The Erasure of Women in History

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The Erasure of Women in History

theconvenientmarriage:

gynocraticgrrl:

drziggystardust:

cuculine:

drziggystardust:

appropriately-inappropriate:

myoinositol:

appropriately-inappropriate:

drziggystardust:

putmeincoach reblogged your post and added:

Please, list me all of those female architects, scientists and great minds that male architects and scientists ripped off. No, really, I am curious to see all of these female inventors and pioneers you’re speaking of.

Ada Lovelace – Founder of scientific computing, the world’s first computer programmer. Modern computers as we know them wouldn’t exist without her innovations.

Queen Seondeok of Silla – Silla was one of the three kingdoms in Korea’s Three Kingdom period and Seondeok was its first reigning Queen. She is well known for setting up the first astronomy tower in Asia and for founding several Buddhist temples.

Cecilia Payne – Discovered what the sun was made of. Was then prohibited from publishing her work. Henry Norris Russel republished her work as his own and received all the credit. 

Jocelyn Bell Burnell – Discovered the first pulsar. Anthony Hewish took credit and listed her a non involved assistant, he had nothing to do with the discovery. Not only did he receive all the credit, he received the Nobel prize. 

Lise Meitner – Co-discovered nuclear fission and her male colleagues refused to name her in their publication. The men won the Nobel Prize, and she received no credit.  

Nettie Stevens – Discovered chromosomes determined sex, when she sent her work to a man for peer review, he published a book of her work passing it off as his own and named her a technician. 

Marie Curie – Noted Nobel prize laureate (first lady to earn 2), discovered radium. Barred from many prestigious male dominated academic organizations like the French Academy due to being a female. She was demonized and attacked by men all her life simply for being superior to men in the field, and men in general. 

Marie Van Brittan Brown – Co-invented home security surveillance that is the precursor of home security systems today. You wont hear her name in history class, not only is she a woman, she is a black woman. ERASED by nasty white men LIKE YOU. 

Lucy Terry – Another historical black woman, erased by neo-colonialist white men. This young lady was a teenager when she composed the first known work of literature by an African American person. 

Mary Shelley -Invented science fiction. She literally invented a genre of literature, she was a teenager when she wrote her first piece. Across the northern American continent. While she was pregnant.  

Sacagawea – An indigenous American (Lemhi Shoshone) who led Lewis & Clark across the northern American continent. While she was pregnant.

Elizabeth Gurley Flynn – feminist, suffragette, civil rights activist, founded the ACLU

Sarah Parker Remond -worked to desegregate schools and end slavery. Also noted physician- but you wont read about her in your white history books because she is black. Its like you white dudes just threw together some shitty fan fiction and called that history. 

Hedy Lamarr – came up with an early technique for spread spectrum communications and frequency hopping, necessary for wireless communication from the pre-computer age to the present day. She invented your wi-fi in addition to being an actress. SUCK IT. 

Vera Rubin -Rejected from Princeton because she was female, went to Cornell instead and discovered dark matter while earning her PhD. Went on to make contributions that your simpleminded white male self couldn’t begin to fathom. 

This list is just a taste of what women have accomplished. Women invented the core technologies that make civilization possible. This is a not a feminist myth, this is what anthropologists KNOW. Women have made those contributions in spite of astonishing hurdles. Hurdles like not being allowed to go to school, or not being allowed to work in an office with men, or join a professional society, or walk on the street, or own property. Hell, some of these women were legally deemed property, a fraction of a human being.

Eleanor of Aquitaine, Queen Catherine the Great, Queen Christina of Sweden, Anacaona of Hispaniola, Hypatia of Athens, Aspasia of Thebes, Dido, Cleopatra, Nefertiti, Nzhinga of Matamba, Joan of Arc, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Anne Boleyn, Queen Catherine of Spain, Queen Isabella of Castille, Florence Nightingale, Boudicca of the Picts, Hildegard of Bingen, Heloise of Paris, St Theresa of Avila, Theodora of Constantinople, Queen Sybila of Jerusalem, Queen Catherine de Medici, Mirabai of India, Cady Stanton, Margaret Sanger, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Emmeline Pankhurst, Emily Murphy, Rosa Luxembourg, ArchEmpress Maria Theresa of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire

…..

Did you want more? Those are just the ones I could think of off the top of my head.

aww you put in mirabai :)

and of course…from the sciences…rosalind franklin, jocelyn burnell, ester lederburg, LISE MEITNER, mathilde krim, and countless, countless others (did you know that menten of michaelis-menten was a woman?); these are just from the west; this doesn’t count women elsewhere who are trafficked and raped from birth instead of being allowed to explore their potential in the sciences. here’s a list of indian women overshadowed in the sciences. if women’s potential in the sciences were fulfilled and nurtured and credit duly given then it would probably change the world as we know it overnight. 

Of course! Theology was a major area of philosophical study, and from what I read, she was very knowledgeable And any woman who survives three assassination attempts (iirc? I know there was more than just the one) is p badass. Also women have always had a place in the sciences. We were the first computer programmers, telephone technicians and medical professionals (rural women figured out how to prevent smallpox hundreds of years before Germ Theory or the concept of inoculation was a thing). Haven’t died of smallpox recently? You’re welcome. <3 

You ladies are amazing! All this history, our history off the top of your head!

 Thank you both, this is exactly what I was trying to convey to this ignorant dudebro. Who has yet to respond, btw. 

From Ada Lovelace to Grace Hopper, computers owe everything to women. All six “human computers” working on the famous ENIAC machine were women, and isn’t it funny how people nowadays have some sort of idea of what ENIAC was but not who maintained it?  In fact, computer programming, especially software programming, used to be considered a woman’s jobThey were still paid less than the men who were also in the fieldBut they still did it better.

The first person to crack part of the German Enigma cypher was a woman we only know today as Mrs BB Her solution was dismissed as being too simplistic, though she turned out to be correct.  But we still don’t know her name.  She worked at Bletchley Park, home of the UK’s cryptographers before and during WWII – most of the people working there were women (I’ve seen it as high as estimating 80% women)One of them, Mavis Batey, died a couple weeks ago, in fact.  She decoded the Italian navy Enigma cypher – AT NINETEEN.

Also, to throw in some of my other favorite ladies that I don’t see listed so far: Simone de Beauvoir, Émilie du Châtelet, Princess Elisabeth of the Palantine, Sofia Vasilyevna Kovalevskaya, Emmy Noether…  I could go on and on.  All sorts of brilliant ladies who directly influenced men we cherry pick from history (Voltaire, Sartre, etc.) or whose accomplishments we’ve forgotten despite their value have existed throughout time, everywhere and every place.

Oh look, more erased women who built civilization as we know it! What would women do without men to steal our discoveries and take credit for them? IDK thrive, probably