart and stomach of a king (despite him having asked for it back several times)
  
• Bess of Hardwick - an independent lady
  
• Charlotte Brontë - author
• Emily Brontë - author
• Anne Brontë - author
  
• George Eliot - author
• Aphra Behn - 17th century dramatist and spy
• Rachel Carson - biologist and ecologist
• Valentina Tereshkova - first woman in space
• Hildegarde von Bingen - inventor of the symphony and great mystic, writer and artist

• Agnes and Margaret Smith - lady travellers and manuscript-hunters

• Victoria Woodhull - presidential candidate and stockbroker
• Emma Hardinge Britten - spiritualist, theosophist, OTO founding member
• Anne Bonny and Mary Read - pirates
  
• Marjorie Lee Browne - Doctor of Mathematics
• Evelyn Granville - Computer Programmer, NASA

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

Women pilots

I've just been tipped off about the existence of this splendid website about women pilots in Soviet Russia by a kind gentleman called Gryphon over at the Brass Goggles forum.

Intriguingly, the pilots who flew at night were called the Night Witches.  Above is a photo of one of their planes.

Another bluestocking

Bath graduate Bijal Thakore was announced the winner of the Women’s Engineering Society (WES) prize for her service in the engineering sector at a recent prestigious award ceremony.

Congratulations to Bijal for her excellent achievement.

She also works for Lego and is on the board of directors of the Planetary Society.  

Thakore also works as a technical consultant for a number of global clients, including working with LEGO System A/S as a Global Client Development Officer for LEGO Play for Business.

Representing the activities of young people internationally as a liaison for the 2009 International Year of Astronomy, Thakore is also a member of the Special Advisory Committee to the International Astronautical Federation on Space and Society.  Thakore’s goal is to help make humanity a multi-planet species.

Past positions include serving as a Teaching Associate for the International Space University in Strasbourg, France, where she furthered her interdisciplinary research in Robotics and In-Situ Resource Utilization for space exploration.  She also worked for the X PRIZE Foundation, where she devised prize concepts to bring radical breakthroughs in attempts to solve some of the world’s biggest challenges such as eradicating poverty and providing clean drinking water to all.

Completely awesome.

Edwardian feminists

The printing press of Cambridge University has issued a treatise upon our esteemed Edwardian forebears.

Early twentieth-century feminists caused controversy with the Magisterium by embodying the terrifying spectre of equality of the sexes.

The book also documents the changing meaning of the word feminist, originally used for the French women's movement, and then developing in Britain and America.

The Feminist Avant-Garde: Transatlantic Encounters of the Early Twentieth Century by Lucy Delap (Cambridge University Press)
Edwardian commentators were clear that feminism was no unified entity, but should be divided into competing groups. A survey of ‘modern feminism’ produced in 1914 by a British-born feminist living in the United States, Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale, used the metaphor of an army to delineate the main body of parliamentary suffragists, the rear of municipal suffragists, a vanguard of ‘advanced feminists’, and an ultra-radical group of ‘skirmishers’. This study is concerned with delineating the political argument, discourse and intellectual influences drawn upon by these last two groups, whose members referred to themselves as the feminist ‘vanguard’, ‘advanced feminists’, or ‘modern feminists’. I examine the languages, the conceptual resources, the political argument available to feminists, gaining a sense not only of what they said, but how it was possible for them to say it, and the intellectual reception feminism had.

Lola Montez

Trestle theatre are touring a production of Lola, an exploration of the life of the extraordinary and larger-than-life Lola Montez. If, like me, you have ever read the Flashman novels (a guilty pleasure, to be sure), you will know that Lola was quite a firebrand, counting among her lovers Franz Liszt and Ludwig I of Bavaria (and of course, none other than Harry Flashman).

the show celebrates the life of an extraordinary woman who lived like she danced, with all the might of her body and the fire of her soul.

Perhaps not exactly a bluestocking, but certainly an extraordinary woman.

Lola Montez c.1851

In a bizarre footnote to Lola's story, it was claimed by William Wynn Westcott that Anna Sprengel, the alleged Secret Chief of the Golden Dawn (to whom Westcott and MacGregor Mathers wrote after deciphering her address from an old book) was the love-child of Lola Montez and Ludwig I of Bavaria.

Gracefully late for IWD

So, it was International Women's Day on 8th March.

I was going to write about it but was delayed by the necessity to foil a dastardly plot to create a world chocolate shortage. Fortunately I was assisted by my trusty differencing engine, Profound Cogitation.

Ms Niblock has recorded in her diary a selection of bluestockings of whom we can only say we wholeheartedly approve; those who were not already in our own canon of heroines shall forthwith be co-opted. Her list is Joan of Arc, Boudicca, Isabella Eberhardt, Simone Weil, Gertrude Bell, Katherine Stinson, Joanna de Tuscan, Katharine Hepburn, Margaret Rutherford and Leonora Carrington. Excellent choices all, among whom only Leonora Carrington was already enshrined here at The Bluestocking.

Steve Hayes commemorated IWD by honouring St Theodora the Iconodule - also an excellent choice, as one who wanted people to be able express their spirituality with icon-writing, and for others to access the numinous through icons.

IWD was celebrated around the world; this year's theme was stopping violence against women and girls (though stopping violence in general would be a very good thing).

As that was the theme, I would like to celebrate Eve Ensler, playwright, performer, activist, and author of The Vagina Monologues and The Good Body, among other things.  She writes wittily and entertainingly, and invites us to celebrate our bodies and our orgasms.  Hurrah!

There are some extracts from The Vagina Monologues at ivillage for those who are not familiar with it.

Your hosts

As mentioned earlier, I am Angharad V. Setherwood, known as "Bunny".  In between competing at archery and fencing competitions, I paint scenes of bohemian life.  Artists and writers turn to me for a little stability in their lives; which is fortunate as I only have a little of that commodity - maintaining a large rambling house in the country (Setherwood Grange), and being a breeder of prize ferrets, is somewhat taxing.  But I relax by swimming in the River Cam and researching the witchcraft traditions of rural Cambridgeshire.  My greatest chums (apart from Blossom and Dauntless of course) are dear Rafe and Jessie.

My esteemed colleagues on this august publication are Isobel G. Sissinghurst, otherwise known in her set as "Blossom", and Chalmers Z. Vanderbilt, my delightful American cousin. 

Isobel acquired the moniker of "Blossom" from her interest in garden design.  She can often be seen pottering about with her chum Gertrude J., discussing the finer points of lavender, lovage and whatnot.  She rides a large penny-farthing to suffragist meetings, and lives in an artists' colony in rural Gloucestershire with her collection of Houdan hens.  Her other interests include amateur operatics and dismantling clocks.

Chalmers is a gossip columnist of some distinction, but he has a shocking propensity for wearing quite dazzling tartan creations at odd hours of the day (hence his nickname, "Dauntless") - and with a green carnation; would you credit it?  His collection of monocles is unrivalled, and he also plays a mean hand at euchre.  He will recite Betjeman poems at house parties, especially if the hostess summons her guests to the piano.  He is accompanied everywhere by Cuchulain, a large Irish wolfhound, and a young gentleman who rejoices in the name of Temerare K. Marchpane; both are devoted to him - the dears.

So, pull up a chaise longue, top up your glass with port, and settle in for an evening with the bluestockings.

Hail Gail!

We here at The Bluestocking are not the only Gail Trimble enthusiasts... many other bloggers have been writing in praise of the intellectual blitzkrieg.

Walking randomly says:

• If Gail Trimble programmed computers then she would use butterflies.
• Gail Trimble can determine the next random number in a sequence.
• When you search for “guru” on Google it says “Did you mean Gail Trimble?”

Life must be filled up says:

Congratulations to Gail Trimble and her team on winning University Challenge. I was astonished to hear that far from being praised for her success, the poor girl has come in for a load of abuse. 

Sze Zeng says "Gail Trimble the genius"

Michael Axelsen doesn't know who Dylan Thomas was or what nationality he was, but he knows he likes geek girls:

I think any woman who is intelligent, smart, presents herself well and knows her way around Latin literature should be celebrated for their ability and skill.

It's good to know that there are others who appreciate intelligence.  I note that her page on the well-known electronic school yearbook has 424 fans.  I think Gail's undoubted sartorial elegance is irrelevant to her intellectual prowess; she should be celebrated for her brains even if she dressed in potato sacks.