Infinite Women

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/

This week's podcast is about legendary Norwegian shield-maidens and pirates Rusla and Stikla. Also known as the “Red Woman” for her ruthlessness, Rusla is a princess mentioned in Saxo Grammaticus’s History of the Danes and in Irish annals. When her brother’s throne was stolen by a Danish king named Omund, Rusla gathered a pirate fleet to attack Danish ships in revenge. Stikla, who had turned to piracy to escape marriage, was by her side every time. Some sources call her Rusla’s sister, though with the scant details, the exact nature of their relationship is open to debate. While Rusla was attacking ships and coastal towns in what is now Iceland, Denmark and the UK, her brother was busy being Omund’s bitch. The Danish king had tricked Tesandus into siding with the Danes, and in the process he lost his own crown to Omund. Where Rusla got pissed, Tesandus was being a good little boy. He was on one of the ships she attacked - although the ship was sunk, Rusla was merciful and allowed her brother to escape with his life. In an epic case of misplaced anger, Tesandus swore vengeance not on the man who conned him out of his throne, but on the sister who fought to avenge their family honor. He chased her fleet with one of his own, eventually captured her and held her by her braids while his crew beat her to death with rowing oars. To be fair, she earned her ruthless reputation and took no prisoners, so there is a sense of live by the oar, die by the oar. Stikla appears to have had a longer and hopefully happier life. The History of the Danes states that the Norwegian town of Stiklestad was named for her, and she apparently settled here after her exploits with Rusla.

Cathy Perkins, author of The Shelf Life of Zora Cross, joins us to talk about the best-selling Australian poet, novelist and journalist. Cathy is also an editor at the State Library of New South Wales. Read transcript

Fashion is one of the few areas where sewing really gets to shine, but even then modern designers are the ones getting the credit rather than the people building their imagined creations. But not too long ago, the roles were often combined by dressmakers like Elizabeth Keckley, a formerly enslaved woman who gained her professional reputation in Washington, D.C. by outfitting the city's elite, including First Lady Mary Todd Lincoln. Thanks to her work as a seamstress, she was able to buy her and her son's freedom in St. Louis, Missouri in 1855, and moved to DC in 1860, where she established a dressmaking business that grew to include a staff of 20 seamstresses. After the Civil War, Mrs. Keckley wrote and published an autobiography titled Behind the Scenes: Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868). The book was both a slave narrative about the physical and sexual abuse she experienced in her early life, and a portrait of the First Family, especially Mary Todd Lincoln. For a fictional novel about Mrs. Keckley, I recommend Mrs. Lincoln's Dressmaker by Jennifer Chiaverini. Read more about Keckley on the Infinite Women site: https://www.infinite-women.com/women/elizabeth-keckley/Speaking of outfitting the first lady, Ann Lowe was the first African-American to become a major fashion designer from the 1920s through the 1960s. She was best known for designing Jacqueline Bouvier's wedding dress when she married John F. Kennedy in 1953 - or rather, she should have been. Although her work is recognised now, Jackie never publicly credited Ann for the most talked-about dress of the year. Even though Ann had been working with the Bouvier family for years, when asked who designed the dress, Jackie reportedly replied ‘I wanted to go to France, but a colored dressmaker did it.’ The dress, which cost $500 (approximately $5,000 today), was described in detail in The New York Times's coverage of the wedding, but Ann's name was never mentioned. Even worse, Ann lost money on the project - ten days before the wedding, a pipe burst in her studio, ruining the dress as well as nine other dresses for other members of the wedding party. Ann and her team worked day and night to re-create the masterpieces in a week and a half. She ended up losing $2,200 — about $21,000 in today's currency. Then, when she hand-delivered the gowns in Newport, R.I., she was told to enter through a service entrance in the back. Ann replied that either the dresses went with her through the front door or they went back with her to New York. Ann also designed the dress Olivia de Havilland wore to the 1947 Oscars, when she won Best Actress. The name on the label, however, was Sonia Rosenberg.In 2019, Ruth E Carter became the first African-American to win an Academy Award for Best Costume Design, for her incredible work on the superhero film Black Panther. It was her third nomination - of the more than 60 films she worked on as lead costume designer, she was also nominated for Spike Lee’s Malcolm X in 1992 and Steven Spielberg’s Amistad in 1997. She then won again in 2023 for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. And it probably goes without saying, but her own Oscars dresses were masterpieces.

In the 1960s, Walter Keane’s “Big Eye” paintings gained immense popularity across the US. Derided as kitsch by critics, they were a massive commercial success. Andy Warhol remarked "I think what Keane has done is just terrific. It has to be good. If it were bad, so many people wouldn't like it."  But while they were done by “Keane,” they weren’t Walter’s. Like other women who escaped their husband’s influence, Margaret Keane later claimed credit for her work. In a common refrain, Walter was significantly older - 12 years - and physically and emotionally abusive, with Margaret later saying “I was afraid for my life.”  Initially, he was taking credit for her work without her knowledge or consent. As she explained, “After I married Walter I just signed my paintings ‘Keane’. He was able to take credit for my work, which I was not aware he was doing at first.” When she did find out, she kept quiet and even publicly supported his claim for fear of reprisals behind closed doors, later saying that he had threatened to kill her.  It was only years after their 1965 divorce that Margaret went public, asserting in a radio broadcast that she was the true artist. A reporter from the San Francisco Examiner arranged a “paint-off” between the former spouses - Margaret attended, Walter did not. It was not the only time he’d dodge such a challenge - in 1986, Margaret sued Walter and USA Today for an article in which he claimed to be the true artist of the Big Eyes paintings. The presiding judge ordered both Keanes to create a Big Eyes painting in the courtroom. Walter refused, spinning a tale about a “sore shoulder,” while Margaret finished hers in under an hour. The jury awarded her $4 million in damages; a federal appeals court later overturned the monetary award but upheld the defamation verdict. Margaret said after the initial trial, "I really feel that justice has triumphed. It's been worth it, even if I don't see any of that four million dollars." Indeed, unlike the sad children and dark surroundings of her earlier works, her post-Walter paintings tended to be much happier and lighter - a reflection of her own revitalised outlook on life. For a big-screen adaption of Keane’s life, check out Tim Burton’s 2014 biopic Big Eyes, starring Amy Adams and Christoph Waltz.