Herstory

In a fast-moving tech world, it's worth taking time to remember Grace Hopper. A navy admiral and math whiz, she taught computers to talk

'Extraordinary Women in Science & Medicine', an exhibit at The Grolier Club, highlight 32 women scientists who transcended gender-related societal constraints, including two queer women.

...It has nothing to do with the innate characteristics of women (because that idea is a fallacy if ever there was one) but rather the way people who are identified as "feminine" by society are treated, or not treated: the stories they are told about themselves.

All that philosophizing aside, de Beauvoir explains in detail the ways — at least up to her time, in the mid-1900s — that women of equal intelligence were kept away and turned down from institutions of higher learning.

And the women highlighted in this exhibit are some of the few who transcended, for whatever reason, those gender-related societal constraints on their intellect.

In 1881, Edward Charles Pickering, director of the Harvard Observatory, had a problem: the volume of data coming into his observatory was exceeding his staff’s ability to analyze it. He also had doubts about his staff’s competence–especially that of his assistant, who Pickering dubbed inefficient at cataloging. So he did what any scientist of the latter 19th century would have done: he fired his male assistant and replaced him with his maid, Williamina Fleming. Fleming proved so adept at computing and copying that she would work at Harvard for 34 years–eventually managing a large staff of assistants.