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| Women Who Ought To Be Famous | |
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The exclusion of women's contributions in "regular" history is part of the reason why Women's Studies courses have become so popular in many universities. These courses are an effort by women to reclaim all of who we are and who we have been; to remember all that we have done in and for this world. Until very recently, women were being taught a "history" that began by assuming that women had done little of note in the world, and so, not surprisingly, failed to find any notable contributions made by women. The rise of women's history scholars, and the popularity of women's studies courses, were a direct response those assumptions about the unimportance of women's contributions. It's not that women's historians felt there was some vast conspiracy to exclude women, it was simply that women scholars began with a different assumption. As my colleague Jone Johnson Lewis, About Women's History Guide, writes in her "Perspectives on Women's History" series: If women aren't assumed to be part of history, then the historian won't look for evidence of women's role. One's assumptions help shape what evidence one looks for, and therefore what evidence one finds.
Thanks, in part, to these women's scholars, I have learned about many more notable women since my school days: Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Lucy Stone, Mary Wollstonecraft, to name just a few. Even so, most of the women I learned about were women who were active in the women's suffrage movement. Not that these women's work wasn't important, but it did contribute to my continuing misperception that women weren't very active contributors in other fields.
That's all changed since the "Really Cool Women who ought to be famous" thread started. So far, I have learned about:
Hildegard of Bingen, a medieval nun who wrote books on spirituality, medicine, botany, biology, and astronomy. She wrote 63 hymns. She was an effective administrator; as abbess, she separated her convent from the control of the local monastery and made it a successful separate entity. She was in demand as speaker and preached in many of Europe's great cathedrals. She was known to monarchs, scholars and church leaders across Europe. She died in 1179.
Annie Jump Cannon: Theorist of Star Spectra, who developed the system to index and classify stars by their spectra that is still in use today.
Cornelia Fort, the first woman to die on active duty for the United States when another pilot accidentally clipped the wing of the plane she was flying. Fort was a member of the Women's Flying Training Detachment (WFTD), established by Jackie Cochran, the first woman to ferry a bomber across the Atlantic (1941)
Dr. Mary Edwards Walker, the only woman to be awarded the Medal of Honor, and the first woman doctor to serve with the Army Medical Corps.
Maria Montessori, who developed the Montessori method for teaching children, and was the first woman to earn an MD from the University of Rome (1894). This one is my favorite because her last words when she died in 1952 were to her son: "What are you planning on doing to reform the world?"
There are many more women to discover! Read our nominations and be amazed at all that women have done in this world.
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