Come Be We And We Be Free

If this woman was alive today, she’d have my vote. Shit.

#she put frederick douglass on her ballot as v.p. too #unfortunately he didn’t know about it at the time #he read about it in the papers and was like ‘is this chick serious’

Victoria Woodhull 2016

This fails to mention that she was the first woman to run for US president, as well as being the first woman stockbroker on Wall Street alongside her sister Tennie Claflin, and their newspaper published the first English translation of the Communist Manifesto known to date

Why you should be in passionate horny love with Elizabeth ‘Nellie Bly’ Cochrane

nellie bly is honestly one of the coolest people ever, i read ten days in a mad house last year and it was one of the most interesting pieces i’ve ever read

Murasaki Shikibu

Art by velvetcouch (tumblr, society6)

Around the year 1000, an aristocratic Japanese woman wrote The Tale of Genji which some consider to be the first novel ever written.  It is groundbreaking as the first example of a work of fiction which explored the inner thoughts and motivations of characters.  The author’s exact name is unknown, but this she is generally known as Murasaki Shikibu and she is believed to have been a member of the Fujiwara clan.  The Tale of Genji is set at the Heian court where Murasaki served as a lady in waiting to Empress Soshi.  

The teenage Empress Soshi was a great fan of literature and she served as a patron to numerous female writers.  At the time, Chinese was the intellectual language of Japan.  Murasaki and other Heian female authors wrote in kana, a written form of Japanese.  These popular works were instrumental in the development of formal written Japanese.

Although she is best known for The Tale of Genji, Murasaki also wrote The Diary of Lady Murasaki and Poetic Memoirs, a collection of 128 poems.  

#DiversifyAgentCarter in pictures | my twitter

@ all the people saying it wouldn’t be historically accurate to have POC in the 40s

Annie Jump Cannon (1863-1941): The Queen of Modern Astronomy

Annie Jump Cannon’s middle-class Victorian-era biography could have easily gone something like this:

But thankfully for the field of astronomy (and humanity at large), Annie led a life less conventional:

No, really: Annie’s story begins in earnest around age 33, when she became a Harvard Computer. Far from a squad of Transformers-esque shapeshifters, the Harvard Computers were an all-female team of astronomy analysts who worked for Edward Pickering in the early 1900s. As the story goes, Pickering, as head of the Harvard Observatory, became so fed up with a (male) grad student’s incompetence, he hired his maid to prove that even she could do better – only to find out that she was a goddamned genius. After that, he only hired women, reasoning that they were better at detailed work.

At the time, though, they were largely referred to as “Pickering’s Harem.” Sigh. Early 1900s Harvard folk, you suck.

Annie quickly became a phenomenal astronomer. Tasked with classifying stars based on a huge catalog of astronomic spectography, Annie quickly realized that the classification system they were using was woefully inadequate — so she made her own. Whereas previously, all stars had been lumped into categories of A, B, and C, she came up with the classification system of O, B, A, F, G, K, M, R, N, S, which has been remembered for years now with the pneumonic of “Oh, be a fine girl, kiss me right now, sweet.” By 1910, Annie’s system had become the de-facto standard, and, with minor modifications, remains so to this day.

She became scarily good at her job. At the peak of her career, she could classify three stars per minute, which led to her cataloging upwards of 350,000 over her lifetime. For reference’s sake, Williamina Fleming, the aforementioned goddamned genius, only cataloged 10,000. Not just that, but Annie retained a terrifying ability to recall all of them. When offhandedly asked for a photo of a specific star, she instantly knew, out of tens of thousands of plates, the exact one to pick up (Plate I 37311, if you must know).

As her career grew, she got involved in the suffragette movement, and became an ambassador for professional women everywhere. She gave talks at the Worlds Fair in Chicago and fought tooth and nail against the preconception of female astronomers as astrologers and horoscope readers. She never retired, and kept working – 7 days a week, mostly for the criminally low rate of 25 cents an hour – until she was 76, at which point heart disease took her life.

Part of the reason for her astronomical skill was that she was near-totally deaf. Although a nasty bout of scarlet fever permanently damaged her hearing in college, she used it to her advantage. The relative silence, she’d later say, allowed her to concentrate more fully on her work. While some biographers claim her hearing loss had a negative effect on her social life, it was only a temporary one. In later years, with the help of a powerful hearing aid, she held regular dinner parties at her house, an utterly-charming villa she dubbed the Star Cottage.

(many write-ups of Annie mention the deafness upfront – but since she didn’t let it define her, why should anyone else?)

Near the end of her life, with World War 2 on the horizon, Annie summed up her worldview in one of her last interviews: “In these days of great trouble and unrest, it is good to have something outside our own planet, something fine and distant and comforting to troubled minds. Let people look to the stars for comfort.”

ART NOTES

The scene here is a bit of a mishmash of her life. The observatory in question is based off of one that she worked at in Peru, but the telescope is from later in her career. The women in the background didn’t do their work at the observatory, and almost certainly didn’t work by lamplight, but hey.

Speaking of the Harvard Computers, some notable ones include:

CITATIONS

American Profiles: Women Scientists by Nancy Veglahn

NEXT WEEK ON REJECTED PRINCESSES

A peculiar princess legend from the Hmong.

Isobel Stanley (pictured in white), daughter of the same Lord Stanley who created the Stanley Cup, was key in popularizing women’s hockey. In 1899, she participated in one of the first games of women’s hockey at Rideau Skating Rink. Her legacy lives on with the Lady Isobel Gathorne-Hardy Award, given to the active player whose values, leadership, and personal traits are representative of all female athletes.

Another day, another kick ass woman from history who is sadly lacking her own movie franchise.

Source

but nah, women never did anything interesting or exciting in the Old Days

She was known as the Lioness of Brittany.