Infinite Women

In this episode, we're joined by Evelien de Bruijn, a glass artist from the Netherlands, to discuss biases in how women’s lives are documented, and the impact this has on future generations.Read the interview transcript

Dr. Ides Wong, a program manager at CSIRO, joins us to talk about 18th century Chinese astronomer, mathematician, and poet Wang Zhenyi. Read more about Wang Zhenyi on the Infinite Women site: https://www.infinite-women.com/women/wang-zhenyi/

Known as the Lioness of Brittany, Jeanne de Clisson turned to piracy to avenge her husband, who the French king had had executed for treason. Olivier de Clisson was her third of four husbands, the first having died and the second marriage having been annulled. Together, they had ruled part of Brittany, but following the Breton War of Succession, he was accused of not defending his city vigorously enough; he was beheaded in 1343. Jeanne was then charged, because she had tried to bribe a sergeant to free her husband. Thanks to powerful friends, she avoided the banishment and confiscation of property that she was sentenced with.She then swore vengeance upon the French King Philip VI and the duke who had accused her husband of treason. She sold her estates, raised a fighting force of 400 loyal men and started attacking. One of her early targets was a castle at Touffou, where the officer in charge recognised her and let her in, at which point her men massacred the entire garrison, save one person. This was a precursor to her practice of leaving only one or a few sailors alive when she attacked ships, to carry word to the King of France.With the help of the English king and Breton sympathisers, she started building her Black Fleet, outfitting three warships painted black, with red sails. She named her flagship My Revenge. She started attacking ships in the Bay of Biscay but soon escalated to hunting down French commerce ships in the English Channel. She is also said to have attacked villages along the Norman coast.At one point, the French were able to sink her flagship and Jeanne and two of her sons were adrift for five days, with her son Guillaume dying of exposure while Jeanne and her other son Olivier were eventually rescued, and resumed their piracy. All told, she was active for over a decade in her 40s and 50s, from around 1343 to 1356.Jeanne is sometimes referred to as a privateer, meaning her piracy was sanctioned by the English crown, which was a common practice at the time. Although no official documentation of this exists, she did work with the English, including using her ships to supply their forces.Jeanne remarried for the fourth and final time in the 1350s, to one of the English king’s deputies, and later settled at the Castle of Hennebont, on the Brittany coast. Husband and wife died a few weeks apart in 1359, when Jeanne was 59.

CSIRO’s Dr. Denis Bauer, whose work focuses on improving human health by applying cloud-computing technology to better understanding the genome, joins us to discuss both her own work and one of Dr. Bauer’s scientific forebears - Rosalind Franklin.Read the interview transcript: https://www.infinite-women.com/wp-content/uploads/Dr.-Denis-Bauer-on-Rosalind-Franklin.pdfRead more about Franklin on the Infinite Women site: https://www.infinite-women.com/women/rosalind-franklin/

Kimberly Hess, author of the 2021 biography, A Lesser Mortal: The Unexpected Life of Sarah B. Cochran, joins us to discuss the philanthropist and businesswoman who rose from housemaid to head of a coal empire. Sarah was also a suffragist and builder of not one but two National Register-listed buildings.Read Sarah's entry on Infinite Women, written by Kimberly for the National Women's History MuseumRead the interview transcript

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.