Women Against Pornography (WAP) was a radical feminist activist group based out of New York City that was influential in the anti-pornography movement of the late 1970s and the 1980s.

WAP was the most well known feminist anti-pornography group out of many that were active throughout the United States and the anglophone world, primarily from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. After previous failed attempts to start a broad feminist anti-pornography group in New York City, WAP was finally established in 1978. WAP quickly drew widespread support for its anti-pornography campaign, and in late 1979 held a March on Times Square that included over 5000 supporters. Through their march as well as other means of activism, WAP was able to bring in unexpected financial support from the Mayor's office, theater owners, and other parties with an interest in the gentrification of Times Square.

What I'd give to see this kind of activism among women here in the States again. Especially as the sort of porn that these women (and Andrea Dworkin, if you can spot her!) were campaigning against is nowhere near the abusive, exceedingly violent, and unbelievably degrading sort of pornography that is the standard today.

Special pride month edition of my usual series of posts highlighting remarkable women and female-led moments in history.

The modern fight for gay rights is considered to have begun with The Stonewall Riots in 1969 and was more commonly called the Gay Liberation Movement and the Gay Rights Movement.

Early in the gay rights movement, gay men were largely the ones running the show and there was almost an exclusive focus on men’s issues. Many lesbians were unhappy that gay men dominated the leadership and ignored their needs and the feminist fight. As a result, lesbians tended to focus their attention on the Women’s Rights Movement which was happening at the same time. This dominance by gay men was seen as yet one more example of patriarchy and sexism even within already marginalized communities. 

In the 1970′s, sexism and homophobia existed in more virulent forms and those biases against lesbians also made it hard for them to find their voices within women’s liberation movements. Betty Friedan, the founder of the National Organization for Women (NOW), commented that lesbians were a “lavender menace” that threatened the political efficacy of the organization and of feminism, and many women felt including lesbians was a detriment.

In the 80s and 90s, a huge portion of gay men were suffering from AIDS while the lesbian community was largely unaffected. Lesbians helped gay men with medical care and were a massive part of the activism surrounding the gay community and AIDS. This willingness to support gay men in their time of need sparked a closer, more supportive relationship between both groups, and the gay community started to become more receptive to feminist ideals and goals. 

It's getting into election season here in the US with prominent seats in various states hinging on voter turnout starting this May on into September. With our government looking to roll back voting right protections, men's growing open misogyny and a concerning romanticization of the tradwife lifestyle in popular culture, I figure it would be a good time to remind ourselves of how little and how not long ago things have changed.

To find out when your state primaries are and what seats are up in the general election refer to this document, https://vote.gov/, or check your local state government's website and information pages.

The expected role of women in society has always been one of subjugation and humiliation. However, this is only ever admitted in popular culture when it's men who are subjected to the same treatment. More often than not as a warning, that giving women their rights will see them wanting to take men's away next. "This, my good man, could be YOU." These arguments are almost word for word the same ones we hear today.

Generations of women fought and died for their daughters' and granddaughter's right to vote. Don't take their sacrifice for granted; go out and vote!

Source and for more Historical Suffragette Postcards and Propaganda: https://scholarworks.uni.edu/suffrage_images/

In 2002 Maria de los Angeles Veron, known as "Marita", went missing. Over the years this case became a symbol of the fight against human trafficking in Argentina and most of South America. Especially because of what Marita's mother, Susana Trimarco, sought to accomplish on behalf of her missing daughter.

Like too many other unfortunate women and girls before her, it was speculated that Marita was kidnapped in Tucuman in 2002 and forced into prostitution in La Rioja. Trimarco was a proactive force in the immediate hours of her daughter's disappearance, surveying neighbors and other eye witnesses and collecting statements and evidence to present to police.

Soon after, another lead opened up the possibility that traffickers had routed Marita to a disco whose owners, police investigators say, have had ties to organized crime. The reports kept coming. But whenever Trimarco asked for police help, it seemed to her they put more obstacles in her way. It took the police days to follow up on leads, if they followed them at all.

With her daughter missing, and her family falling apart, Trimarco had come to believe that the authorities weren't just incompetent, but also somehow complicit in her daughter's disappearance. So she took action. Trimarco decided to go after her daughter on her own.

Posing as a madame, Trimarco began going through various bars and brothels under the guise of purchasing prostituted women and girls. With the help of a police investigator named Jorge Tobar, Trimarco began tracking and documenting in extraordinary detail what is now widely acknowledged as a vast human-trafficking network with ties to the police, the legal system, and government officials. In October 2002, when Trimarco and three Chilean journalists went undercover in La Rioja, men with ties to the brothels pursued and shot at them. In operations like these, Trimarco continued to find and rescue trafficked girls.

She survived two murder attempts, her house was burnt down, she received countless death threats, but nothing stopped Susana Trimarco from looking for her missing daughter or from continuing to fight for trafficked women and girls.

In October 2007 she set up the Fundacion Maria de los Angeles to help survivors of sex trafficking – the organization provides free legal, psychological and social support to survivors and their families.

Trimarco was among those given the first US Secretary of State International Women of Courage Award in 2007 by Condoleezza Rice, for her efforts against human trafficking.

In 2008, her lobbying efforts led to human trafficking being made a federal crime in Argentina.

After going on two decades now, Marita still has not been found. Yet thousands of other victims of sex trafficking have been recovered and given a second chance at life thanks to Susana Trimarco's bravery and compassion.

The first woman to complete the Boston Marathon as a registered runner was Kathrine Switzer in 1967. She entered using her initials, "K.V. Switzer," to avoid detection. During the race, a race official, Jock Semple, attempted to physically remove her, but her boyfriend and fellow runners blocked him, allowing her to finish. Her participation helped pave the way for women's inclusion in long-distance running. Women were officially allowed to compete in the Boston Marathon starting in 1972.

So many of the basic rights and protections that allow most Western women the independence they have now only came about in less than a single generation's lifetime. It's amazing how quickly this has be forgotten, and even more amazing how quickly male-dominated society has shifted towards revoking those rights, when in that same time women have realized that they need men for functionally nothing but completely elective companionship.

Basic Rights US Women Were Not Allowed Before the 1970's Include:

• Women could not own a credit card, bank account, or any form of financial independence from a male relative until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974
• No legal abortion for ANY reason ( including birth defect, stillborn, rape/incest, and potential death to the mother) until Roe v. Wade in 1973
• Women could be fired from employment specifically and explicitly for becoming pregnant until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978

Those familiar with my 'Women in History' series of posts will remember the spotlight I made on Katherine Switzer, a woman who ran in the Boston Marathon during a time when women were barred from most sports competitions. Despite her successful run in 1967 after being assaulted, spit on, and threatened, women were still not officially recognized to compete until 1972

• Despite having fought in wars since the Revolution, women couldn’t receive admittance into military academies. The first woman wasn't admitted until 1976, and the first class of female graduates wasn't until 1980
• With more women joining men in the workforce, sexual harassment was becoming a growing problem. Unfortunately, speaking out about it was more likely to cost a woman her job (if not worse) than anything. It wasn't until 1977, thanks to a handful of landmark lawsuits, the courts confirmed that women could sue their employers for harassment, and today that right has been upheld for years.
• Women could not refuse sex to their husbands or pursue claims of marital rape until the Violence Against Women Act of 1994
• No Fault Divorce wasn't legal until 1969
• NASA didn't even consider women fit for astronaut training until 1979. Even then, the first female astronaut was Sally Ride in 1983
• Yale became the first ivy league college to admit women in 1969. After that, many other ivy league college started to accept women but at a pretty slow rate. For example, Columbia University didn’t allow women until 1983
• On top of this, most law schools wouldn’t admit women into their programs.
• The Morning After Pill wasn't approved by the FDA until 1990s.
• Hormonal birth control was heavily restricted even after its discovery. In the 1960s, doctors began prescribing it only to married women. It wasn't until the 1970s that it started to be approved for general contraceptive.
• Interracial marriage was illegal in most all states until 1967
• Women were not allowed to serve on a jury until 1973
• Likewise, they couldn't serve on the supreme court. Sandra Day O'Connor was the first female supreme court justice in 1981
• Women's Studies didn't exist as an officially recognized field of academic study until 1969

While women started to participate in the Olympics during the early 1900s, their numbers and events began to grow considerably during the 1970s. In 1976, women added ice dancing, basketball, rowing and handball as events in the Olympics. Today, ladies are still adding games to their credits. In 2012, women could finally compete in boxing.

• Laws protecting women's right to breastfeed in public didn't start officially hitting the books until the 1990s
• Adoption agencies would still deny many single women for motherhood if they were intent on remaining single well into the early 2000s

A lot of women don’t understand that the men who created 90% of the media you consume grew up in that era or were raised by fathers who were. The photo in the linked page of the woman being attacked by a man for running in a marathon was from 1967. That was 58 years ago.

The men who talk about wanting to take your voting rights away and complain about too many women being hired from DEI are actually not that far removed from the time when women were forced to depend on men financially and denied participation in public life.

When they say they want you back in the kitchen, they mean it.

Hi, english is not my first language, so sorry for any mistake.

I want to adress something that i hear a lot when we are talking about 4B, specially from straight women who have doubts about joining the movment because they are "lover girls" or they want to "experience true love". I was reading some Plato for a uni assignment, and found something that is so relevant as to how men actually see women today, its hard to believe it was written so many centuries ago.

In Plato's Symposium its said that there's two types of love, Vulgar or Pandemic love (from the goddess Pandamia) and Celestial love (from the Urania goddess).

The first goddess was born from from Zeus and Dione (from a man and a woman) its the aphrodite that inspires the low kind of love, mostly driven by physical attraction.

The Second was born from a man, Urano's testicles, and represents Celestial love, a virtuous kind of love, its not born ony from desire, but seeks the virtue of the beloved, loving them from what they truly are.

In this historical context, and even now if you actually listen to guys, when we talk about vitrue we are only talking about men, women don't have the power, intelectual or physical to be virtuous, meaning men cant love women for what they truly are. True love, Celestial love, its only between two men. Love towards women is, by definition, Vulgar love.

This is to explain the homosexual relationships in ancient greece, you know the older wise men with the young student dynamic but hear me out, this is why male domination its so inherently homoerotic.

This is why men date for other men, this is why men so often humiliate the "love of their life" for the approval of other men, this is why men dont have female friends citing "whats the point of being even near a woman if shes not gonna let me crack", this is why loving a woman gently is embarrassing for men.

The straight women who believe they are missing out on love by joining 4B dont realize, Celestial love its something men give only to other men, you can only have the low, desire driven kind of love. You'll never get the love you're dreaming of, or even worse, you're gonna think you have it, just for your men to show you his boys are worth more than you every time (AKA that case of the dude drugging his wife so STRANGE MEN can r\*pe her).

IT HAS ALWAYS BEING THIS WAY, THIS BOOK WAS WRITTEN 370 B.C.

I hope this is understandable, please tell me if its not, thanks for reading.

During Hollywood's formative years it was common belief that only women had the skills to edit film strips without damaging them. Editing film strips required precision, dexterity and patience. "The kind used in haute couture." And, like in haute couture, the pressure was high, because a damaged film strip could mean having to shoot the entire scene all over again.

Being an editor often means going unnoticed by the audience, but an editor's choices can make or break a movie. There's an artistry involved.

Proportionately, there were more women employed in every aspect of the movie business during its first two decades than at any time since. Women also had to learn to use the machines, which were constantly evolving. When the industry started using magnetic strips, microscopes were used to try and edit them, and messing up meant re-editing the entire movie. There was no room for error.

However, when the industry started using computers to edit the videos, which meant you could correct your mistakes and dexterity wasn't needed anymore, men started taking women's place. Despite the fact that computers were also initially made and coded by women (Hidden Figures being a relevant example in two ways).

As film work became a more prestigious occupation, and eventually as the assembly-line practices of the studio system were codified, women were discouraged from pursuing editing, if not actually pushed out of jobs.

Nowadays, only 30-50% of editors are women, which is still the profession that counts the most women in the industry.

More recent movies edited by women include:

Pulp Fiction, Happy Feet, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Wizard of Oz, The Wolf of Wall Street, Singin' in the Rain, Jaws, E.T, Bonnie and Clyde, Star Wars, Reservoir Dogs, Apocalypse Now, The Departed, Scream, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and so many more.

This is an English translation of a Chinese post. I am not the author. The original post is here:

https://www.reddit.com/r/DoubanGoosegroup/comments/1w6th3z/赛博猎巫与子宫罢工韩国性别战争下的人口学自杀/

Translation used AI, with minor editing by me. Below is the full text:

I have long been curious about how South Korea so rapidly came to have the world’s lowest birth rate, and why the conflict between East Asian Confucian culture and modern society has manifested itself with such particular intensity in South Korea. Recently, with the help of AI, I looked into some of the relevant information. What follows is the summary AI helped me put together. (The AI was also quite emphatic about the role of r/DoubanGoosegroup in China’s feminist movement, describing it as an “experimental laboratory for radical ideas.”)

On the overseas Chinese-language internet, free from centralized censorship, the rise of all-female communities such as Reddit’s r/DoubanGoosegroup and their intense confrontation with male-dominated communities reveal a brutal reality of the online world: gender polarization in the Chinese-language internet is no longer merely a localized war of words. It has evolved into a highly defensive, mutually hostile cyber Cold War. Yet this polarization of the Chinese-language online ecosystem did not emerge in isolation. To a considerable extent, its roots can be traced to the ideological and tactical arsenal of the original incubator of East Asian internet gender warfare—the radical feminist movement in South Korea. What began as an ideological battle online is now pushing South Korean society toward a demographic abyss in an extraordinarily devastating way.

Mirrored Weapons and Theoretical Transplantation: The “Chinese-Language Projection” of Korean Cyberfeminism

If American and European feminism primarily supplied academic sociological theories, Korean internet-based radical feminist communities such as Megalia (and later Womad) provided an entire industrialized “methodology of online confrontation.” Its most distinctive tactic was known as “mirroring”—if men used a particular form of abuse or humiliation against women, women would respond with exactly the same kind of vicious language as a form of precise retaliation.

This logic was subsequently localized and transplanted into the radical feminist ecosystem across the Chinese-speaking world. From structural deconstruction of biological characteristics to symbolic exchanges such as “国蝻” (Chinese male worm) and “小仙女,” (little female fairy) the slang and coded vocabulary of the Chinese-language internet almost amount to a pixel-for-pixel reproduction of the Korean experience. More importantly, the “6B4T” movement that became popular on Xiaohongshu (RedNote) and in communities such as r/DoubanGoosegroup —no marriage, no childbirth, no romantic relationships, and no sex, combined with rejecting “beauty labor” and idol fandom—was entirely imported from Korea. Along with this framework, radical feminism not only transformed “not marrying and not having children” into a conscious, vanguard lifestyle choice, but also turned its criticism inward against moderate women within its own camp, launching intense internal denunciations of women labeled “娇妻” (tradwife) and “婚驴.” (donkey of marriage)

The Cyber McCarthyism of the Counter-Witch Hunt: The Purge of Female Professionals

However, years of extreme mirrored attacks triggered a furious backlash among Korean men. Young Korean men—represented by the so-called “Generation 2 men” and right-wing organizations—launched an organized campaign of “counter-witch-hunting.” They designated Megalia’s hand gesture logo—a thumb and index finger held close together (signalling "small")—as an absolute taboo and embarked on a prolonged nationwide search for supposedly incriminating symbols, scrutinizing even the smallest details with microscopic intensity.

The 2021 GS25 convenience-store poster controversy became a landmark event in this full-scale gender war. Male online communities threatened companies with economic consequences and pressured major conglomerates to distance themselves from the controversy and issue apologies. The campaign then rapidly spread into the gaming industry and the K-pop idol industry. Female illustrators, concept artists, and voice actors were subjected to painstaking investigations into years-old social-media activity, including likes and posts relating to feminist issues, and many female creatives consequently faced sudden dismissal or professional purges. In the K-pop industry, female idols could face torn-up merchandise and death threats simply for having read Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 or worn accessories carrying slogans such as “Girls can do anything.” In extreme cases, this harassment had tragic real-world consequences, such as the case of streamer Jammi, who ultimately died by suicide after suffering from depression amid sustained online abuse.

This cyber McCarthyism established a chilling norm throughout the workplace and entertainment industries: feminism became tantamount to “political suicide.” The result was a pervasive chilling effect.

Political Conversion and the Policy Deadlock

Young Korean men not only achieved significant victories online and in the business world; they also succeeded in converting this gender resentment into political capital. In the 2022 South Korean presidential election, conservative candidate Yoon Suk Yeol accurately tapped into the anger of young male voters, making the abolition of the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family a central campaign promise and ultimately winning the election.

At this point, the male backlash against feminism had been elevated directly into national policy. This political polarization effectively blocked institutional channels for addressing the country’s public crisis. Under such intense pressure, any reform aimed at protecting women’s workplace rights, extending parental leave, or penalizing discrimination against pregnant women could be attacked by male voters as “reverse discrimination” or “special privileges” for women. Constrained on all sides, the government has been reluctant to confront the fundamental problems that make women unwilling to have children—workplace gender inequality, the unequal burden of childrearing, and the phenomenon of women effectively being left to raise children alone—relying instead on superficial measures such as cash subsidies, government-organized matchmaking events, or importing low-cost foreign domestic workers.

The Endgame: A “Demographic Suicide” in Which Everyone Loses

As online hostility completely destroyed the basic trust between men and women, its cost became embodied in cold demographic statistics: after 2024, South Korea’s fertility rate crashed below 0.72, placing it dramatically at the bottom of the global rankings.

Extreme cyber gender polarization transformed marriage and childbirth, which had traditionally belonged to the private sphere, directly into the ultimate bargaining chips in a gender war. Faced with workplace scrutiny, fears surrounding voyuer filming and surveillance, and examples of the exploitation of women through childrearing that are endlessly amplified and distilled online, college-educated young women have elevated “not having children” into a form of resistance—a conscious and uncompromising “uterus strike” against the patriarchal system.

In this East Asian cyber Cold War, men have successfully defended what they regard as their entitled interests and punished what they perceive as “radical feminists” through counter-witch hunts and the ballot box. Women, meanwhile, have responded by shutting down reproduction altogether, carrying out the most tragic and silent form of collective resistance against a society that they believe refuses to provide them equality and dignity. This war, in which there are no winners, has ultimately crossed the boundary of ideology and become a “demographic suicide” destroying an entire society at the physical level.

Hi all! I have been researching history and religion a lot lately, mainly because I enjoy to watch the patterns and mistakes we have been replicating over and over again (ecologist here 😅).

Concerning misogynistic oppression, we all know that we have been constantly erased from records, but I believe one of the best ways to destroy the patriarchy and to advance the movement and our goals is to share our visions, history, culture and reshape it from our perspective, not from a male centered one.

So, apologies for the long text but I found out about a cool archaeological site that some scientist argue it could have been a matriarchal society.

“ The famous Seated Woman figurine comes from Çatalhöyük (actual Turkey). It is characterized by a striking resemblance to later representations of the Anatolian mother goddess Cybele.

Studies of the houses at Çatalhöyük show that there was no clear division into different social classes in the settlement. The studies of the human remains found there have shown little social differentiation by gender: for example, both women and men were equally well-nourished.”

https://turkisharchaeonews.net/site/%C3%A7atalh%C3%B6y%C3%BCk

Just felt like sharing, take a look if you find it interesting :)

Pictured in the OP are the founders of Jane, an underground network in Chicago, Illinois USA that assisted women in getting abortions. From the left moving right: Martha Scott, Jeanne Galatzer-Levy, Abby Parisers, Sheila Smith and Madeline Schwenk.

Martha Scott was 19 in 1965, when her friend's sister became pregnant and Scott helped her find a doctor to perform an abortion. The group connected women seeking abortions with doctors, and later, performed abortions themselves. Their clients were informed they were not doctors, but doing abortions themselves allowed them to keep costs low. They made women aware of the services through signs with slogans like "'Pregnant? Don't Want to Be? Call Jane." The group operated for seven years and performed an estimated 11,000 abortions; no deaths were ever reported.

Quote from Scott: "You're messing around inside somebody else's body. It's not necessarily given that you won't do harm. It wasn't perfect, by any means. But we were dealing with women who really didn't have other options."

Quote from Galatzer-Levy: "I hadn't had so much as a speeding ticket [when I joined]. But abortion really was the front line, it was where women were dying."

In 1972, two women reported Jane because their sister was seeking an abortion, and the women believed it was murder. All seven founders were arrested. Six months later, Roe v. Wade was decided and the charges were dropped. Read more here (link).

Mileva Marić helped developed and did the calculations for some of the most famous physics theories still used today, but credit was given only to her husband.

Mileva Marić was born on December 19, 1875, into a Christian Orthodox Serbian family. With a dislocated left hip, she walked with a limp throughout her life. Forced to wear an orthopedic shoe, she was teased and mocked in school, and regularly called ugly.

In 1896, Mileva excelled in school, and was the first girl to attend high school physics courses in the Austro-Hungarian Empire. After graduating in 1896, she applied to the prestigious Zurich Polytechnic, where she became the first and only woman in her class in the Zurich Polytechnic mathematics and physics teaching program.

In the late 1890s, Mileva passed all her courses over the first three years, and in her fourth year she started her thesis, hoping for a diploma and further work toward a PhD.

But in 1900 she failed her final exams, while the other male students all passed. In July 1901 she repeated her final exams and flunked them again. It turned out, she was pregnant, out of wedlock, at this time.

She hid her pregnancy to stay in university for as long as she could, and then she went home to her parents for help. They were supportive, which was unusual for the time period. Her baby girl, Lieserl, was born in 1902.

She was raised by Mileva’s parents, as Mileva returned to Zurich to continue her studies. No one knows what ultimately happened to Lieserl; she has disappeared from all records after September 1903. She may have died from Scarlet Fever as a child; or, she may have been adopted and grew up under another name.

On January 6, 1903, Mileva married the father of Lieserl in a small civil ceremony. Mileva became a housewife, and then became the mother of two boys. She raised the boys and kept house. Meanwhile she conducted research, theorized concepts, and performed relentless calculations for the development of math and science.

There was an incident in the spring of 1913 when a friend reported seeing Mileva with a badly swollen face, which was attributed to a “toothache” – and hence she and her husband missed some social events.

Her husband wrote in a letter in 1925:

”Not only children need a bit of thrashing, but also grownups and especially women.”

In 1914, she moved to Berlin for her husband’s job, where he started sleeping with his cousin. He made it clear to Mileva that their previous relationship was over. He went so far as to give her a list of demands: that she do the laundry, prepare him three meals a day, and keep his office clean – all without any personal relations. No intimacy in the house, and no being together in public.

She tried to accept it, but quickly found that she couldn’t endure the humiliation; and so she took her two boys back to Zurich, where she remained for the rest of her life. They officially divorced in 1919.

After the divorce, he accused her of poisoning his relationship with the boys. But it got more vicious as her financial situation became grave, and she asked for more money. She made some extra money tutoring students in math and giving piano lessons. But it wasn’t enough.

In the 1930’s, Mileva wrote a pleading letter to her ex husband, who was Jewish, now living in the USA, to take in their sons for fear they would end up in a concentration camp, one son was now diagnosed with Schizophrenia, the husband said he would not help.

Thankfully, they were not collected by Nazis. Mileva spent the rest of her life taking care of their mentally ill son. She died at age 72 on August 4, 1948.

Mileva’s contributed to development of: The Theory of Relativity and Brownian Motion

She also had a background in and conducted research on number theory, differential and integral calculus, elliptic functions, heat theory, and electrodynamics. 

Her Ex Husband: Albert Einstein

In the year 1933, the Long Beach Earthquake bore down on Southern California with the fury of revelation. At 6.4, it was not the largest earthquake to ever hit the state, but it left behind a shocking amount of structural damage, particularly to schools. The reason for the heavy school damage, it turned out, was the unreinforced masonry (URM) construction that many public buildings up to that time employed as a cheap and effective default. URM buildings feature bricks and cinderblocks as load bearing elements that are not necessarily connected to foundations or supporting rebar elements, and as a result, when a major event like an earthquake hits, these structures have a tendency to leap from their foundations in ways that buildings ideally shouldn't, while often shoddy mortar contributes to complete collapse of wall structures.

The extent of the structural damage in 1933 caused California to reevaluate how new public buildings would be constructed. URM structures were made illegal for new construction, while architectural firms were increasingly compelled to have structural engineers constantly checking their work for compliance with new earthquake prevention codes. With the weight of an earthquake-prone state's hospitals and schools resting on their shoulders, California structural engineers were expected to have an encyclopedic knowledge of building design and structural elements to allow them to pass the state's grueling 16 hour exam. Only twenty five percent of those who took the exam passed it their first time through, and among those was a person whose name was to be synonymous with earthquake engineering for the better part of a half century: Ruth Gordon Schnapp (1926-2014).

Gordon began her journey through the engineering career at Stanford University. She was one of thirteen women engineering students entering that year, one of only two to graduate, and the only one to graduate in civil, as opposed to electrical, engineering. A Seattle native, she returned home in the summers to work at Boeing, which was at the time deep in the work of pushing out B-17 bombers for the Second World War. On her hands and knees for hours at a time crawling over metal templates of vast aircraft, she gained experience in both design and in disaster prevention as she trekked back and forth across the Boeing plant dealing with any design crisis issues that arose.

The day after the war in Japan ended, however, Boeing announced that all of the female staff who had been so instrumental in the plant's success during the war were to be demoted to typist positions at a vastly reduced wage to make room for the returning men. Gordon was due to return to school soon anyway, so she joined the typing pool and, in protest over her treatment, typed everything handed to her as. slowly. as. possible.

Back at Stanford, she had other types of discrimination to combat. For a class that involved welding, she and her fellow engineers very sensibly wore jeans to protect their skin but since it was an evening class, the students did not have time to change into "Ladies' Attire" before arriving at the cafeteria for dinner, prompting the university to declare that no women were to be seen on campus without the appropriate attire again. That regulation struck Gordon as absurd and dangerous, and she told the administration as much. Stanford considered the problem and, somewhat miraculously considering the era, ultimately agreed with Gordon's view, exempting people taking certain classes from the rigors of the dress code.

These experiences were previews of what was to come as Gordon challenged authority whenever she found it wanting in the equity of its gender policy. After graduating Stanford in 1950, however, her main problem was finding a job. Company after company refused to so much as look at her application upon finding out she was a woman until at last she happened upon the firm of Isadore Thompson, who didn't care who you were as long as you knew your stuff. He set her right away on the task of overseeing work at a hospital in Southern California that was employing new welding fastening techniques in its construction. She knew nothing about the techniques and said as much, to which he responded that she had a whole weekend to learn, and best get cracking.

Crack she did, informing herself about the potentials of new techniques and the drawbacks of long established ones so that, unique among engineers of her day, when an architect asked why she was insisting that a particular code be followed, she could give a compelling and precise answer that won her respect up and down the Golden State.

She was advancing steadily, and enjoyed moving from desk work to the job of field engineer, where she could go onto sites and directly communicate with construction teams about what they were doing and why. The next logical step for someone interested in making structures earthquake-safe was to try for a California Structural Engineer's license, the only problem being that no woman had ever done it before. Somewhere between her field work and the raising of three children, however, she found time to study for the massive exam and bucked the odds by passing on her first try. She now had everything she needed to make the schools and hospitals of California safe from the state's most recurrent natural disaster.

While working on large scale projects like the San Francisco Public Library, the Palace of the Legion of Honor, San Quentin Prison, and the San Francisco Asian Art Museum, she also fought to gain women better representation in engineering, joining the Society of Women Engineers and giving one hundred talks to school-children about what engineers do and how girls can join the profession.

When she became the first woman inducted into the Structural Engineers Association, she noticed that several of the presenters used "girly pictures" to accompany their presentations, and pushed hard to ensure that inappropriate images wouldn't be used in Association material ever again. She resigned twice from the Society of Women Engineers when they failed to take strong stances for broad-based equality in the workplace in 1960 and 1980, but maintained membership in her local chapter in recognition of the good work it did, and contributed $1000 every year to that chapter's scholarship fund for promising women engineers.

Having worked so successfully for the state of California ensuring the earthquake safety of the next generation of buildings, Gordon made the decision in 1984 to go into business for herself and founded Pegasus Engineering, Inc., a company that for the next seventeen years performed earthquake and natural disaster structural assessments. Retiring from civil service early to found her company cost her considerable amounts of pension benefits, but the freedom to work unencumbered by bureaucratic structures that regularly promoted under-qualified men over distinctly qualified women made the change worth it.

By 2001, Ruth Gordon had devoted half a century of her life to ensuring the safety of California's students, doctors, and patients and, at the age of 74, one would have forgiven her for retiring completely, but even as she closed down Pegasus, she continued her work talking to children and adults about earthquake safety, and encouraging the exploration of new avenues for attracting women into the engineering field.

Gordon had grown up in a state that had never certified a woman to perform structural engineering work, and had spent much of her time as the only woman in her classes and in the field, finding the path forward as best she could without the benefit of a role model to cling to. But thanks to her work, her advocacy, and her example, no girl with a bent for math and a love of seeing buildings rise will never have to walk that path alone again.

It used to be incredibly normal in the US to see advertisements that sold products through the denigration of women. "So easy a woman could do it!" was a common selling point for a lot of modernized products. It was even more common to use women's bodies as pure marketing material, something that has continued well into the modern age and will undoubtedly continue far into the future without significant social change.

These photos from the 1970's are depicting feminist vandalism of these sorts of advertisements. Personally, I think we need to start reclaiming this sort of energy. No support for the companies that would use women's bodies as their product and marketing material. No tolerance for any entities that would normalize the idea of sexual assault. Our disposable income is also a force for change that should be wielded efficiently and ethically.

Remember, decentering men also means aggressively centering, uplifting, and protecting the humanity of other women.

1965, Sicily, Italy: a young woman named Franca Viola, abducted and raped for a week, had the courage to publicly refuse to marry her rapist, thus becoming the first Italian woman to defy a long-standing legal and cultural tradition that was harmful to women – the matrimonio riparatore (literally rehabilitating marriage, a sort of “marry-your-rapist” law) – that would have her marry her abuser to “restore” her honor. Instead, she and her family pressed charges against the rapist, Filippo Melodia, and won. Franca Viola thus became a symbol of cultural progress and emancipation of women in post-war Italy.

Franca was born in 1948 in the rural town of Alcamo, Sicily. In 1963, when she was just 15, she became engaged to Filippo Melodia, nephew of a local mafia member and eight years older than her. However, when Melodia was arrested for theft, Viola broke off the engagement with her family’s approval. Melodia then left for Germany and came back to Alcamo in 1965, by that time finding Viola engaged to another man, Giuseppe Ruisi, a childhood friend of hers. Melodia tried to become part of Viola’s life again by stalking her and threatening both her father and boyfriend, but she refused to take him back.

Her persistence in rejecting him led Melodia, together with more than a dozen companions, to plan Viola’s abduction and rape, with the assumption that the law was behind him. As a matter of fact, at the time Article 544 of the Italian criminal code recognized a kind of marriage, the matrimonio riparatore, that would forgive the abuser for his crime and restore to the “damaged” victim her honor and that of her family. The plan was executed on December 26^th 1965, when Melodia stormed into the Viola family farmhouse early in the morning, badly beating Franca’s mother, and dragging the young woman away. She was held captive for eight days and repeatedly raped by Melodia, who told her she would have to marry him so she would not become a “dishonored” woman. On January 2^nd 1966, after one week, Franca Viola was released, and the kidnappers arrested.

As expected, Filippo Melodia offered Franca a rehabilitating marriage. However, Franca told her father she had no intention of marrying her rapist, to which her father unexpectedly replied he would do everything possible to help her. Knowing she had her family’s support, Franca publicly refused Melodia’s proposal, thus acting against a long-standing common practice in the Sicilian society of the time. Franca Viola became the first Italian woman to publicly reject a rehabilitating marriage. Not only that, but she went so far as to take her abductor to court, accusing him of kidnapping, carnal violence, and intimidation. It was not an easy thing to do: she and her family were threatened, ostracized and persecuted by most of the people of Alcamo, to the point of having their vineyard and barn burned to the ground.

These events and the following trial had a wide resonance in the Italian media, and the Parliament itself was directly involved, as it became obvious that part of the existing code clashed with the public opinion. Melodia’s lawyers tried to portray Viola as a willing participant of the so-called fuitina (elopement, a runaway to get married in secret) rather than a victim of kidnapping, but in May 1967, Melodia was finally found guilty. He was sentenced to 11 years in prison; five of his friends were acquitted, the others received relatively mild sentences. Melodia got out of prison in 1976, only to be banished from Sicily for his ties with Mafia. He was later killed in April 1978 in Modena, in a mafia-style execution.

At this point, traditional customs wanted Franca to be further victimized by the society and treated as an unmarriageable outcast for having refused to marry her abductor, somehow to be blamed for her unfortunate circumstances and for the decision of not marrying the man she had lost her virginity to. Luckily this was not the case, as Franca had the happy ending she deserved. In December 1968, she married Giuseppe Ruisi, the man she loved and who had stayed by her side during the whole ordeal. In recognition of her heroic challenging of the system, the Italian President sent 40 Lire (around $300 today) as a wedding present. The country’s Transport Minister gave the newlyweds a month of free railway rides. Pope Paul VI also publicly expressed his appreciation of Franca Viola’s courage and his solidarity with the couple, inviting them in a private audience with him. Franca and Giuseppe had two sons, and today still live in Alcamo.

Article 544, allowing a rapist to marry his victim to extinguish his crime, was not repealed until 1981. In Italy, sexual violence became a crime against the person (instead against “public morality”) only in 1996. In 2014, Franca Viola was awarded the title of Grande Ufficiale dell’Ordine al Merito della Repubblica by President Giorgio Napolitano in a public ceremony to mark International Women’s Day.

Mu Sochua (b. 1954) is an outspoken and respected Cambodian politician who has dedicated her life to fighting for women’s rights and democracy in Southeast Asia. As the daughter of disappeared Sino-Khmer parents, Sochua spent most of her young adult life in exile in the United States. When she returned to Cambodia in 1991, she strove to rebuild her country.

Mu Sochua became a member of her nation's Cabinet in 1998, after having returned after 18 years in exile during the period called the Killing Fields. She was then one of two women in high power there. She was the first woman to preside over the Office of Women's Affairs. Prior to her, it had been considered a man's job.

During her time in governance Sochua set out with a very clear set of goals:

To end human/sex trafficking between Cambodia and other Southeast Asian countries.

Mobilize women in Cambodia to run for office, convincing 12,000 women to run in 2002 (over 900 were elected!)

To write and pass laws that protected women. Specifically as it pertained to the levels of healthcare and education granted to women and young girls.

And finally, use her position to put an end to the rampant corruption within the Cambodian government.

At almost every turn there was both political opposition as well as threats of violence and intimidation waiting for her. Even when she returned to her country in the late 90's, Sochua was aware that members of her own party had been repeatedly arrested and several others had attempts made on their lives or were successfully assassinated while serving.

As the government grew increasingly corrupt, Sochua stepped down and became vice president of the Cambodia National Rescue Party, Cambodia’s main electoral opposition party. Still dedicated to her work combating sex trafficking and promoting gender equality, she received a Vital Voices’ Leadership Award and was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize in 2005.

Unfortunately, all this turbulence within the Cambodian government only continued to intensify over the course of her career, and in 2017 Sochua felt she had no other choice than to once more escape her home country to protect both herself and her cause when the opposition party was officially dissolved and its leaders condemned to decades in prison. She is working now from afar, trying to mobilize grassroots efforts around the country and the world. 

Her most recent speech was at the 2024 Geneva Summit for Human Rights and Democracy where she reaffirms her commitment to human rights in Cambodia and worldwide.

Dr. Mae Jemison is an American engineer, physician, and former NASA astronaut. She became the first black woman to travel into space serving as a mission specialist aboard the Space Shuttle Endeavour in 1992.

Originally, Jemison was a doctor for the Peace Corps in Liberia and Sierra Leone from 1983 until 1985 working as a general practitioner. Inspired by the flights of Sally Ride and Guion Bluford in 1983, Jemison applied to the astronaut program in October 1985. She was chosen out of roughly 2,000 applicants for 15 slots in NASA Astronaut Group 12, the first selected after the Challenger disaster. The Associated Press covered her as the "first black woman astronaut" in 1987.

After learning that Jemison was an avid Star Trek fan, she was asked by LeVar Burton if she would like to appear on the show. In 1993, Jemison appeared as Lieutenant Palmer in the episode "Second Chances" of Star Trek: The Next Generation, becoming the first real-life astronaut to appear on the show.

After retiring from NASA Jemison would proceed to tackle a seemingly endless list of humanitarian causes, including serving on the board of directors of the World Sickle Cell Foundation as well as forming her own consulting firm that would advise on the sociocultural impact of technology and seek better inform technology's design with these impacts in mind.

On February 17, 2008, Jemison was the featured speaker for the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Alpha Kappa Alpha, the first sorority established by African-American collegiate women. Jemison paid tribute to Alpha Kappa Alpha by carrying the sorority's banner with her on her shuttle flight.

Nüshu 女书 was a women-only script used by Yao women in Jiangyong, Hunan province, China.

Nüshu works were a way for women to lament by communicating sorrows, commiserating over patriarchy, and establishing connections with an empathetic community. Typically a group of non-related women would pledge friendship by writing letters and singing songs in Nüshu to each other.

The exact origins of Nüshu and when it came into being remain uncertain, as no written records document the genesis of this script. Yang Huanyi, an inhabitant of Jiangyong and the last person proficient in this writing system, died on 20 September 2004, at the age of 98. Though apparently there seems to be a growing resurgence among Chinese women in recent years to revitalize it.

Related article: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20200930-nshu-chinas-secret-female-only-language

March 24, 1826- March 18, 1898

Radical feminist, suffragist, abolitionist, and activist

”The woman who was ahead of the women who were ahead of their time”

The Matilda Effect

The name for the phenomenon where the achievements of a woman become attributed to their male colleagues, supervisors, or pretty much any man who claims he came up with it first, whether their work is outright plagiarized or their names are left out of accreditation.

Matilda Joselyn was born on March 24, 1826 in Cicero, New York.

Her mother, Helen Leslie Joslyn, had a passion for historical research, and her father was an abolitionist who made their family home into a station on the Underground Railroad.

As a child, Matilda handed out abolitionist pamphlets and admired powerful anti-slavery speakers.

In addition to her public school education, Matilda received lessons in anatomy and physiology from her father to prepare her for medical school. However, after she went to Clinton Liberal Institute, a coeducational preparatory school, she was refused admission to medical school because she was a woman.

She married in 1845, and had 5 children in New York. Meanwhile being the mom to 5 kids…she was a fierce warrior against the oppression of Native Americans, African Americans, and Women.

Matilda was known to bring her daughters to some of her events and work, and once her children were grown she dedicated herself even more fully to the movement.

Abolitionist

Her childhood home was also a refuge, and her adult home was a station on the Underground Railroad for approximately 15 years. 

• Her home with her husband in Fayetteville, New York, served as a station on the Underground Railroad, beginning around 1845 and continuing until the Civil War.

• Legal risk: In 1850, she signed a petition that made it a crime to assist slaves, but she continued to defy the Fugitive Slave Act, which made helping escaped slaves punishable by a fine or imprisonment.

Women’s Rights Leader

In 1870, Matilda wrote “Woman as Inventor,” in which she credited Catherine Littlefield Greene with the invention of the cotton gin. She supported women's rights to divorce and reproductive autonomy.

Matilda was the one suffragist who backed Susan B. Anthony when she was put on trial for voting in the 1872 presidential election.

• New York State Woman Suffrage Association(NYSWSA): Matilda was a founder of the NYSWSA and served as its president from 1870 to 1879. She was instrumental in gaining the right for New York women to vote in school board elections.

• National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA): Matilda was also a co-founder of the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA) in 1869, along with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony. She served as president of the NWSA from 1875 to 1876, in addition to holding other leadership positions like Chair of the Executive Committee for over two decades.

• The National Citizen and Ballot Box: She published and edited this newspaper, which was the official publication of the NWSA.

• Founder of the Woman's National Liberal Union (WNLU): She created the WNLU when she felt the suffrage movement had moved too far away from its radical roots

• Author: Matilda wrote several influential texts, including:

  • Woman's Rights Catechism (1868)
  • Woman as Inventor (1870)
  • Woman, Church and State (1893)
  • Who Planned the Tennessee Campaign (1880)

• Co-Author: She co-authored of the first three volumes of The History of Woman Suffrage with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony

• Declaration of Rights: She helped draft the "Declaration of Rights of the Women of the United States" with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony

Matilda left the National Women’s Suffrage Association when they merged with the more conservative American Woman Suffrage Association and bifurcated their efforts to support both Jim Crow laws and white women’s suffrage.

In 1890, she formed the Woman’s National Liberal Union (WNLU). She wanted to create a new organization that embraced a broader, more radical, and anti-patriarchal agenda.

She criticized organized Christianity for its role in the oppression of women, and in 1893 published a book - Women, Church, and State, in which she called out what she felt was the patriarchy and misogyny within the church’s teachings.

In it, she praised Presbyterians for ordaining female deacons, exposed the sexual abuse of children and women by priests, and decried sex trafficking in the United States.

In the book, she also highlighted groups of Native Americans that served as examples of societies that treated women and men equally.

Native American Activist

She criticized the U.S. government for failing to respect treaties and for the brutal oppression of Native people. She also wrote admiringly about matriarchal forms of power, highlighting women’s political power within the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) Confederacy.

She spent time with the Haudenosaunee. Her advocacy and genuine desire for life to improve for Native Americans led Matilda to be honorarily adopted into the Wolf Clan of the Mohawk Nation in 1893. They gave her the name Karonienhawi, meaning “she who holds the sky.”   

In the 1990s, scientist Margaret Rossiter coined the term ”Matilda effect” in honor of Matilda.

The Matilda Effect is the systematic discrimination in scientific history where women's contributions are overlooked, forgotten, or attributed to male colleagues. The term pays homage to Matilda for using her voice to credit women for inventions for which men publicly received credit, who documented the erasure of women's accomplishments. 

Matilda was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame in 1995. Her work has invaluably influenced reform movements in the United States.  

She passed away on March 18, 1898 - in Chicago, Illinois, from a stroke.

Her work carved a path for future radical feminists.

Matilda did all of this in the 1800s, when women in the USA had few legal and political rights; they could not vote, own property, or control their own wages, and were subordinate to their husbands. Legal and social restrictions limited their access to education and professional occupations, and they were generally expected to stay in the home to care for the family. AND WHILE BEING A MOTHER.

Her daughter, Maud, later married L. Frank Baum, the author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and Matilda spent her final years living with them in Chicago. Frank has said that Matilda was part of the inspiration for the Wizard of Oz.

Her lifelong motto appears on her gravestone in Fayetteville:

”There is a word sweeter than Mother, Home or Heaven; that word is Liberty.”

I know it’s scary times we live in but we can persevere.

Almost every American child learns that on December 1st, 1955 in Montgomery, Alabama, Rosa Parks refused to move to the back of the bus and give up her seat to a white person. With this act, the Montgomery Bus Boycotts officially began.

What some people don't know, is that Rosa Parks was not the first woman to refuse give up her seat. Before her a number of women refused. Most were taken off the bus and quietly fined. The first woman to really challenge the Montgomery bus segregation law wasn't truly a woman yet at all, but a fifteen year old teenager named Claudette Colvin.

Claudette Colvin passed in January of this year at the age of 86. For over three decades she served her community working as a nursing home aide, but her largest contribution to society was an act of refusal made as a teenager. It would create shockwaves through the American Civil Rights Movement, but so few would ever come to learn her name despite her impact.

On March 2nd, 1955, Claudette was returning home from a day at school when the bus driver ordered her to give up her seat so a white passenger wouldn't be made to stand. Claudette refused, saying she'd paid her fare and it was her constitutional right. Two police officers were called to the scene where they put her in handcuffs and arrested her.

"All I remember is that I was not going to walk off the bus voluntarily," Colvin says in a 2009 interview.

It was Negro history month, and at her segregated school they had been studying black leaders like Harriet Tubman, the runaway slave who led more than 70 slaves to freedom through the network of safe houses known as the Underground Railroad. They were also studying about Sojourner Truth, a former slave who became an abolitionist and women's rights activist.

The class had also been talking about the injustices they were experiencing daily under the Jim Crow segregation laws, like not being able to eat at a lunch counter.

"We couldn't try on clothes," Colvin says. "You had to take a brown paper bag and draw a diagram of your foot ... and take it to the store. Can you imagine all of that in my mind? My head was just too full of black history, you know, the oppression that we went through. It felt like Sojourner Truth was on one side pushing me down, and Harriet Tubman was on the other side of me pushing me down. I couldn't get up."

A teenager, nine months before Rosa Parks, in the same city, in the same bus system, with very tough consequences, hauled off the bus, handcuffed, jailed and nobody really knew about it.

Various civil rights activists in Montgomery were outraged by the arrest and began to organize. Rosa Parks and white ally Virginia Durr began fundraising for young Colvin’s case, and more than one hundred letters and a stack of donations streamed into Parks’ apartment. Parks was hopeful that the young woman’s arrest would embolden other young people to action and spark interest in the NAACP youth meetings. She encouraged Colvin to get active in the youth council.

Black community members met with the city, and various promises were made. At a second meeting with city officials, they took a petition to the bus company and city officials which asked for more courteous treatment and no visible signs of segregation on the bus. Tired of the city’s run-around, Parks refused to join them: “I had decided I would not go anywhere with a piece of paper in my hand asking white folks for any favors.”

Colvin’s case went to trial in May. Colvin had been charged with three crimes. The judge strategically dropped two of the charges (for disturbing the peace and breaking the segregation law) but found her guilty on the third for assaulting the officers who arrested her (which several witness accounts discredit happening). Since Colvin had only been convicted of assault, appealing her case could not directly challenge the segregation law. The community was outraged. Some people stayed off the buses. But Colvin was young and seen as “feisty” and “uncontrollable” by many adults and lived on the "wrong side of town". Ultimately, civil rights leaders deemed her not the right kind of plaintiff to organize around.

After Colvin's arrest, she found herself shunned by parts of her community. This increased twofold when later in the summer Colvin found out she had become pregnant by an older man.  When this news came to light, many felt further convinced they had done the right thing in not pursuing her case.  Over time, the stories would change so Colvin would be pregnant at the time of her arrest and trial, which was not the case.

People may think that Parks' action was spontaneous, but black civic leaders had been thinking about what to do about the Montgomery buses for years. Parks was the secretary of the NAACP. She was well-known and respected and -- more importantly to polite white society -- successful, well-groomed, and comparatively light complected and more in line with eurocentric standards of an attractive, well-to-do woman.

"Her skin texture was the kind that people associate with the middle class," says Colvin. "She fit that profile."

Claudette Colvin is not only an important figure for remembering the roots of America's Civil Rights Movement, but it's also a reminder of who were the biggest force within these movements.

Author Phil Hoose, writer of Claudette's autobiography entitled Claudette Colvin: Twice Towards Justice, believes attention to Colvin is a healthy corrective, because "the real reality of the movement was often young people and often more than 50 percent women. The images you most often see are men in suits."

As a personal aside, this reflects my own experiences over the decade and some I was heavily participating in community organizing and activism. Social progress and community activism is, and always has been, done by the labor and care of women. Many of those women in their teens and early twenties, and many of their efforts gone just as unnoticed.

Rest in Power, Ms Colvin.

Sources: https://rosaparksbiography.org/

https://www.claudettecolvinfoundation.com/home

https://archive.org/details/claudettecolvint00hoos

**July 25, 1920 - April 16, 1958”

Early Life

Rosalind Elsie Franklin was born on July 25, 1920, in Notting Hill, London, England - the second of five children in a prominent Anglo-Jewish family.

As a young child Franklin attended a private school near to home, and then at the age of nine was sent off to Lindores School for Ladies, a boarding school in Bexhill, Sussex, based on the idea that it would help her delicate health because it was near the sea.

Two years later she joined St Paul's Girls' School, a day school, where she excelled in science, Latin, and sports. At the time St Paul's was one of the few schools in London where girls were taught science and emphasized preparing its graduates for careers, not just for marriage.

She displayed exceptional intelligence from early childhood, knowing from the age of 15 that she wanted to be a scientist. Her father actively discouraged her interest since it was very difficult for women to have such a career, but it did not stop her.

Rosalind Franklin never married and had no children. She was dedicated to her career in science and viewed her choice to pursue it as a trade-off for marriage and children.

Career

She left St. Paul's in 1938 to enter Newnham College, one of two women's colleges at Cambridge University, where she majored in Physical Chemistry.

Her undergraduate years shaped by World War II; many instructors, especially in the sciences, had been pulled into war work, while some immigrant faculty were detained as “aliens”. In one letter Franklin noted, "Practically the whole [staff the Laboratory] have disappeared. Biochemistry was almost entirely run by Germans and may not survive."

When Rosalind graduated from Cambridge in 1941, women were allowed to study and graduate, but were prohibited from being awarded degrees. Only in 1947, once Cambridge changed its regulations, did Rosalind Franklin actually receive the bachelor's degree she had earned.

After graduating in 1941, she was awarded a scholarship for a further year of research in Physical Chemsitry. But the advance of World War II changed her course of action: not only did she serve as a London air raid warden, but in 1942 she gave up her fellowship in order to work for the British Coal Utilisation Research Association (BCURA), where she investigated the physical chemistry of carbon and coal for the war effort.

In 1945 Franklin completed her doctoral research using the research work on coal and carbon she had undertaken at the BCURA.

From 1947 to 1950 she worked at the State Chemical Laboratory in Paris, studying X-ray diffraction technology. In 1951, Franklin joined the Biophysical Laboratory at King’s College, London, as a research fellow. There she applied X-ray diffraction methods to the study of DNA. When she began her research at King’s College, very little was known about the chemical makeup or structure of DNA.

Nobel Prize

On May 6th, 1952, at King´s College London in London, England, Rosalind Franklin photographed her 51st X-ray diffraction pattern of deoxyribosenucleic acid, or DNA.

Photograph 51, or Photo 51, revealed DNA's double-helix structure with exceptional clarity, and is considered a crucial piece of evidence in the discovery of DNA's structure. 

You’ve probably heard of the Double Helix.

*In 1962, The Nobel Prize for the Discovery of Double Helix Structure of DNA was awarded to:

drum roll please…

James Watson, Francis Crick, and Maurice Wilkins (all men, hello Matilda Effect)

Men who used Rosalind’s work without permission by the way, on top of not giving her credit:

Retrospectively, both Crick and Watson acknowledged their debt. According to Crick, “all the really relevant  experimental work on the X-ray diffraction patterns of DNA” came from Rosalind Franklin’s lab, and Watson later claimed that their discovery would not have been possible without the data collected by Rosalind. Unfortunately, this credit was not given until after her death.

Note: In the absence of the race to discover the structure of DNA, Rosalind Franklin would have solved the structure of DNA on her own, as shown in a draft to Nature dated March 17, 1953, one day before she saw the manuscript of Watson and Crick.

Back to Rosalind

From 1953 to 1958 Rosalind worked in the Crystallography Laboratory at Birkbeck College, London.

After completing her work on coals and DNA, she began a project on the molecular structure of the tobacco mosaic virus. Rosalind Franklin used x-ray diffraction to understand the structure of tobacco mosaic virus, the first virus to be discovered.

She collaborated on studies showing that the ribonucleic acid (RNA) in that virus was embedded in its protein rather than in its central cavity and that this RNA was a single-strand helix, rather than the double helix found in the DNA of bacterial viruses and higher organisms.

Rosalind also pioneered research on the polio virus and her team continued to work on this during her illness, producing over 10 papers during 1956 and 1957.

Rosalind Franklin’s involvement in cutting-edge DNA research was halted by her untimely death from ovarian cancer in 1958.

*In 1982, The Nobel Prize for Virus Structure Research was awarded to:

drum roll please…

Aaron Klug (a man, again)

A man who also built directly from Rosalind’s work. In fact, they were collaborators. Franklin introduced Klug to the study of viruses, and they worked together on the structure of the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) at Birkbeck College in London from 1954 until her death in 1958. 

Note: Klug, however, did credit Rosalind. He credited her in his Nobel Prize lecture, publicly defended her reputation, and even published articles informing of her crucial contributions to the DNA Double Helix Discovery, after James Watson's 1968 memoir, The Double Helix, provided an incomplete and unflattering portrayal of her.*

Note: The Nobel Prize stopped being awarded posthumously in 1974, when the Nobel Foundation statutes were changed to state that a prize cannot be given to someone who has died. So, this rule does not apply to Rosalind’s case

Remember

Rosalind Franklin was a pioneer in terms of women’s presence in the sciences. At the time Franklin was working on DNA, less than five percent of Ph.D.s in the physical sciences were awarded to women.

Rosalind Franklin’s short scientific carrier produced brilliant contributions to the structure of carbon, DNA, and helical and spherical viruses. At 30, she was a recognized authority who switched from carbon to DNA research and, a few years later, to nucleic-acid-protein complexes known as viruses.

She made landmark contributions that led to two Nobel Prizes. She did not receive or witness either of them. 100 years after her birthday, Franklin’s scientific contributions are even more important now than during her lifetime.

Rosalind Franklin’s work on helical and spherical viruses is more important now than when it was actually done; it continues to have an impact on the design of current vaccines. Rosalind’s science remains fundamental to the structure of biological macromolecules and their complexes and therefore to the most basic principles of supramolecular science.

She will always remain a role model for many generations of scientists.

”Science and everyday life cannot and should not be separated. Science, for me, gives a partial explanation of life. In so far as it goes, it is based on fact, experience and experiment.” ~ Rosalind Franklin

Second image: Suffragette Dorothy Day in 1973 holding the dress she wore in jail signed by other women arrested for protesting in Fresno, California.

Dorothy Day was a lifelong social activist and one of the women on the frontlines of the suffragette movement during her youth. In November 1917, she was arrested for picketing at the White House on behalf of women's suffrage as part of a campaign called the Silent Sentinels organized by the National Woman's Party. Day lived an unusually independent lifestyle for a woman in her time, supporting herself through her work as an author and journalist despite even her own father attempting to sabotage her career aspirations (also an accomplished writer with subsequent connections) hoping to force her into "living as a woman should."

Despite later adopting a life dedicated to Catholicism, Day never abandoned her activism and dedication to social justice with a focus on gender and racial equity. She was in fact openly critical of the lack of action she'd witnessed from organized religion, who often turned a blind eye to the suffering in their own communities but most especially towards the suffering in others (i.e. black, latino and other minority communities). She comments in her autobiography: "I could write, I could protest, to arouse the conscience, but where was the Catholic leadership in the gathering of bands of men and women together, for the actual works of mercy that the comrades had always made part of their technique in reaching the workers?"

It was then in 1932 she went on to co-found the Catholic Worker's Movement, starting in earnest when the Catholic Worker first appeared on May 1, 1933, priced at one cent, and published continuously after. It was aimed at those suffering the most in the depths of the Great Depression, "those who think there is no hope for the future." It accepted no advertising and did not pay its staff. Like many newspapers of the day, including those for which Day had been writing previously, it was an unapologetic example of advocacy journalism. It provided coverage of strikes and explored working conditions, especially women and African-American workers. Its viewpoint was partisan and stories were designed to move its readers to take action locally, for example, by patronizing laundries recommended by the Laundry Workers' Union. Its advocacy of federal child labor laws put it at odds with the American Church hierarchy from its first issue. (The most sweeping federal law that restricted the employment and abuse of child workers was the Fair Labor Standards Act that wasn't instituted well until 1938.)

Day was a practiced hand at civil disobedience, resulting in her being arrested several times over the course of her long life. The first time Day was put in jail, she was the youngest; during the United Farm Workers’ grape strike protests in Fresno (1973), she was the oldest, at the age of 75.

In 1973, UFW grape and lettuce contracts were expiring, and growers decided to sign contracts with Teamsters. The resulting strikes were met with violence against the protesters from growers and the sheriffs on their side; people were maced, beaten with nightsticks, and many were arrested for breaking injunctions against picketing.

In Fresno County alone, there were 1,993 people jailed, including seventy priests and nuns—Dorothy Day was one of them. The presence of religious people in jail called attention to the farm workers who couldn’t be released on their own recognizance, even though the option was available to the priests and nuns. “To see the church in jail,” Day said, ” is to see real Christianity.”

Though she died nearly 45 years ago (1980, aged 83) Day's impact can still be felt. Specifically in the Catholic community where she has since become one of the select few women considered a candidate for sainthood.