Infinite Women

Dr. Brandy Schillace, Editor in Chief of Medical Humanities for the British Medical Journal, joins us to discuss women and Autism. For context, both Dr. Schillace and host Allison Tyra are Autistic.https://brandyschillace.com/Read the interview transcript: https://www.infinite-women.com/wp-content/uploads/Dr-Brandy-Schillace-on-Women-and-Autism.pdf

In the late 1860s, Russian mathematician Sofya Kovalevskaya needed permission from her father or husband to study abroad, so at age 18 she entered into a fake marriage with another student so they could move to Germany and continue their education. In 1874, she became the first woman to earn a modern doctorate in mathematics and published papers on topics that are far beyond my understanding. After the death of her husband in 1875, Sofya moved to Sweden to take a position at Stockholm University, where she later became the first woman appointed to a full professorship at a European university since the physicist Laura Bassi and mathematician and philosopher Maria Gaetana Agnesi had done so in Italy in the 1700s. In Stockholm, Sofya met Swedish author and women’s dress reform activist Anne Charlotte Edgren-Leffler. The two began a close relationship that would continue until Sofya’s untimely death at age 41 in 1891. Among her novels, plays and other writing, Anne’s final work was a biography of Sofya published in 1892 before Anne passed away that same year. Modern interpretations have suggested their relationship ventured beyond friendship into the romantic, not least because Sofya referred to it as a “romantic friendship”. It should be noted that although both entered into marriages of convenience, Sofya is documented as having romantic relationships with men and Anne was married twice, making it more likely that the women were bisexual rather than lesbians.Read more about Sofya on the Infinite Women site: https://www.infinite-women.com/women/sofia-kovalevskaya/Read more about Anne on the Infinite Women site: https://www.infinite-women.com/women/anne-charlotte-edgren-leffler/

Denise Mimmocchi, senior curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, joins us to talk about Australian modernist painter Grace Cossington Smith.Read the interview transcriptSee Grace Cossington Smith's work on the Art Galley of New South Wales website

Before she became one of the most successful pirates in world history, it is believed that Ching Shih likely worked in a brothel. In her mid-20s, she married the pirate Zheng Yi, becoming an equal partner and, after he died, taking over the confederation of pirates that they had built together. Ching Shih is awesome and I’ve dedicated her own episode to her incredible career, so let’s move on to two other famed criminals. Tilly Devine and Kate Leigh were infamous underworld figures in Sydney for decades, from the 1920s to the ‘50s. They each had their own territories for the brothels they ran, with Tillie the so-called ‘Queen of Woolloomooloo’ and Kate known as the ‘Queen of Surry Hills’. Ironically, the NSW Vagrancy Act 1905 prohibited men from running brothels. Tilly and Kate diversified their crimes into drugs, illicit alcohol known as “sly grog”, gambling and other ventures. The turf wars between the women and their other competitors were fierce and violent, including physical fights between the two women themselves. Although rivals, both were among the richest women in the country in their time, and both were eventually taken down by the taxation office for unpaid taxes. Interestingly, one of their key nemeses on the local police force was also a woman, the pioneering law enforcement officer Lillian May Armfield. Less well-known is Germaine Guérin, a madam who used her position and connections to become a valuable asset to the French Resistance during World War II. As her brothel in Lyons was popular with the occupying German forces, she was frequently in contact with powerful men and was able to pass on useful intelligence. Germaine also deliberately had her workers spread venereal disease among the Germans and offer them illicit drugs. She also sheltered Jews who had been forced into hiding, along with helping to save hundreds of people including Allied pilots, spies, radio operators, and refugees. She was later betrayed by a French Nazi collaborator. Germaine was arrested and sent to the infamous Ravensbruck death camp, but survived and returned home after the war. There are also countless stories in history of concubines who attained great power, like Empress Dowager Cixi ruling China, as well as courtesans like the Byzantine empress and saint Theodora, so stay tuned for more on their stories.

Today we’re talking about the unseen contributions of women mathematicians.Einstein declared of his first wife, Mileva Maric, “I need my wife. She solves for me all my mathematical problems”. Helping him was one of her few options after she gave up a promising career before it really got started when he got her pregnant out of wedlock. That didn’t stop him from divorcing her so he could marry his cousin, but he later met Emmy Noether, who took up the position of overlooked collaborator in the 1930s, after the Jewish Noether was forced to flee Nazi Germany. She laid the mathematical groundwork for Einstein’s general theory of relativity and made major advances in algebra. Yet despite her brilliance, Noether herself wrote of Princeton University, where she collaborated with Einstein and others, that she was unwelcome at "the men's university, where nothing female is admitted." She also spent years working in academic positions without pay, even after earning her PhD.The women of Harvard Observatory and others like it helped map the skies, but were derided for working outside the home and crudely referred to as Pickering’s Harem, after director Edward Pickering. He explicitly said he hired women because he could pay them less - only 25 cents an hour - getting significantly more labour on a limited budget. When one of the computers, Henrietta Swan Leavitt discovered the period-luminosity relationship, meaning the brighter a star is, the more slowly it seems to pulses, her work enabled astronomers to calculate the distance of stars from Earth, getting a better sense of the scale of galaxies, causing a radical shift in how astronomers looked at the universe. Years after her death, her discovery made it possible for Edwin Hubble to establish his observations that the universe is continuously expanding, known as Hubble’s law. He often said Leavitt should have won a Nobel Prize.Her colleague Annie Jump Cannon devised the Harvard classification system, the first real attempt to organise and classify stars based on their temperatures and spectral types. It is still in use today.In the 1940s, Kathleen Antonelli, Betty Jean Jennings Bartik, Betty Holberton, Marlyn Meltzer, Frances Spence and Ruth Teitelbaum collaborated to program ENIAC, the world’s first programmable, electronic, general-purpose digital computer. They had to learn to program without a programming language or tools, because they simply did not exist yet. But from the first demonstration on 15 February 1946 — which Betty and Betty Jean wrote the program for — they received no recognition. The programmers were not even invited to the gala dinner afterward for "government and scientific men," as reported by The New York Times. Herman Goldstine, who oversaw the project for the U.S. Army, claimed that he and his wife Adele — who was a programmer and did write the original technical manual for the ENIAC — had programmed that first successful demonstration for the VIPs, which Betty Jean later declared a "boldface lie." Some historical images caption the women as models, rather than actual staff. When the Army used a War Department publicity photo for a recruitment ad, they cropped out the three women in the photo, and the department’s press releases credited a vague "group of experts" for the work, naming only Goldstine and ENIAC designers John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert. This fundamentally ignored that the machine Mauchly and Eckert designed would never have functioned without the work of the programmers.In the 1980s, Harvard University student Kathy Kleiman came across a photo of the women with ENIAC while researching her thesis, on early programmers and software developers. When she enquired about the images, she was told the women were models, hired to make the image more appealing. Fortunately, Kleiman kept digging, discovered the women’s story and launched the ENIAC Programmers Project to get them the recognition they should have received decades earlier.

Elder sister to composer Felix Mendelssohn, Fanny was arguably the more talented sibling, but was held back throughout her life by Felix himself, as well as their father. Their suffocating dynamic empowered Felix to prevent her from pursuing a career as a composer. Although she wrote almost 500 beautiful compositions, he and their father forbade her from publishing them or performing in public. Even as he supported Felix’s career, their father told Fanny, "Music is likely to become a profession for Felix, while it is only an ornament for you; it may never form the core of your life." Even her marriage could not free her from her father and brother’s control. Even after her father’s death in 1835, Felix continued to actively prevent her from pursuing success.During his lifetime, Felix himself acknowledged stealing Fanny’s works and claiming them as his own — even admitting to Queen Victoria that her favourite of his pieces (Italien) was actually written by Fanny. Several of Fanny’s compositions were published under Felix's name in his Opus 8 and 9 collections. She also likely developed the Lied ohne Worte (Song without Words) genre typically attributed to Felix. Additionally, he sought her opinions on all of his own works and her insights helped shape their final versions. Fanny unfortunately died shortly after freeing herself from his control, the year after she published her own first opus. If not for the stroke that killed her, she may have truly come into her own as a composer and received the recognition she deserved.After her untimely death at age 41 in 1847, her personal documents were left to her family, who did nothing more to support her career than they had during her life — in other words, nothing. In 1965, most of her works became part of the West Berlin State Library’s Mendelssohn Archive, under the control of Dr. Rudolf Elvers, who likewise largely kept her works from the public for decades. As reported in 1986: But he says the rest of her work must first be carefully transcribed and checked against all available source material, and that qualified musicologists are not interested. "I am waiting for the right man for the job to come along,'' he adds, after first complaining about "all these piano-playing girls who are just in love with Fanny.'' Contrasting her life with Felix's, he says, "She was nothing. She was just a wife'' with the name Mendelssohn.He maintains that serious musicologists and publishers have little interest in her work because "it's too much, and it's not so good.''Elvers also told a small gathering of scholars at Brandeis recently, "I don't believe she will play an eminent role in music history.'’Because her works were not published during her life, they generally do not meet the criteria for public domain, and groups that wanted to perform her pieces were typically denied by Elvers, as were scholars wanting access for research purposes. This was not the proverbial benign neglect of so many individuals and institutions towards women’s work — this was a misogynist deliberately undermining and gatekeeping the work of someone whose legacy he was entrusted with. When he said "I don't believe she will play an eminent role in music history," this was a prophecy he did his best to see fulfilled — we are only fortunate that her legacy outlived him and more recent decades have seen her work performed in concerts and recordings, as well as academics publishing books and articles about her life and work.Read more about her on the Infinite Women site: https://www.infinite-women.com/women/fanny-hensel/

Microbiologist Esther Lederberg was a pioneer of bacterial genetics, but she experienced a common issue for women in the sciences - she worked with her husband, so everyone gave credit for her work to him. Including, in 1958, the Nobel committee, which awarded the prize for physiology or medicine to Joshua Lederberg and two other men they worked with. Lederberg’s accomplishments included discovering the Lambda bacterial virus and the bacterial fertility factor and creating a replica plating process that enabled biologists to reproduce bacterial colonies en masse. This enabled the Lederbergs to more effectively study mutations. Discovering the Lambda bacteriophage also led to her work in specialised transduction, where foreign DNA is introduced into a cell by a virus. Although Lederberg laid the groundwork for much of 20th century microbiology, she was never offered a tenured position at a university. Even modern textbooks often ignore her work and attribute her accomplishments to her husband. In fact, he likely held her back - she was a grad student when she discovered the F factor and Lambda, and Joshua, as her thesis advisor, stopped her from continuing her work on those discoveries. While we can’t say for sure exactly to what degree he reinforced or contradicted the perception of her as only his wife and assistant, when he wrote an autobiographical account of their discovery of genetic recombination in bacteria, he did not acknowledge her work. She also had to fight to stay employed at Stanford after divorcing him in 1968 - he was head of the genetics department. Physicist Chien-Shiung Wu never won a Nobel - but her male colleagues did, thanks to her work. In the 1950s, Wu set out to test a theory of Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang, whether spinning, decaying particles have a preferred direction that they spin in. Wu experimented using Cobalt-60 in the presence of a strong magnetic field - the electrons produced by the radioactive decay of the cobalt showed a preferred direction. In science-y terms, she proved parity is not conserved. So even though the Nobel committee won’t give out awards for untested theories, they ignored the fact that Wu proved Lee and Yang’s theory and only recognised the men. Wu also worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the process for separating uranium into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes through gaseous diffusion and later researched molecular changes in hemoglobin associated with sickle-cell anemia. Nettie Stevens discovered XY chromosomes at the same time as E.B. Wilson in 1905. The two scientists were working independently, but each was aware of the other’s work. However, when they published their respective results, Wilson was widely acclaimed as the sole discoverer. In retrospect, Stevens’ work appears to be higher quality. For example, Wilson claimed environmental factors affected sex, whereas Stevens believed it was only genetic. She was right. In fact, Wilson didn’t even bother studying eggs, examining only sperm because he claimed that eggs were too fatty for his staining procedure. After reading the papers describing Stevens' discoveries, Wilson reissued his original paper and in a footnote acknowledged Stevens for the finding of sex chromosomes. She also determined that Clarence Erwin McClung’s theory that the X chromosome determines sex was wrong, as sex is determined by the presence or absence of the small (Y) chromosome. Despite this, she was often excluded from speaking at meetings of experts where her own findings were being discussed. After her death, her own Ph.D. advisor belittled and misrepresented her contributions and even implicitly tried to take credit for her work by excluding her name while bragging about his own lab’s work in the field. Although she died only nine years after completing her PhD, Stevens published approximately 40 papers in her short career.

Dr Rachel Franks is the coordinator of scholarship at the State Library of New South Wales, and she joins us to talk about one of Australia’s literary legends, Miles Franklin.Read the full transcriptRead more about Franklin on the Infinite Women site: https://www.infinite-women.com/women/miles-franklin/

Read full transcriptYvonne Chouteau, Rosella Hightower, Moscelyne Larkin, and sisters Maria and Marjorie Tallchief all rose to prominence as ballerinas in the mid-1900s. They also all happened to be Native Americans from the state of Oklahoma, born in the 1920s. Chouteau was Shawnee, the Tallchief sisters were Osage, Hightower was Choctaw and Larkin was Peoria and Shawnee.While each of the women has been recognised with various individual honors, they are also commemorated as a group. A ballet called The Four Moons was created for the Oklahoma Indian Ballerina Festival in 1967, with four solos that each evoke the different tribal backgrounds of the dancers, with a single Osage solo honoring the Tallchief sisters. The work is set to music by Louis Ballard, a Quapaw-Cherokee composer and fellow Oklahoman. A mural called Flight of Spirit depicts the five women in the Oklahoma State Capitol Rotunda in Oklahoma City, painted by Chickasaw artist Mike Larsen, and sculptures of the dancers grace the grounds of the Tulsa Historical Society.

For more than 15 years, American Dr. Mary-Claire King worked tirelessly on research that most people dismissed. From 1974 to 1990, King searched for an answer to why breast cancer ran in families. Because the prevailing theory of the time was that the cause was viral, most scientists considered her efforts to find a genetic marker to be a waste of time. Even King herself sometimes worried that her work would be in vain, but she carried on, and was proven right with the identification of the BRCA1 gene in 1990. Subsequent research identified a second gene, called BRCA2, and today it is believed that they contribute to as many as 5 to 10% of breast cancer cases. Genetic links for many other cancers have also been identified. Read more about King on the Infinite Women site: https://www.infinite-women.com/women/mary-claire-king/British Dr. Jane Plant was diagnosed with breast cancer for the sixth time in 1993. Although she was a geochemist, not a biologist, she decided to investigate the relatively low breast cancer rate among Chinese women, and determined that lower dairy consumption was the most likely cause. She asserted that "basically dairy has now got a lot of oestrogen in it because it's common practise to milk pregnant cows, which has driven up the oestrogen content of milk. It also contains tiny proteins called growth factors, and these growth factors directly promote cancer." Although her reasoning was scientifically sound, her theory was, like King’s, dismissed by the general scientific community, though her advice to avoid dairy did reach thousands of cancer patients. She herself followed a dairy-free diet for 18 years and remained cancer-free, until she eventually strayed from her diet due to a professed weakness for calves’ liver cooked in butter. She died in 2016 due to a blood clot following chemotherapy. Years later, her theory was validated when research was published in 2020, indicating that “consistently drinking as little as one cup per day may increase rate of breast cancer up to 50%” and “Intake of dairy milk is associated with a greater risk of breast cancer in women -- up to 80% depending on the amount consumed.” Read more about Plant on the Infinite Women site: https://www.infinite-women.com/women/jane-plant/Canadian oncologist and clinical investigator Dr. Vera Peters was reportedly told to “go do women’s work” after she challenged the medical establishment in 1950 with a groundbreaking paper. Her research demonstrated for the first time that patients with early-stage Hodgkin lymphoma (cancer of white blood cells) could be cured if they received a regimen of high-dose radiation. Previously, the condition had been thought to be incurable. Her findings were met with scepticism, to the point that she later commented that it took more than 10 years for them to be accepted. She would later study the use of radiation therapy to treat breast cancer, and her research showed that lumpectomies - where only the cancerous tissue is removed - followed with radiation were just as effective as radical mastectomies, where one or both breasts are entirely removed, along with chest muscle and lymph nodes. Given the major impact of a radical mastectomy both physically and psychologically, lumpectomies are significantly less invasive, and radical mastectomies are rarely performed today. Read more about Peters on the Infinite Women site: https://www.infinite-women.com/women/vera-peters/