A Snapshot of the Past

The wonderful website Letters of Note is always worth reading (or following on twitter), and recently they posted a letter which made me reflect on how far we’ve come in a few decades.

Astronomer and physicist Carl Sagan wrote in 1981 to an organisation called “The Explorers Club”. Some history is needed here: this was a group founded in 1905 in New York, as a club for those who pursue “Scientific Exploration” (including both Explorers and Scientists). A letterhead he mentions in the note says To the conquest of the unknown and the advancement of knowledge. Back around 1900, the idea that women could be part of either of those professions or join the club wasn’t considered. The club then remained men-only for decades in the name of tradition.

Sagan was adding his voice to others in the early 1980s asking that women should be allowed to be members. His letter is polite, but one middle paragraph is a brilliant list of women who have contributed to the pursuit of new knowledge:

There are several women astronauts. The earliest footprints — 3.6 million years old — made by a member of the human family have been found in a volcanic ash flow in Tanzania by Mary Leakey. Trailblazing studies of the behavior of primates in the wild have been performed by dozens of young women, each spending years with a different primate species. Jane Goodall‘s studies of the chimpanzee are the best known of the investigations which illuminate human origins. The undersea depth record is held by Sylvia Earle [pictured below]. The solar wind was first measured in situ by Marcia Neugebauer, using the Mariner 2 spacecraft. The first active volcanoes beyond the Earth were discovered on the Jovian moon Io by Linda Morabito, using the Voyager 1 spacecraft. These examples of modern exploration and discovery could be multiplied a hundredfold.

The Explorers Club changed their policy later that year, and now do not restrict based on gender.

But that’s not the part which gives me hope.

If you read the rest of Sagan’s letter, the extraordinary thing today is how reasonable he’s being. He’s genuinely trying to convince the Club, using facts and appealing to logic, that they should make this change. There’s no hint of anger or appeal to fairness. He doesn’t say women deserve equality, and only calmly points out that if you want a ‘social club for the boys’ you shouldn’t claim to represent all scientists and explorers in 1981. In fact he (as a member) acts as though they could have every right to exclude women because of tradition, but that they’re mistaken and women should in fact qualify under their own rules. (I’m not saying Sagan wasn’t passionate about equality, at all – his belief in it comes through clearly in many of his books and documentaries, and he’s an absolute hero. I think he was being deliberately polite.)

However, I expect that someone writing to the Explorers Club today might send a very different message. A message which includes the questions “What do you think you’re doing?” and “Why are you being so incredibly blinkered?”. I can well believe that there was prejudice against the quality of women’s roles in science in 1981: there’s prejudice now. But I think the average expectation of what is normal and fair has genuinely shifted, to the point that Sagan’s letter reads as quite oddly passive today.

In the week when Google celebrated Marie Curie’s 144th birthday, I enjoy anything which reminds us that we need to move away from the token lady scientist when looking at women’s roles in the discovery of new frontiers. This letter is, I hope, an anachronism today. I also dearly hope it won’t seem normal again in the future.