Forgotten Women: A Reading List
Clio, the muse of history, hasn't done very well by her daughters.
Over the last month or two* I've been thinking about how women vanish from history. How their contributions are often erased. Rachel Swaby, whose book about women scientists is listed below, describes writing about their lives as "revealing a hidden history of the world."
Here are a few examples of books that bring otherwise forgotten women back into the story, with links to books that I've written about before:
Karen Abbot. Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy: Four Women Undercover in the Civil War. Harper Collins. 2014 An account of four women who played active roles in the American Civil War, including Emma Edmonds who disguised herself as a man and enlisted in the Union Army
Margalit Fox. The Riddle of the Labyrinth: The Quest to Crack an Ancient Code. The forgotten role of classicist Alice Kober in the decipherment of Linear B, which is usually attributed solely to Michael Ventris.
Nathalia Holt. Rise of the Rocket Girls: The Women Who Propelled Us From Missiles to the Moon to Mars. The overlooked story of the women who did the math that made space exploration possible. "One small step for man" depended on a lot of pencil pushing by women.
Denise Kiernan. The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II. Touchstone. 2013. Kiernan tells the story of the young women who were recruited to work as secretaries, factory workers, mathematicians, and low level chemists at a secret installation at Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where they unknowingly helped develop the atomic bomb. Oak Ridge is familiar to anyone interested in the development of the atomic bomb, but its history has generally been told from the perspective of the men who led the project. Kiernan looks at the familiar story from the perspective of the women involved—women whom traditional histories of Oak Ridge have left out of the story entirely.
Adrienne Mayor. The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women Across the Ancient World. A sweeping and authoritative study of the realities behind the Greek myths about the Amazons. (If you want your Amazonian history and related popular history in bite-sized pieces, joint Mayor's Facebook group, Amazons Ancient and Modern
Rachel Swaby. Headstrong: 52 Women who Changed Science--and the World. Broadway Books. 2015. Written in response to media accounts of brilliant women scientists that routinely note "domesticity before personal achievement", Headstrong treats "women in science like scientists instead of anomalies or wives who moonlight in the lab." Swaby makes the interesting choice not to include Marie Curie because Curie "is who we talk about when we talk about women in science…thee token woman in a deck of cards featuring famous scientists." Instead she gives us fifty-two fascinating stories of women you've never heard about.
That should keep you going for awhile.
*Or the last thirty years, depending on how you count.
ADDENDUM: A regular blog reader reminded me of another book that should be on this list, and my personal TBR list: Founding Mothers: The Women Who Raised Our Nation, by Cokie Roberts. thanks, Paul
The secret lives of America’s most important historical documents
In the early days of World War II, poet Archibald MacLeish, then the reluctant director of the Library of Congress, worked with the Secret Service to relocate the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the Gettysburg Address and thousands of other precious documents to hiding places, including Fort Knox, where they would be safe in case of enemy bombing. In American Treasures:The Secret Efforts to Save the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Gettysburg Address, Stephen Puleo uses the story of MacLeish's undercover librarianship as a framing device for the documents' history as a whole, from the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 through the development of twenty-first century restoration and conservation techniques.
Puelo never loses track of the dual nature of the documents as both artifacts and symbols. He describes the physical creation and publication of the documents as well as the political debates that surrounded their creation, bringing new life to familiar stories in the process. (I don't know about you, but I never thought about what was involved in producing copies of the Declaration of Independence for distribution in 1776.) He traces the documents' physical deterioration, attempts to preserve them, and bureaucratic infighting over their control. In what is possibly the most fascinating section of the book, he compares the single-handed efforts of Stephen Pleasonton, a senior clerk in the office of the Secretary of State, to save the documents when the British attacked Washington in 1814 with MacLeish's carefully executed plan.*
Ultimately, American Treasures is an engaging exploration of Archibald MacLeish's assessment that "They are not important as manuscripts, they are important as themselves."
Who would have thought the story of some pieces of paper could be so enthralling?
*Pleasanton wrapped them in makeshift linen sacks**, drove them out of the city in borrowed wagons, and hid them in an abandoned farmhouse. Not exactly Fort Knox.
**Sewed together by Pleasanton and other government clerks, none of whom would have been experienced with a needle. (I picture a lot of sticking themselves and swearing.)
Most of this review appeared previously in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Déjà Vu All Over Again: Building a Wall
By Edward Valachovic, thanks to a Creative Commons license
Last week while we all blew noisemakers and wore party hats to celebrate the the 100th anniversary of America's National Park Service, we let another anniversary slip by with less fanfare. On August 26, 1961, the Berlin Wall became more than just a barbed wire and cinder block barricade.
If you want a vivid and detailed description of the construction and impact of the wall, I recommend reading Thomas Harding's The House by the Lake. Here's the short version:
Construction of the wall began on August 12--a Soviet response to the thousands of East Germans who fled to the western sectors of Berlin. It was now illegal to cross the wall and border guards were instructed to shoot anyone who tried. On August 24, twenty-four-year-old Günter Litfin became the first East German to be shot as he tried to escape to the West. Two days later, West Berliners were forbidden from crossing into the East.
The wall stood as an international symbol of oppression until November, 1989. Many (most?) of us watched with tears of joy when East Berliners destroyed the wall with their own hands.*
Today some politicians here in the United States propose building another wall on another border. Really, people? Is this the example you want to follow?
*I still tear up just typing these words.