I read a lot of science fiction, as I find imagining the future is a good way of examining our past and present. As Cory Doctorow points out in his latest Locus column, explaining something to a Martian is a great tool for disentangling the mess of practical arrangement and moral judgment that tend to lead to our way of life. So today I’d like to look at an aspect of women’s history by starting from the future.
“Looking Through Lace” by Ruth Nestvold is a science fiction short story which I first encountered in Sex, The Future, & Chocolate Chip Cookies, the first James Tiptree Award anthology. Let’s take two steps back: James Tiptree, Jr. was the pen name of science fiction author Alice B. Sheldon. As it was not known until ten years into her writing career that Sheldon was a woman, she did a lot to break down perceptions and prejudice about “typically male or female” writing. The award bearing Tiptree’s name has been given out annually since 1991 to works in science fiction or fantasy which expand and explore our understanding of gender. I have read many delightful and thought-provoking pieces of writing as a result of the Tiptree award and would highly recommend books and stories which have been shortlisted or won it. One final warning before we move on: if you are planning to read “Looking Through Lace”, do it now – this post will contain spoilers.
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Great, you’re back.
“Looking Through Lace” starts as a somewhat predictable feminist first contact story: an all-male first contact team encounters a matriarchal society. A female linguist (Toni) is quickly brought on board as the matriarchs refuse to have anything to do with the men on the team. The set-up is not dissimilar to Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “Ruins of Isis”.
At a first glance, the new culture appears to be purely oral – the contact team can’t find any evidence of written records. At the same time, the women appear to be very involved with a kind of needlework, not unlike crochet or lace making. They even bring their crochet into meetings, and finished pieces of lace are often displayed on walls as decoration. Men, it is said, are not permitted to make lace – it is not manly.
What emerges eventually is that the “lace” is actually writing – and that discovery made me physically sick. The story is set up perfectly for maximum impact: from the first contact team’s condescending attitude towards what they see as a typical female activity of lace making, their incomprehension of why men would want to engage in this in the first place, to the reversal of gender roles compared to our own history – for me everything was lined up perfectly for an insight to hit me like lightning.
For me personally, language is a key part of my identity – I am fluent in three. The subset of language that is written is hugely important in my life: I earn my living (indirectly) reading and writing things. A lot of the time – like right now – I interact with the world through reading and writing. When I’m sad, or angry, or frustrated, I write; when I’m happy, I write. (It gets me into trouble sometimes.) When I want to know something, I read up on it; when I want to relax, I read; when I want to think, I read! If I was not allowed to read and write, I would not be me: I would be materially and spiritually poorer, I would quite literally not be the same person.
This is why “Looking Through Lace” had such a powerful impact on me: it pointed me at our own history, at the countless generations of women who were not allowed to learn to read or write, whose history was taken away from them – and from us – because they had no way of recording it.
So today I would like to celebrate just a few of the remarkable women who – despite everything – did manage to write, and whose voices have remained with us through the ages.
Claudia Severa was not a philosopher, or theologian, or social commentator, or writer of fiction. What she wrote was “I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I hope to prosper, and hail.” The reason this is remarkable is that it is the oldest known Roman document written by a woman. It was found in a Roman fort called Vindolanda, about 30 miles from where I live. The Vindolanda tablets give us a remarkable insight into life on the borders of the Empire around 100CE. They show a bustling town, more than a military fort, where officers’ wives lived with their husbands, wrote to each other, and invited each other to birthday parties. The tablets are exhibited at the British museum, yet looking at its description of the Vindolanda tablets, you would hardly know this document existed.
Heloise was a 12th-century French nun, whose lengthy correspondence with her former lover Pierre Abélard ranges from emotional to spiritual and philosophical matters. The telling of Heloise’s story often focuses on her romantic relationship with Abélard, sidelining her contributions to medieval theology.
Sei Shōnagon was a Japanese courtier and social commentator in the late 10th and early 11th century. She is known as the author of the “Pillow Book”, a remarkably readable and at times extremely witty collection of diary entries, musings, observations and poems. As well as being supremely entertaining, Shōnagon gives us a brilliant insight into life at the Emperor’s court. Here is an excerpt from the Penguin edition translated by Ivan Morris:

A good lover will behave as elegantly at dawn as at any other time. He drags himself out of bed with a look of dismay on his face. That lady urges him on: “Come, my friend, it’s getting light. You don’t want anyone to find you here.” He gives a deep sigh, as if to say that the night had not been nearly long enough and that it is agony to leave. Once up, he does not instantly pull on his trousers. Instead he comes close to the lady and whispers whatever was left unsaid during the night. Even when he is dressed, he still lingers, vaguely pretending to be fastening his sash.

We learn so much about relationships between men an women in Shōnagon’s society from this one passage! Shōnagon comes across as confident, empowered, often opinionated, highly intelligent. She is an absolute delight to read.
Murasaki Shikibu was a contemporary (and rival) of Sei Shōnagon’s. Murasaki is known as the author of The Tale of Genji, generally regarded as the world’s first novel.
These four women for me showcase the full spectrum – from writing about “women’s things” which our culture doesn’t value (Claudia Severa’s birthday party invitation), right through to playing on the big stage – writing novels and making contributions to philosophy and theology. We should celebrate them and treasure them, along with the few other women whose words still reach us through the ages. We should, above all, be aware of how privileged we are to live in a time where reading and writing is not considered “un-feminine”, and we should be aware that there are still parts of the world today where wanting an education is life-threatening for a girl. We have a duty to those who have gone before us, both recorded and unrecorded, and to our less fortunate contemporaries to remember, to raise awareness, and to keep writing. This is what Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day are all about.

As the first of my Women’s History Month posts, this is a little reprise of one of my Ada Lovelace Day posts from last year. Ada Lovelace Day is all about raising awareness of women past and present in science and technology. One of the women I chose to write about last year was Lise Meitner.
I found out about Meitner by chance, on my way home from work, listening to Radio 4’s Great Lives. Given that she was Austrian, that I carry and Austrian passport, and that I completed most of my education in the Austrian school system, this is practically criminal. Thank you Austrian education system, for failing to acknowledge even Austrian women’s contributions to science, for failing to present me with female role models in the sciences, for being incredibly uninspiring when it came to both science and history education. Thank you BBC, for finally bringing this amazing woman to my attention!

Lise Meitner was born in Vienna in 1878 to a Jewish family. She studied physics and became the second woman to obtain a doctoral degree from the University of Vienna. She moved to Berlin where she became Max Planck’s assistant (the Max Planck of the Planck Constant but also the Max Planck who wouldn’t, before Meitner, even allow women into his lectures).
Most of Meitner’s research was in collaboration with the chemist Otto Hahn. In the early 1930s they worked on attempts to create elements heavier than uranium by bombarding heavy nuclei with neutrons. With the rise of Hitler in Germany and the Anschluss of Austria, it became unsafe for Meitner to remain in Germany and she fled to Stockholm. From Stockholm, she continued her correspondence with Otto Hahn, who by that point was getting some really interesting experimental results from his attempts to create heavy elements – what he found was that as he bombarded heavy nuclei with neutrons, the output was actually lighter elements.
It was Meitner, with her physics background, who provided the theoretical explanation for what Hahn was seeing in the lab. She suggested that, instead of sticking to the nucleus and making it heavier, the neutrons were actually splitting it into two smaller nuclei – the process we now know as neutron-induced fission.
As the practical implications of her work were recognised, Meitner was invited to join the Manhattan Project, which she declined. Otto Hahn received the Nobel Prize in chemistry for his work on nuclear fission, while Meitner was not recognised. In later life, she even refused to appear in a documentary about the atomic bomb as she did not want her name associated with it, though she is believed to have been bitter about not receiving any official credit and recognition for her work on fission.
Lise Meitner was a pioneer, not just as a female physicist, but of physics in general. In my last post I talked about how restrictive gender roles result in women being denied access to certain areas of life as well as women’s contributions to those areas they do traditionally have access to generally being less valued. Meitner’s career in particular, and women in the sciences in general illustrate that first effect very well. Where higher education was easily available to men of a certain wealth and standing at dedicated institutions, Lise Meitner had to complete hers privately, and had to fight to be allowed to do a PhD. She had to fight to be allowed into Max Planck’s lectures. She had no role models to follow, and had to create her own path, and yet she managed to contribute to one of the 20th century’s most significant discoveries in science.
To date, only five women have won a Nobel prize in physics or chemistry, and two of those come from the same family! Another ten have won the Nobel prize in medicine, and there has been a single female winner in the Economics category. This is not because women are not good at science! People like Lise Meitner, Marie Curie, Claire Gmachl and many, many others more than prove that. It is because, historically, there has been a lot direct discrimination against women, and even today the way career structures in the sciences are set up indirectly discriminates against women who are not willing to sacrifice all else to get to the top.
By being aware of our history, by talking about the female role models that do exist, and by constantly challenging the structures which favour men and disadvantage women, hopefully we will be able to get to a truly level playing field where women are enabled and empowered to make outstanding contributions to science, and where those contributions are recognised and rewarded accordingly.

Name a great leader.
I often sit in meeting rooms and training sessions and get asked this question. I reckon there’s an 80% chance the first one or two people who popped into your head when you read that were male. My own highly unscientific experiment on Twitter yielded seven men and three women – and my Twitter feed is full of feminists! I recently gave a training session on leadership, and when preparing my slides, it took some genuine effort to get to four male and four female examples.
To me, this is a perfect illustration of why we so desperately need Women’s History Month, which kicks off tomorrow. There is a strong tendency for women to get sidelined by history. In some ways this is understandable: Wikipedia lists over 70 Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom, out of whom as you well know exactly one has been a woman; the United States is on its 44th President, and I’m sure you know the numbers there too.
There is one underlying reason for this: traditional, socially determined, restrictive gender roles – the kind of social norms which for centuries have dictated what it is acceptable for a woman to do as opposed to a man. A woman may bear and look after children, run a household, look after her husband. A man may work outside the home, he may engage in social, political and economic activities from which women are barred, he may own property! There are modifications of this to account for different periods in history and variations in social class, but you get the gist.
This then has two effects, both of which lead to women being erased from history. Firstly, very few women have access to the kinds of positions that men do. To succeed in a world from which she is traditionally barred, a woman must be truly exceptional. She must refuse to believe what she sees on a daily basis and what she is told over and over – that there is no place for her. She must create the path she walks, for there are no role models she can follow; she must create the yardstick against which she will be measured, which is invariably harsher than that against which men measure themselves. She must convince the men around her that, really, despite her unfortunate lack of a penis, she can perform well at the task in front of her – a task which in no way requires the possession of a penis.
Secondly, and to some extent more horrifically, the roles and work traditionally available to women – caring, nurturing, childrearing both at home and as the associated professions – are not seen by society as of equal value to the roles and work of men. What men do is worth noting, worth writing down, worth talking about. What women do, they do in secrecy and obscurity, and it is taken for granted. These are the twin mechanisms by which women’s history, female achievement, the lives of billions of women, are erased from our history.
Alan Bennett puts this better than me:

History is not such a frolic for women as it is for men. Why should it be? They never get round the conference table. In 1919, for instance, they just arranged the flowers then gracefully retired.
History is a commentary on the various and continuing incapabilities of men.
What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.
Mrs Lintott in The History Boys

Though sparse on detail, the indications Education Secretary Michael Gove has so far given on his view of what history is and how it should be taught don’t leave much room for hope. Children are to learn “facts” and a “narrative”. Historian Nigel Jones welcomes Gove’s Brave New History and lists ten things he believes children must learn at school:

1. Which three kings fought for the English throne in 1066?
2. Which was the longest, biggest, and bloodiest battle ever fought on English soil, and in which conflict?
3. Whose tomb were Chaucer’s Canterbury Pilgrimage going to see?
4. Who said (according to Shakespeare) ‘A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse?’
5. Who brought the printing press to Britain?
6. Who said she had the body of a weak and feeble woman, but the heart and stomach of an English king?
7. Who was the Lord Protector of England?
8. How many lines in a sonnet?
9. Who, according to Churchill, were ‘the Few’?
10. Who wrote ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ ?

So, um, how many of these require you to even acknowledge the existence of women? Yep, one.
I, for one, am fed up with following behind with the bucket. I think it’s time for women to reclaim our history, so I am really excited about Women’s History Month. Over the course of March, this blog will feature a series of posts around women’s history. I am hoping to give you some food for thought – both by raising awareness of women who have succeeded in traditionally male-dominated environments, but also by shedding some light on the parts of history which are so easily overlooked by the likes of Michael Gove. What I choose to write about will invariably reflect my own interests, but suggestions and ideas are always welcome, and if anyone wants to guest blog, then drop me a line. I’m looking forward to it.