Mary Fields was born into slavery in Tennessee sometime around 1832, the exact year being uncertain. Not too much is recorded about this phase of her life, other than, apparently, a fondness for physical altercations and bad homemade cigars. (Let’s just stop and consider what a badass figure Fields must have cut, standing six feet tall, well muscled, and puffing away on a cheap cigar.)
It’s a few decades after the abolition of slavery in the US that the really interesting part of Fields’ story begins. Around 1884 she moved to Cascade, Montana and sought employment with a group of Ursuline nuns there. She signed on to do the heavy labour – hauling freight, stone work, carpentry, that sort of thing. She stayed here for a while, eventually becoming forewoman.
One somewhat apocryphal story from this era tells of Fields’ freight wagon being overturned and attacked by wolves. Fields holed up in the wagon overnight, keeping the wolves at bay with her rifle and revolver, bringing the cargo in safely the following morning. Whilst this story may or may not be accurate what is undeniable is that the Great Falls Examiner (the only paper in the area) records Fields as being the cause of more broken noses than anyone else in town. She had little patience for the often inappropriate ways of men in frontier towns, and no problem with defending herself.
Why did she leave? Well, remember that fondness for fights? Yeah, she ended up having a gunfight with a coworker. He had complained that she earned $2 more than him, despite her being black and female. She dealt with this the way all sensible people deal with workplace disputes – she tried to shoot him. She missed on the first shot, a gunfight broke out, the bishop’s laundry was damaged, and Fields found herself out of a job.
So Fields moved on, applying for a job with the United States Postal Service. She was around 60 at this point, and being a mail carrier was not an easy job. Riding between frontier communities, living on the road in all extremes of weather, dealing with outlaws and wild animals; this was not a job for the faint of heart. But Fields impressed in the interview, being the fastest applicant to hitch a team of horses, and so the job was hers. This made her the second woman and the first African American woman to work for the Postal Service.
So reliable was Fields, living up to the postal service’s unofficial motto of being stayed by “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night,” that she picked up the nickname ‘Stagecoach’. Along with her mule, Moses, she spent the next decade or so carrying mail out to frontier outposts and remote mining posts.
In the winters Montana gets some serious snow. On more than one occasion the trails would become impassable to horses because of the depth of snow drifts. When you’re pushing 70, there’s snow too deep for horses to pass, and miles to the next outpost, you stay at home and drink by the fire, right? No, of course not, not when you’re Stagecoach Mary Fields you don’t. She pressed on through with the mail over one shoulder and her rifle over the other, walking up to 10 miles between outposts and depots to ensure the mail arrived on time.
Everything has to end eventually though, and around 1902 she retired from the Postal Service to settle down in the town of Cascade. The nuns helped her buy a laundry business, but she never really enjoyed working there. Her two loves by this time in her life were the local baseball team, for whom she often grew flowers, and drinking in the town bar, still smoking those homemade cigars.
Just because she’d settled down, though, doesn’t mean Mary Fields lost any of the grit and pugnacity that had served her all her life. One customer, according to stories, failed to pay his laundry bill on time. Fields, drinking in the bar, heard him talking outside. Excusing herself from her drinking companions she stepped outside and decked him with one solid blow to the jaw. She may have been in her mid 70s by this point but Stagecoach Mary Fields was not a woman with whom one messed. The satisfaction of seeing the guy laid out, so she said, was more than worth the price of the laundry bill.
In 1914, after a hard-lived life, Fields’s liver finally gave out. Her neighbours buried her in Cascade’s Hillside cemetery, and for a while her birthday was an unofficial holiday, with the town’s schools being closed to celebrate her.
For further reading on the West’s toughest postal worker you can check Robert Miller’s The Story of Stagecoach Mary Fields (though be aware that it is a short piece aimed mostly at children, and can be horribly expensive to find). She’s also mentioned in Cheryl Smith’s Market Women: Black Women Entrepeneurs Past, Present and Future and Jessica Ruston’s nicely illustrated Heroines: The Bold, The Bad And The Beautiful.
]]>One of three children, Theodora was the daughter of an actress and a bear trainer of the Green faction1. Following her father’s death she was presented to the Blue faction and became a supporter of theirs. Being a supporter of the Blue faction would prove to be significant later in her life.
The details of her time as an actress or prostitute are somewhat unclear, with a lack of reliable resources on the topic. Procopius spends a lot of his Anekdota providing snippets of a sordid past, and John of Ephesus calls her “Theodora ek tou porneiou”, or “Theodora from the brothel.” Historian Lynda Garland, however, argues that there’s little reason to believe Theodora worked in what we’d recognise as a modern brothel. Instead, she claimed, it was more like a stage-house in which the acting involved lewd displays and off-stage sexual activities with clients were standard. Either way, it was definitely a low status job.
Sarah Bernhardt in Victorien Sardou's play 'Théodora', 1882.
Around about 516 AD, Theodora leaves the theatre/brothel and travels to North Africa. By the time she returns to Constantinople four years later she’ll have made the acquaintance of several high ranking officials throughout the Empire, converted to Monophysite Christianity, and decided to take up a career as a wool spinner. Well, possibly. It’s also possible that the ‘wool spinning’ was a detail added to her life by writers in the 11th century. It was seen as a more virtuous career, one that would partially forgive the ‘sins’ of her earlier life, and thus may have been fabricated to give her respectability.
Whether she was a wool spinner or not, it was around the time of her return to Constantinople that she became associated with the young Justinian, the adopted heir of Justin I. It’s unclear quite how they met, but quite likely it was through a dancer, Macedonia, a member of the Blue faction and informer to Justinian who was himself a Blue faction supporter.
Marriage between Theodora and Justinian was initially problematic. Byzantine laws prevented the heir from marrying an actress, and Emperor Justin’s wife Euphemia would not grant Justinian permission to pursue this. Following her death however the Emperor, being fond of both Justinian and Theodora, changed the law, allowing an actress to repent her past and be considered a clean slate of virtue. Thus the pair were married, and in 527 ascended to the position of Emperor and Empress.
Of course, just becoming the Empress of the Byzantine Empire, though undeniably one hell of an achievement, does not automatically make a person awesome. Theodora gets awesome because of what she did while she was in power. For one thing, she was by all accounts Justinian’s intellectual equal, taking a hand in the forming of Byzantine policy. They may have gotten together because of basic lust, but a sharp mind kept her respected and on the throne (despite being a follower of the Monophysite heresy).
The Blue and Green factions mentioned earlier? About five years into the reign of Justinian and Theodora, they caused trouble in something halfway between a political uprising and a football riot (though with chariot racing instead of football). An event known as the Nika Riots (which is one of history’s most fascinating incidents) saw half of Constantinople burned to the ground, and thousands killed. Justinian and his officials were on the brink of abandoning the city and fleeing for safety when Theodora, so the sources claim, made a stand.
Those who have worn the crown should never survive its loss. Never will I see the day when I am not saluted as empress. Royalty makes a fine burial shroud.
– Attributed to Empress Theodora
Spurred into action by Theodora, Justinian rallied his forces, the riots were put down, and order restored. Over the following years Theodora and Justinian would engage in a large scale public works programme to rebuild the city, including rebuilding the Hagia Sophia in its current form as one of the architectural wonders of the world.
When not putting down rebellions, Theodora was instrumental in passing laws aimed at increasing the rights of many women in the Byzantine Empire. This included the institution of the death penalty for rape, the increasing of property rights and the rights to guardianship of children, and the closing of brothels followed by the opening of a convent to support former sex workers.
Theodora died of unknown causes in 548 AD. Afterwards Emperor Justinian worked to keep the peace and protect her small community of Monophysites, despite being a Chalcedonian Christian himself. Both of them were eventually canonised by the Eastern Orthodox Church.
So there’s Theodora. Given to a sports team as a child, grew up in the sleazy Byzantine entertainment industry, ended up one of the most powerful women in the world and eventually a saint. How’s that for an achievement?
For further reading there’s the expensive but well researched Byzantine Empresses: Women and Power in Byzantium, AD 527-1204 by Lynda Garland, and the more affordable The Empress Theodora: Partner of Justinian by James Evans. There’s also the works of Procopius, but those are skewed by the political issues of the time.
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!
- These factions will be important later. They were somewhere between a sports team and a political affiliation, and pretty important in Byzantine society. There were four teams, named for the colours of their uniforms, though by the time of Theodora only the Blues and Greens were particularly influential.
Juana in 1666, aged 15, looking super knowledgable
Juana demonstrated her latent awesome from an early age. Sneaking away from family gatherings to read her grandfather’s books, she’d picked up Greek, Latin and Nahuatl by her teens, composing poetry and teaching younger children. If you want to keep some a scorecard of achievements here, that’d be four languages self-taught to the level of writing poetry in them and teaching them to others by early adolescence.
Wanting something a little more formal than teaching herself from borrowed books, Juana asked her family for permission to disguise herself as a man in order to gain access to the university in Mexico City. Her family were not keen and permission was denied, so instead she found private tutoring from the Vicereine Leonor Carreto.
The Viceroy was intrigued by this apparent prodigy studying under his wife, and seemed to doubt that a 17-year-old woman could have the intellectual prowess she claimed. He set her a test (because apparently that’s what you do when someone is awesome; you make them jump through hoops to prove it): many of the country’s leading minds were invited to put difficult questions to her in fields of law, literature, theology and philosophy, and to have her explain difficult concepts without preparation. You can probably guess what happened. If you can’t guess, here’s what happened: she kicked intellectual ass.
Over the next few years the now really rather popular Juana would reject several marriage proposals from assorted influential types before, in 1669, entering a Hieronymite convent.
Sor Juana made for a rather unusual Sister. Set against the social pressures of the time, prevailing attitudes in the church, and the continued influence of the Spanish Inquisition, she wrote works that bordered on the heretical in their focus on freedom, science and the education of women. One surviving, translated example of her work, Redondillas, deals with the madonna/whore complex, and the issue of whether someone who pays for sin is any better than someone who is paid for it.
“The greater evil who is in-
When both in wayward paths are straying?
The poor sinner for the pain
Or he who pays for the sin?”– Sor Juana, Redondillas
In 1690 the pressure against Sor Juana began to mount. A letter was published attacking her intellectual pursuits, and several high-ranking church officials spoke out against her. On her side she had the Viceregal court and the Jesuits, who remained impressed by her intellect and works. She also had a lot of popular appeal, being considered at the time to be one of the first great writers to emerge in the country.
The support bought her the time to write an open letter to her critics, in which she defended the right of women to proper education. Even with powerful friends, it takes some distinct bravery to stand up to not only the Inquisition, but to the very church institution that you’re a part of via your convent, and tell them just why they’re wrong.
Unfortunately, it didn’t last. Details get a bit fuzzy here, and it’s possible that some of the letters involved were not in fact by Sor Jauna but merely had her name stuck at the bottom. What is clear is that around about 1693 the official censure became too much and Sor Jauna stopped writing (or at least, stopped making public things that she had written.) Her personal library of books and scientific instruments, which by that point consisted of some 4,000 or so volumes, was sold off.
A year later Sor Juana died when a plague hit the convent. She had done what she could to tend to the other sisters who were afflicted, but succumbed after a few weeks. She left behind a legacy as one of the most important poetic writers in recent South American history.
Part of what makes Sor Juana’s story fascinating is the difference 100 years made between her reception and that of Maria Agnesi. Both were fiercely intelligent, both spoke and wrote in multiple languages across an array of subjects, and both ended up in a convent. But where Agnesi was offered a professorship by the Pope, Sor Juana was censured and driven to abandon her lifestyle. It’d be interesting to see what Sor Juana might have managed, had she born a little later.
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!
Born in Alabama in 1956, Jemison’s family moved to Chicago in 1959 to take advantage of the better educational opportunities there. Jemison took to the sciences with ease, doing well enough in her studies that she was able to enrol at Stanford University aged just 16.
In kindergarten, my teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I told her a scientist. She said, ‘Don’t you mean a nurse?’ Now, there’s nothing wrong with being a nurse, but that’s not what I wanted to be.
Jemison faced barriers due to both racism and sexism at Stanford, particularly in the engineering department, a place that was (and unfortunately to some extent still is) the domain of well off white males. She describes, looking back, occasions where professors would ignore her input while congratulating her male classmates for the exact same comments, and credits her success in part to the youthful arrogance of a teen allowing her to push on through.
After getting her chemical engineering degree Jemison went on to study medicine at Cornell, graduating in 1981. She did extensive work abroad during her time there, ranging from Thailand to Kenya as a primary care provider, and eventually joining the Peace Corps in 1983. With the Peace Corps she served in Sierra Leone, acting both as a medical doctor and a writer of guidelines, care manuals, and research proposals.
So, we’ve established she’s pretty goddamn awesome as both a doctor and a scientist. But I promised you a doctor in space, and so far it’s all been ground bound1. So, onto her career with NASA.
Rejected on her first try, Jemison was accepted into the program in 1987, the first class of astronauts to be enrolled after the 1986 Challenger disaster. She worked in launch support at the Kennedy Space Centre while training for her launch, helping to send other shuttle flights up into orbit. Her own turn came in 1992, when she became the first black woman to go into space, flying aboard the shuttle Endeavour with the six other astronauts of STS-47.
I wouldn’t have cared less if 2,000 people had gone up before me … I would still have had my hand up, ‘I want to do this.’
– Mae Jemison, speaking to the Des Moines Register in 2008
For the next 190 hours Jemison would orbit the Earth, one of the select few to see the planet from above for themselves.2 She conducted a series of life science experiments on how living organisms responded to the microgravity of space. This included one of her own devising, to study the effects of orbital conditions on bone cells. On September 20th 1992, Jemison and the rest of the mission’s crew returned safely to Earth, having spent the last eight days being awesome enough to risk death in the name of science.
STS-47 was to be Jemison’s only space mission, as she retired from NASA shortly after her return. She wanted to focus on social issues surrounding technology, its impact in developing nations, and means of mitigating future-shock. To this end she founded two rather cool organisations. First up, doing applied research, there’s the Jemison Group, set up to develop technology for daily life, which has worked on projects including thermal energy generation for developing countries, and satellite communications for facilitating health care in West Africa.
Her second project was the Dorothy Jemison Foundation for Excellence, named for her mother. The foundation runs international science camps for students in their teens, aimed at encouraging people to think globally about how technology can deal with problems. The group works to build critical thinking skills and scientific literacy, which is a pretty damn solid aim.
Oh, and a last point of geeky coolness (which obviously is the most important kind), Jemison appeared in an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation after LeVar Burton discovered she was a fan and invited her to take part. That makes her the first real life astronaut to have featured on the show. It’s a neat bit of circularity, given that Jemison cites Nichelle Nichols’s performance as Lt. Uhura as one of her motivations for joining NASA.
So, doctor, astronaut, advocate for science education, and she even got to hang out on the bridge of the Enterprise. That’s a pretty good definition for a badass life right there.
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!
- Well, excepting an incident in Sierra Leone where Jemison commandeered a hospital plane to evacuate a volunteer with meningitis and worked throughout the flight to keep them alive, racking up an eventual total of 56 hours solid work.
- As of today only around 500 people have been up there, depending on exactly what you define as “in space”.
Bird’s first journey abroad, in 1854, was not the most adventurous trip of her life: she travelled around the Eastern US and Canada, mostly staying with relatives for the several months she was in North America. However, the trip sparked off the two key interests that would come to define much of her adult life, travelling and writing. She composed daily journal entries throughout the duration of her journey which – along with letters written to her younger sister Henrietta – formed the basis for her first book, The Englishwoman in America.
Following her return to England and her father’s death in 1858, Bird moved to Edinburgh with her mother and sister. As well as several shorter trips to the Americas, Bird made several journeys to the Outer Hebrides during this period, writing articles on the plight of the crofters there. She used some of the royalties from these articles to help crofters emigrate to the US.
1868 saw the death of Bird’s mother, and her sister’s settling on the Isle of Mull. Loathing the quiet domestic lifestyle there, and finding it brought back her childhood illnesses, Bird planned a longer series of voyages. She set out first for Australia, and then in 1872 to Hawaii. There she climbed an active volcano and penned her next book. The money from that funded her travels on to Colorado, the most recent state to have joined the US. Her time in Colorado prompted another book, A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, perhaps her best known work. Her adventures there were rather awesome, reading like the treatment for a movie. She befriended a charismatic one-eyed outlaw, Jim Nugent, a fan of poetry and casual violence. With his help she climbed Long’s Peak and explored the Rockies. Bird caused some controversy by dressing in a sensible manner for her travels here, and riding astride instead of side-saddle, which ultimately lead to her threatening to sue the Times for accusing her of dressing ‘like a man’.
Her return to England after the trip followed the same pattern as before. Horrified by the idea of a quiet home life, and with an offer of marriage from Edinburgh-based doctor John Bishop, she once again arranged for a journey abroad. This time she voyaged around East Asia, writing about her experiences in Japan and Malaysia amongst others. Her trip was cut short by the loss of her sister to typhoid in 1880, leaving Bird devastated. She agreed to marry Bishop but found the experience miserable, and began travelling again when he died in 1886.
This time around, Bird decided she needed to do some good on her travels, and chose to travel to India as a missionary. Aged almost 60, she studied medicine, and arrived on the sub-continent in 1889. She roamed the area, visiting Tibet, Persia and Baghdad, taking with her a medicine chest and a revolver. (After all, you never know when it might be necessary to heal someone or shoot them.) She also established not one but two hospitals; the Henrietta Bird Hospital in Amritsar and the John Bishop Memorial Hospital in Srinigar. This is two more hospitals than most people ever get round to founding, and a pretty brilliant achievement.
Chilling out on a horse in Tibet, as you do.
Her journeys and writing had earned Bird a deal of fame in England, and in 1892 she became the first woman to be granted a fellowship with the prestigious Royal Geographic Society (presided over at the time by the fantastically named Sir Mountstuart Elphinstone Grant Duff). She met with Prime Minister William Gladstone and addressed a parliamentary committee to discuss the atrocities being committed against Armenian people in the Middle East at the time. Of course, this wasn’t enough to sate her desire for travel and shortly afterwards she once again set off around the world.
She travelled to East Asia again, seeing the Yokohama region of Japan and much of Korea, leaving only when forced to by the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war. Rather than return home, she moved on to China. There, in addition to travelling up the Yangtze River and writing more, she was attacked by a mob and trapped in the top floor of a building that was then set on fire. Later she was stoned and left unconscious in the street. That’s the sort of thing that might put a lot of people off travelling, but when she died in 1904 Bird had been in the middle of planning another trip to China, due to set off just after her 73rd birthday in October. Because no one as awesome as Bird lets a little mob violence deter them from going where they want to go.
By the time of her death, Bird had circumnavigated the globe three times over, written over a dozen books and countless articles, and established herself as one of the most daring and best known travellers of the era. Many of her works can be found on Project Gutenberg here, all of them excellent reads. Pat Barr provides a detailed biography of her in A Curious Life for a Lady.
“Her work was both intimate and informative, combining personal insight and scientific knowledge of her destinations to provide the reader with an engaging, educational account of her travels. Among other themes, [Bird] wrote to challenge Western stereotypes of Eastern cultures, to critique the treatment of women in lower classes.”
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!
Marian was born in Philadelphia in 1897, the eldest of three Anderson children. Her mother had previously worked as a school teacher but was unable to do so in Philadelphia due to stricter controls on the qualifications needed by black teachers as opposed to those for white teachers. The family was active in their local Union Baptist church, and Marian’s aunt Mary encouraged her to sing with the church choir.
From age six onwards Marian began to sing at local concerts and functions, encouraged by her aunt. She had a clear talent from the start, and by her teens was earning several dollars for a performance.1 After attending high school – which was paid for by charitable donations raised by her pastor and other local community leaders – Anderson applied to the Philadelphia Music Academy, but was turned away. The reason? ‘We don’t take coloureds.’
As long as you keep a person down, some part of you has to be down there to hold him down, so it means you cannot soar as you otherwise might.
– Marian Anderson, My Lord What A Morning
Undaunted, Anderson sought private tuition from the talented Giuseppe Boghetti.2 Boghetti was a good teacher, and Anderson would credit him with expanding her repertoire to include classical works and arias in addition to choral music. She took these skills to the New York Philharmonic, winning a voice contest there in 1925. The prize was the chance to perform in concert with them, marking the first major critical success of her career.
Despite being critically acclaimed and applauded by all who heard her, Anderson’s career struggled to take off in the United States. Much like Josephine Baker she found difficulty getting bookings due to racism, and like Baker she responded by touring heavily in a more welcoming Europe. She toured extensively through the 1930s, befriending many influential people in the music field who were impressed with her voice. Toscanini, Jean Sibelius, and Kosti Vehanen were all amongst those who worked with her or applauded her voice.
Those Lincoln Memorial crowds. All 70,000 of them.
For all her European success, there were still issues in America. In 1939 Howard University sought to have her perform at Constitution Hall. The hall was owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR), who denied her the chance to play there on grounds of race. This kicked off a storm with many DAR members resigning in protest, including board member Eleanor Roosevelt. This is where we get that aforementioned lovely example of people stepping up to do the right thing. Eleanor Roosevelt, along with Anderson’s manager, members of the NAACP, and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes arranged an open air concert for Marian Anderson on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The performance was a huge success, attended by over 70,000 people, and with a million or so more listening in by radio.
Four years later the DAR asked Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall. She accepted.
I forgave the DAR many years ago. You lose a lot of time hating people.
– Marian Anderson
Although she was trained for it and regularly performed operatic arias in her concerts, Anderson shied away from appearing in actual operas. She was offered positions consistently throughout her time in Europe, but felt she lacked the acting talent to accompany her voice. The exception to this was 1955’s appearance with the New York Metropolitan Opera in a performance of Giuseppe Verdi’s Un Ballo in Machera. This was the first time a black singer had been counted amongst the regular cast.
The next decade was studded with achievements for Anderson, almost too many to give each one the detail they deserve here. which frankly is sign of brilliance in itself, when you have too much cool stuff to actually describe at any great length. Between 1955 and 1965, then, she:
- sang at the inaugurations of Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy
- was appointed a UN delegate
- was made a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
- sang at the 1963 March on Washington
- … and received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
- Marian’s autobiography, My Lord What A Morning, which is unfortunately quite hard to get a hold of.
- Raymond Arsenault’s The Sound of Freedom which goes into much more detail on the 1939 Lincoln Memorial concert.
- Allan Keiler’s A Singer’s Journey provides an in-depth study of Anderson’s life.
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!
- Which may not sound like much, but for early 20th century America it was pretty damn impressive.
- Born Joe Bogash, he had changed his name to something Italian sounding in the hopes that it would boost his opera career. It didn’t, and he returned to America in 1918 to open studios in New York City instead.
Oh, and she released an album of poetry, songs and spoken word pieces dedicated to her beloved pet cat Snoopy. A busy and exceedingly well spent decade.
Anderson retired from public performance in 1965 with a farewell tour that began at Constitution Hall and ended in New York’s Carnegie Hall. By the time of her death in 1993 she would accrue a list of honours and accolades quite staggering in length, including but not limited to honorary degrees from three different universities, a Grammy, a Silver Buffalo from the Boy Scouts of America, and her likeness on postage stamps and $5000 Series I Savings Bonds.
There are many persons ready to do what is right because in their hearts they know it is right. But they hesitate, waiting for the other fellow to make the make the first move – and he, in turn, waits for you.
– Marian Anderson, My Lord What A Morning
For further reading, check the following:
So far in this series we’ve seen daredevil pilots, hardworking activists, and daring wartime spies.
Maria Gaetana Agnesi (1718–1799), by contrast, was a quiet type who lived most of her life in seclusion and finished her days in a convent. So what made her awesome? Well, for one thing she was a particularly prodigious polymath of skull-burstingly intense genius. There’s more than that too, but it makes a good place to start.
Born in Milan to a wealthy silk merchant who had married into nobility, Agnesi was the oldest of 21 children (gigantic families apparently being a running theme amongst the people featured in this series). She was pretty much as prodigious as child prodigies come, speaking both French and Italian by the age of five, and Latin soon after.
The stare of unadulterated genius.
Her Latin was put to the test at the age of nine, when she began doing public salons and debates, organised by her father. Agnesi prepared a lengthy speech arguing for women’s right to education, translated it into Latin, and delivered it to a gathering of local intellectuals. Most of us, I think, at age nine, would have settled for doing well on a classroom mental arithmetics test, maybe getting a gold star on a spelling quiz. But no, Agnesi was intellectually amazing, so she jumped right past those and straight to giving lectures in a foreign language on controversial topics. As you do.
Over the next few years Agnesi would continue to deliver these speeches and take part in debates – learning Greek, Hebrew, Spanish and German along the way, so that she could talk to her audience in their native languages. She ended up giving several hundred talks, and gathered around two hundred of these which were published as the Propositiones Philosophicae in 1738. For those of you keeping track at home, that makes seven languages learned, hundreds of serious debates from age nine onwards, and one weighty tome published, all by the age of 20.
He began with a fine discourse in Latin to this young girl, that it might be understood by all. She answered him well, after which they entered into a dispute, in the same language, on the origin of fountains and on the causes of the ebb and flow which is seen in some of them, similar to tides at sea. She spoke like an angel on this topic, I have never heard anything so remarkable…
– C de Brosses, Lettres Historique et Critiques sur l’Italie
Agnesi did not particularly enjoy the public life of the intellectual, however, and at age 20 asked to be allowed to join a convent. The request was denied, but she was able to semi-withdraw from the world at home, eschewing social interaction in favour of an almost convent-esque lifestyle within the family household. When she wasn’t tutoring her vast army of siblings, she devoted her time to the study of maths, particularly the fields of differential and integral calculus – still relatively new at the time, having only been formalised in European circles by Newton and Leibniz a generation or so before.
She published her mathematical work in 1748 under the title Instituzioni Analitiche ad uso della Gioventù Italiana, a mammoth two-volume tome that provided a clear and well written introduction to the mathematical concepts of the time. The work was written in Italian1 as opposed to Latin – which was the scholarly language of the time – because Agnesi wanted the work to be accessible to as many young Italians as possible, not just the educated upper classes.
I will finish the Instituzioni with a warning. The expert analyst should be industrious in trying to search for solutions to these problems and will be much more advanced by means of the techniques that are “born” during this process.
– Maria Agnesi
Following her father’s death in 1752, Agnesi was appointed Professor of Mathematics at the university of Bologna by Papal decree. She was the first woman to be appointed to the role of professor in a European university. You know you’re a shining example of sheer genius when the Pope himself decides to say “to hell with traditional gender roles, I want this person made a professor!”.
Agnesi considered the professorship to be an honourary role, and never actually set foot in the university or taught a class, though by all accounts it would actually have been a proper position had she wanted it. Instead, no longer feeling obligated to stay at home for her father, she devoted herself to theology. She became the director of the Hospice Trivulzio, working to provide for the poor and the sick. She remained there until her death, putting all of her not inconsiderable wealth into charitable works, and dying a pauper at the age of 81.
So there you have it. Seven languages, two books, the first female professor by appointment of Pope Benedict XIV, and decades of selfless charity work. That’s a pretty damn good body of evidence in favour of Agnesi being brain-blisteringly awesome.
Further Reading:
- The Contest For Knowledge: Debates Over Women’s Learning in Eighteenth-century Italy
-
Analytical Instructions in Four Books, the English translation of Agnesi’s two volumes on calculus and trigonometry. - The World of Maria Gaetana Agnesi, Mathematician of God, by Massimo Mazzotti. It’s a pretty solid account both of Agnesi’s life and the intellectual atmosphere of mid 18th-century Italy.
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!
- The translation of this work into English saw the word ‘versiera’ (curve) mistaken for ‘avversiera’ (witch). As a result one of the main parts of the work, the formula for a certain curve, now lives on as the Witch of Agnesi.
Possessing a sharp mind, and with the good fortune of coming from a family that could afford quality education, Cannon had attended Wellesley College and graduated with a degree in physics in 1884. Finding the limited career options of home life boring, and having little in common with her peers, being (paraphrasing from her autobiographical writings) older and better educated, Cannon returned to Wellesley in 1894. Guided by her former instructor, the formidably minded professor Sarah Frances Whiting, Cannon took graduate courses in astronomy and spectroscopy (a relatively new development in imaging at the time), and discovered her true calling.
After two years of graduate study, and looking to get access to Harvard’s superior telescope facilities, Cannon was hired at the Harvard Observatory as part of the group that would become known as “Pickering’s women”. The Harvard Computers, to use the group’s actual name, were a small group of women hired by Edward Pickering to work through the raw data being gathered by the observatory (this of course being a time when a computer was still generally a person who calculated things, not a machine). Pickering had hired Cannon and her fellow computers largely because women were cheaper to employ than men, allowing him to hire more of them; a neccessity given that the rate at which data was being gathered was outstripping the rate at which it could be processed.
So, what was Cannon earning, given her degree and graduate work at one of America’s most prestigious private colleges, and the fund set up by the wealthy physician Anna Draper to support the observatory’s work? Somewhere in the region of $0.25 to $0.50 an hour. This put her slightly above an unskilled factory worker, and somewhat below a clerical or secretarial worker. What would a lot of us do in the face of woefully poor pay despite excellent qualifications and a natural talent? Probably look for new work, or failing that become disillusioned and start putting in less effort than perhaps we should.
Fortunately for modern astronomers, Annie Jump Cannon had a passion for her field, a drive for progress, and a rather brilliant mind for organising and classifying abstract data. Rather than throw up her arms in frustration at the poor pay and oten tedious work of examining stellar images she set herself to the task of examining the bright stars of the Southern hemisphere.
Now for some vaguely sciencey details: at the time, there was a disagreement between two others working at the observatory, Antonia Maury and Williamina Fleming, as to how stars should be classified. Cannon pioneered a third system, classifying stars based on the strength of their Balmer absorption lines (one of a set of series that describe the spectral line emissions of hydrogen atoms, the strength of a star’s Balmer absorption lines provide a reliable indicator of the stars temperature). This provided a thorough and yet elegant means of classifying stellar objects, dividing them into letter categories based on temperature. When astronomers refer to our sun as a G-type star, that’s Cannon’s classification system in action.1
Following her groundbreaking work on stellar classifications, Cannon remained dedicated to the field of astronomy, eventually receiving a regular appointment at Harvard as the William C Bond Astronomer, in addition to receiving an honorary doctorate from Oxford (the first one given out to a female academic). Her legacy lives on for astronomers, both in the ongoing use of her work and in the Annie Jump Cannon Award, given out by the American Astronomical Society to pioneering female researchers in the field. Even off the planet, Cannon’s memory lives on, one of the Moon’s craters being named in her honour.
So, next time you’re looking up at the sky, keep in mind Annie Jump Cannon, who more than likely labelled most of the stars you can see.
(As a final note, Cannon was not the only woman working in the Harvard Observatory at the time to do amazing things. Henrietta Swan Leavitt‘s work on Cepheid stars arguably provided the vital theoretical underpinnings on which much of Edwin Hubble’s work was based. She received almost no recognition for her discoveries during her own lifetime.)
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!
- For the curious, the stars are classified from hottest to coldest as O, B, A, F, G, K and M. The hotter stars tend to be more massive and less common than their colder cousins. The classes are further sub-divided into 0-9, 0 being the hottest in a class and 9 the coldest. Our own sun is a G2 star.
Winning is great, sure, but if you are really going to do something in life, the secret is learning how to lose. Nobody goes undefeated all the time. If you can pick up after a crushing defeat, and go on to win again, you are going to be a champion someday.
– Wilma Rudolph
The 1960 Summer Olympics, the first to be broadcast internationally (the 1948 games had been aired by the BBC, but only in London), helped launch the fame of one of the world’s best known athletes, Cassius Clay. But this post is about someone else who competed that year: the woman who would become known as “the Tornado” and “La Gazella Negra”, Wilma Glodean Rudolph (June 23, 1940 – November 12 1994).
Rudolph was not the most likely choice to become one of the best runners of her generation. The 20th in a family of 22 children, she was a premature birth, weighing only 4.5lbs. Racial segregation in the US at the time prevented Wilma from being treated at the local hospital, and the poverty caused by the Great Depression made it financially difficult for her family to take her elsewhere. Throughout her childhood her mother had to nurse her through measles, mumps, scarlet fever, whooping cough, chickenpox, and pneumonia.
The disease that had the most impact on her chances of athletic stardom, however, was polio, which left her partially paralysed and with a twisted left leg. It seemed unlikely that she would be able to walk again, let alone run. Wilma, however, was far too tenacious to be slowed down by a little thing like polio and childhood paralysis. Through a combination of intense physical therapy, corrective shoes, and a metal leg brace, Wilma regained the ability to walk unaided by the age of twelve.
My doctor told me I would never walk again. My mother told me I would. I believed my mother.
– Wilma Rudolph
No stranger to physical training by this point, Wilma decided to follow in the path of one of her older sisters and take up basketball. She excelled at the sport, setting state records for scoring, and catching the attention of Edward Temple – the track and field coach for Tennessee State University. She had some track experience already from high school athletics classes, and by 1956, aged 16, she was running to a high enough standard to have a spot on the US Olympic team for the 1956 games in Melbourne, where she picked up a bronze medal.
Four years beforehand she’d been unable to walk unaided, and four years before that she was being told by doctors that she’d never walk at all. Now she was an Olympic medallist. Of course, someone who overcomes polio through sheer determination isn’t the sort of person who settles for a mere bronze medal. In 1960 Wilma returned to the Olympics for the Rome games and landed no less than three gold medals, the first American woman to do so. She set a world record for the 200m sprint at 23.2 seconds, and one for the 400m relay with her teammates Martha Hudson, Lucinda Williams, and Barbara Jones.
What made Wilma’s Olympic victory go from a regular badass achievement to a triple-decker pile of brilliance, however, was what she did afterwards. Upon returning to Clarksville, Tennessee, with her medals, a homecoming parade was arranged in her honour. She insisted the parade be an integrated event, where previous such occasions had always been segregated. Her banquet was the first time in the city’s history that a large meal was held without segregation. After this, Wilma joined the protests that took place in the city until segregation laws were struck down.
You want to hear about more awesomeness? Hopefully you do, because Wilma Rudolph still had plenty more of it to deliver. Her athletic excellence had earned her a full scholarship at Tennessee State University, you see, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in education. She taught for a while at her own former high school, followed by schools in Maine and Indiana. In 1967 she was asked by the then Vice President of the US, Hubert Humphrey, to take part in an athletic outreach programme aimed at underprivileged children living in housing projects in several major cities. When the programme ended she established her own non-profit organisation, the Wilma Rudolph Foundation, to continue the work. The foundation provided free coaching, academic assistance and personal support to kids in deprived areas.
The triumph can’t be had without the struggle. And I know what struggle is. I have spent a lifetime trying to share what it has meant to be a woman first in the world of sports so that other young women have a chance to reach their dreams.
– Wilma Rudolph
For more detailed discussion on Wilma Rudolph’s athletic achievements and work as an educator and civil rights campaigner, check out Wilma Rudolph: Athlete and Educator by Alice Flanagan, and the good but somewhat short Wilma Unlimited by Kathleen Krull. Wilma’s 1977 autobiography, Wilma, is also good, but a bit tricky to find.
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!
Helen Taussig, taken during her time as a professor at Johns Hopkins University.
Taussig (b. 1898) had other ideas. Having studied at a series of prestigious schools, including Harvard, Taussig graduated from Johns Hopkins University Medical School in 1927, moving to Johns Hopkins Hospital to spend several years specialising in cardiology and paediatrics. In 1930 she was appointed head of the Children’s Heart Clinic, making her one of the highest ranking women in American medicine at the time. She noted that infants with another particular heart deformity (patent ductus arteriosus, which allows blood to flow between the aorta and the pulmonary artery) who suffered from Tetralogy of Fallot tended to have better survivability than those with Tetralogy of Fallot alone.
Based on this, Taussig came to a conclusion that had evaded everyone else up until then: by creating an artificial hole, or shunt, between the two arteries it might be possible to overcome most of the problems caused by Tetralogy of Fallot. She took her ideas to Robert Gross, a surgeon at Boston who had pioneered patent ductus arteriosus ligation (the tying off of the hole between the arteries to stop the flow between them). Gross dismissed the idea, acting on the accepted wisdom of the time that stated the condition to be impossible to fix surgically. Without the help of an experienced cardiac surgeon, there would be no way to actually test Taussig’s ideas.
In addition to the resistance from established surgeons, Taussig faced another obstacle to developing her idea: Around the time of graduating from Johns Hopkins she had become profoundly deaf, something which seemed, at the time, like it might put an end to her career. How could one practise cardiology without being able to hear heart rhythms through a stethoscope? Taussig was not one to be stopped by such trifling matters though, and developed an exceptional proficiency for feeling the rhythms by hand instead of listening to them, later crediting some of her discoveries to this talent.
You must learn to listen with your fingers.
– Dr Helen Taussig
This might be the point where a less awesome individual might give up, might let their idea drop and become just another footnote in medical history. Instead, Taussig approached Alfred Blalock, a recent appointment at Johns Hopkins Hospital. Together with his surgical technician, Vivien Thomas, they began to develop the idea, and by 1944 were ready to perform their first operation on a person.
The first operation was a qualified success – the initial surgery went well, but the patient didn’t survive a follow up surgery the following year. The following two attempts were wholly successful, and by 1952 over 1,000 patients had undergone the Blalock-Taussig Shunt procedure, as it became known, with around 85% survival rates. Taussig and Blalock lectured on their technique in Paris and London, where surgeons experienced similar success rates.
But pioneering a new field of medicine and improving the life expectancy and quality of life for countless infants wasn’t enough for Taussig – she had more awesome achievements still to go. In 1957 the sedative drug Thalidomide was distributed to thousands of clinicians in the US for testing, proposed as a safe drug for a variety of conditions. We now know, of course, that the drug was far from safe for this, having massively teratogenic properties. Taussig was one of the doctors, along with the FDA inspector Frances Oldham Kelsey, who provided evidence for the dangers of the drug. This lead to its being refused approval for sale in the US, and eventually removed from other markets once its dangers had been exposed.
So that’s twice that Taussig was a key figure in improving the quality of life of infants, thus arguably making the world a better place through her actions. In addition to this she campaigned for the legalisation of abortion and became one of the first women to be appointed to a full professorship at Johns Hopkins University in 1959, and the first to serve as president of the American Heart Association. One of the four colleges of the Johns Hopkins medical school still bears her name.
Her 1947 textbook, Congenital Malformations of the Heart, is worth reading whether or not one has a medical background, as it stands as an example of a very well written work by one of the field’s most incisive minds.
[Taussig] was truly a remarkably notable woman in health care.
– Harold Ellis, Journal of Perioperative Practice
- Unsung Heroes: spotlighting fascinating people we never learned about at school. Rob Mulligan also blogs at Stuttering Demagogue. Stay tuned for future Heroes, or send your own in to [email protected]!