It may seem nonsense in some countries nowadays talking about equality, but it only seems so in places where it has been reached. It is unfortunately not the situation worldwide and we might still find women living under the shadow of someone else (of men, of a government, of a patriarchal culture, of war, outdated laws, etc).
The First Programmable-electronic Digital Computer.
“One of the greatest secrets of war—an astonishing machine that applies electronic speeds for the first time to mathematical tasks hitherto very difficult to solve—was announced this evening by the War Department,” reported the New York Times on September 14, 1946.
The article mentioned two names as the main responsible people for the achievement — Dr. John William Maulchy and J. Presper Eckert Jr. — and it also mentioned that many others in the school helped.
Hidden by the pronoun and unknown by the press, there were the names of 6 women, which were discovered decades later by the scientist Kathryn Kleiman: Frances “Betty” Holberton, Kathleen “Kay” McNulty, Marlyn Wescoff, Ruth Lichterman, Frances “Fran” Bilas e Jean Jenningsz.
Whoever photographed the creation of ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) did not mention in the photo descriptions the names of women constantly shown in the pictures. The construction contract was signed on June 5, 1943; work on the computer began in secret at the University of Pennsylvania's Moore School of Electrical Engineering.
What we nowadays know, thanks to Kleiman's researches, is that the US military recruited over 100 qualified women in order to project the calculation tables for launching war cannons, as most of the men were on the front lines.
The First Woman to Win a Nobel Prize
The only person ever to be awarded in two different scientific fields was born under the name of Maria Salomea Sklodowska in Warsaw. Maria's parents were both school teachers who had 5 children. Teachers in Poland earned little money, but especially very little if they were against the Russian Empire, so the Sklodowska family was very poor.
Her mother passed away when Maria was 10 years old. Despite of the pain, she had to get by and find a job, so she became a governess for wealthy families and taught their children to read and write.
Back then, women were not permitted to study at Polish universities. She and her sister Bronisława then became involved with Flying University, a clandestine educational institution that defied Russian authorities, admitted women, and got its name because it had to keep moving so the Russians couldn't find it.
In late 1891, at the age of 24, Maria joined her elder sister Bronislawa, who had moved to Paris with her husband, and enrolled at the University of Paris, known worldwide as the Sorbonne. In 1895 she married the French physicist Pierre Curie and became Marie Curie. After great researches under her lead, the couple received the Nobel Prize in Physics along with Antoine Henri Becquerel.
Madame Curie never lost her roots. She named the first chemical element she discovered polonium, after her native country. She intended to return to her home country, but she was denied a place at Kraków University because of sexism in academia.
After her first daughter's birth, Marie started teaching at the École Normale Supérieure. Marie Curie also had a very important role as an educator. In addition to teaching in Paris, she also taught at an illegal university, attended mainly by women who were forbidden to follow their courses regularly, giving many women of the time the opportunity to acquire knowledge.
On 26 December 1898, the Curies announced the existence of a second element, which they named "radium", from the Latin word for "ray". In the course of their research, they also coined the word "radioactivity".
In June 1903, supervised by Gabriel Lippmann, Marie was awarded her doctorate from the University of Paris. That month the couple were invited to the Royal Institution in London to give a speech on radioactivity, but she was prevented from speaking for being a woman, so Pierre Curie presented their speech alone.
In December 1903 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences committee had intended to honour only Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel in recognition of the services they have rendered by their joint researches on the radiation phenomena, even though Marie led all the experiments undertaken by the trio and noted down all the discoveries, found by herself. Fortunately, a committee member and advocate for women scientists, Swedish mathematician Magnus Gösta Mittag-Leffler, alerted Pierre to the situation, and after his complaint, Marie's name was added to the nomination.
Later, after overcoming oposition, the same institution honoured her a second time, with the 1911 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, by her achievement isolating radium.
Under Marie's direction, the world's first studies were conducted into the treatment of neoplasms by the use of radioactive isotopes. She founded the Curie Institute in Paris in 1920, and the Curie Institute in Warsaw in 1932; both remain major medical research centres. During World War I she developed mobile radiography units to provide X-ray services to hospitals in the battlefields.
In 1995 she became the first woman to be entombed on her own merits in the Paris Panthéon, and Poland declared 2011 the Year of Marie Curie during the International Year of Chemistry.
The Matilda Effect
There are numerous reports of magnificent works carried out by women, but signed by their husbands, just as happened with Marie Curie.
Freud - The Mind of the Moralist is a hailed book of a permanently valuable contribution to the human sciences that approaches the historical and cultural context of Freud's psychoanalysis. The book provided Philip Rieff with recognition, even if his wife at the time he wrote it, Susan Sontag, has been responsible for most of the content produced (Benjamin Moser, Sontag: Her Life and Work Hardcover, 2019).
It happened so often because discoveries reported through a man's name would be taken more seriously in the scientific, artistic or linguistic community. A sex-linked phenomenon seems to exist and it's been named the 'Matilda Effect', for the American suffragist and feminist critic Matilda Joslyn Gage.
References:
* https://zap.aeiou.pt/historia-matematicas-primeiro-supercomputador-523663
* Marie Curie: A Life From Beginning to End (Biographies of Women in History), Hourly History
* https://www.stylist.co.uk/people/matilda-effect-what-is-it-erasure-achievements-by-women-susan-sontag-hidden-women/267412
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