Speaker 1: Chloe, and welcome to Cool People Who Did Cool Stuff?
Speaker 1: Your favorite podcast? That well, it's actually just your favorite podcast. UM.
Speaker 1: I know you love all of your podcasts equally, but
Speaker 1: basic you love this one a little bit more. I'm
Speaker 1: your host, Margaret Kiljoy, and I'm ready to tell you
Speaker 1: all about cool people. And one of those cool people
Speaker 1: I'm going to tell you about is this week's guest,
Speaker 1: Bridget Todd, who is a feminist and activist and the
Speaker 1: host of the show There Are No Girls on the Internet,
Speaker 1: which is also allowed to be your favorite podcast. How
Speaker 1: are you doing, Bridget, I'm good. I'm so excited to
Speaker 1: be here. And we've got Sophie on the call to Um,
Speaker 1: how are you Sophie as our producer, How are you doing, Sophie?
Speaker 1: I'm doing I'm doing, Margaret. That's all I got for you. Yeah. Okay,
Speaker 1: So today I want to talk about computers and space,
Speaker 1: and I'm gonna call this episode When Women Were Computers,
Speaker 1: because we're going to talk about how computer used to
Speaker 1: be a job description. But when I started looking into that,
Speaker 1: I started turning up more and more weird ship. So,
Speaker 1: in addition to this being a story about women computers,
Speaker 1: both white and black. It's also about abolitionist astronomers, religious
Speaker 1: fanatics who are trying to raise the dead as well
Speaker 1: as explore the universe, bisexual goth rockets, scientists, and a
Speaker 1: gay man who saved millions of lives in World War
Speaker 1: Two and was oppressed as hell by the government that
Speaker 1: he just saved. And I'm sure I'm leaving more stuff out.
Speaker 1: It's a weird story today, but I think it's gonna
Speaker 1: be a cool one to bear with me. Oh, this
Speaker 1: is right up my alley. I love talking about how
Speaker 1: women used to be the the o g computers like us,
Speaker 1: you know, yeah, I like, I don't even know. I
Speaker 1: was probably in my thirties when I figured out that
Speaker 1: computer was used to be a job description, and I
Speaker 1: grew up a like computer kid, you know, I was
Speaker 1: like interested in computers from whatever. Anyway, I want to
Speaker 1: start with a quote from Stephen J. Gould, who was
Speaker 1: an evolutionary biolog just a science educator. And it's a
Speaker 1: quote people have heard before, but I feel like it's
Speaker 1: relevant to kind of frame what we're talking about today.
Speaker 1: I am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions
Speaker 1: of Einstein's brain than then the near certainty that people
Speaker 1: of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields
Speaker 1: and sweatshops, and because so the show cool people who
Speaker 1: did cool stuff, it's it's not about heroes. Like I
Speaker 1: don't want to just be like this person is the
Speaker 1: single best person anytime I'm talking about someone. And I
Speaker 1: really basically hate the great man theory of history that
Speaker 1: says that history was just moved forward by single spectacular individuals. Rather,
Speaker 1: I really like that the accurate story, which is that
Speaker 1: ship gets done by a thousand hands doing the work
Speaker 1: together and um including spectacular individuals, but it's not solely them,
Speaker 1: and it's absolutely not them working alone. So like, I
Speaker 1: don't know, Einstein was smart at fun, right, but he
Speaker 1: wasn't the only person as smart as fuck. And there
Speaker 1: are so many people who are artists funk who are
Speaker 1: prevented by systemic barriers from exercising their talents and contributing
Speaker 1: in the way that they would otherwise be able to.
Speaker 1: So today I'm basically excited to talk about smartest fun
Speaker 1: people who had to push past systemic barriers and then
Speaker 1: advanced human knowledge by leaps and bounds. I love that.
Speaker 1: I love that idea that I don't know. There's something
Speaker 1: about engaging with history in this way where the people
Speaker 1: that you admire have to be hero figures. I understand
Speaker 1: the inclination to to lionize and hero eze these people,
Speaker 1: but then you have this really surface engagement with them,
Speaker 1: like you don't. They don't get to be the full, messy, flog, complex,
Speaker 1: dynamic people that we know they are. They get to
Speaker 1: be like a stick around a notebook, right, And how
Speaker 1: boring is that? Yeah? Totally yeah, and like and the
Speaker 1: warts and all thing kind of like keeps us locked
Speaker 1: out of it because we're like, oh, well, I'm not
Speaker 1: as cool as that person because I did bad stuff
Speaker 1: when I was a teenager, or I don't know, I
Speaker 1: lose my temper sometimes or whatever the thing is, um,
Speaker 1: you know, being able to like, yeah, I really want
Speaker 1: to try and warts in all things as much as
Speaker 1: I can. And the two biggest warts that need to
Speaker 1: be talked about before we talk about anything has to
Speaker 1: do with space are the fact that a lot of
Speaker 1: what I'm gonna be talking about our accomplishments that are
Speaker 1: claimed by two nations, neither of which do I have
Speaker 1: any love for. One of those nations is the United
Speaker 1: States of America, and one of them is the the USSRUM.
Speaker 1: I love the just straight up like fuck the USA energy,
Speaker 1: you just ground us in. Yeah, and it's not because
Speaker 1: it's not because I'm like, oh well, if you hate
Speaker 1: the USA, you love the USSR. Like, no, they're they're
Speaker 1: both bad things, like hate them both. Yeah, but but
Speaker 1: cool people within those structures figured out how to advance
Speaker 1: human knowledge as best as they could. Yeah, I don't know.
Speaker 1: And so most of these people get talked about in
Speaker 1: patriotic terms. But as far as I can tell, most
Speaker 1: of these people, and I'll mark some who did, most
Speaker 1: of these people did not see things in patriotic terms.
Speaker 1: They saw things basically. I mean, they care about science
Speaker 1: by and large more than anything else. But I'm I'm
Speaker 1: cutting curious, Bridget, since you you do a lot of
Speaker 1: work around this sort of thing, Like, how do you
Speaker 1: handle talking about people who do good things within bad frameworks?
Speaker 1: You know, like like people like now we're all stock
Speaker 1: working these capitalist jobs and things like that, or you know,
Speaker 1: all the science that ends up being used by governments,
Speaker 1: by by forces of colonization and all that. Ship. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what a good question. I think it's really complicated and
Speaker 1: I guess I try to remember kind of like you
Speaker 1: just pointed out, Margaret, that we're talking about people within systems, right,
Speaker 1: So like I'm an anti capitalist. I don't really funk
Speaker 1: with our government like that, Like I'm consider myself a radical,
Speaker 1: but I'm still living in the United States, and so
Speaker 1: I still have to engage in commerce. They still have to,
Speaker 1: you know, do all the machinations that come with living
Speaker 1: in a white supremacist like how Herrow patriarchy fucked up society,
Speaker 1: and so I just try to I I'm it's really
Speaker 1: easy for me to give myself that grace, and I
Speaker 1: tried to extend that to the people that I'm like
Speaker 1: reading about and and hearing about and learning about, because
Speaker 1: you know, there are also individuals who did cool ship,
Speaker 1: but we're trapped within systems that are very oppressive, and
Speaker 1: so it's a bummer to see like, oh, this cool
Speaker 1: ship was used to do something horrible that I don't
Speaker 1: agree with, but you got to remember that it's like
Speaker 1: against that backdrop that none of us can really escape. Yeah, um,
Speaker 1: I was. There's this amazing trans woman named Lynn Conway
Speaker 1: who is super cool. She's still alive, and she is
Speaker 1: used to work for IBM back in the fifties, and
Speaker 1: she is like the person who developed the technology for
Speaker 1: the cell phone, right, and like she was fired from
Speaker 1: IBM for being trans and all this stuff, and reading
Speaker 1: about her story, I was like, wow, I'm so inspired
Speaker 1: by her, Like what a life. But then I continued
Speaker 1: reading about her story and it's like, oh, she was
Speaker 1: designing the pen for the government. Cool cool Google like,
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean I admire her and her bravery
Speaker 1: and her you know, ability to like do cool ship
Speaker 1: and persevere any less, even though I don't love the
Speaker 1: fact that, you know, building defense for the government isn't
Speaker 1: really my cup of tea, right, totally. No, that that
Speaker 1: that nails it, And I think that's the similar story. Now.
Speaker 1: I actually want to find out more about this this woman.
Speaker 1: But um, a lot of the people that are going
Speaker 1: to end up interwoven into this story have a very
Speaker 1: you'll learn You'll learn this when you ever I'm talking
Speaker 1: with Bridget, I end up like spending like four hours googling,
Speaker 1: and like the best possible way. I'm gonna take that
Speaker 1: as a compliment, absolutely, all right. So I want to
Speaker 1: start by going way back in time, just because it's fun.
Speaker 1: And the first thing that I want to make like
Speaker 1: really clear to anyone um which I think everyone knows
Speaker 1: this unless you swallowed a lot of really Eurocentric history,
Speaker 1: which is that the first people doing complex were not
Speaker 1: white people. The oldest undisputed mathematical documents are from Egypt
Speaker 1: and Mesopotamia which is modern day Iraq, and there are
Speaker 1: from the second century BC. The concept of zero was
Speaker 1: imported into Europe from Africa. China was the first place
Speaker 1: to make use of negative numbers. To be fair, as
Speaker 1: far as I can tell, ancient Greece wasn't like terribly
Speaker 1: far behind, but they, you know, got these ideas from
Speaker 1: other places, and then the Celts picked some of it up.
Speaker 1: But but overall, quote unquote Western knowledge is absolutely based
Speaker 1: on Asian and African knowledge as far as anything I
Speaker 1: can tell. And then the other thing in which I
Speaker 1: guess I recovered in the introduction is to know is
Speaker 1: that the first computers were people. So someone who computes,
Speaker 1: someone who solves mathematical problems, which a lot of it
Speaker 1: was about astronomy, a lot of it back in the day.
Speaker 1: A lot of the first complex math that people were
Speaker 1: doing was tracking the position of stars, which I like
Speaker 1: because it ties neatly back into the story that we're
Speaker 1: gonna be telling today. And the word computer itself dates
Speaker 1: back to at least six from some really weird quote
Speaker 1: that I could not figure how to parse, and I
Speaker 1: like asked the Internet, and the Internet's like, we don't
Speaker 1: know how to parse this either, some quote about the
Speaker 1: mortality of man and how God or maybe Moses is
Speaker 1: the computer who counts your days. Oh yeah, And everyone's like,
Speaker 1: is this about God or Moses or something, or is
Speaker 1: it just like some guy who's like counting all your
Speaker 1: days who just like, I don't know, maybe a profit
Speaker 1: or something. I'm not sure. Someone listening to this nose
Speaker 1: and will be very upset that I didn't focus on
Speaker 1: this particular aspect. But originally it was interchangeable with the
Speaker 1: word mathematician, until eventually mathematicians started implying someone who was
Speaker 1: doing the thinking about math and computer was involving someone
Speaker 1: solving the math, which of course makes a hierarchy. And
Speaker 1: when you figure out how to make a hierarchy, people
Speaker 1: figure out how to shove humans onto it based on
Speaker 1: existing systems of discrimination. So for a computer, they went
Speaker 1: with one of the classics. Men do the thinking. Women
Speaker 1: do the solving, which is obviously thinking also, but you know,
Speaker 1: try explaining that to the patriarch. I love that people
Speaker 1: were able to get away with saying that solving didn't
Speaker 1: involve like complex thought evolved. Yeah, they're not doing the
Speaker 1: higher level thinking about it. I'm like, I can't do
Speaker 1: either of these things. So and it's actually something that
Speaker 1: I've noticed in a lot of fields that I've worked in,
Speaker 1: is that, for example, and publishing and a lot of
Speaker 1: my work and publishing as a writer, it's a lot
Speaker 1: of this is not universal and I'm not trying to
Speaker 1: call out individual publishers, but there's a lot of women
Speaker 1: doing the back end work and who are to publish men? Right,
Speaker 1: A lot of the people who make books happen, who
Speaker 1: are the editors, who are the type setters, who are
Speaker 1: just doing all the work, not all the work. Writing
Speaker 1: is work too, but I don't know it, and it
Speaker 1: it annoys me when I've noticed that publishers work for
Speaker 1: it annoys me. Yeah, it is annoying, and I see it.
Speaker 1: I agree with you, and I've seen it in so
Speaker 1: many places. And I think that labor that we associate
Speaker 1: with women, it's always going to be devalued. And so
Speaker 1: even if it's the labor that like literally the thing
Speaker 1: would not exist without this labor. It is the grease
Speaker 1: that keeps the wheels running if it's associated with women
Speaker 1: or somehow like perceived as feminine, and we just don't
Speaker 1: value it, and that you can see that in I
Speaker 1: mean everywhere, all all the all the way down. Yeah, no, absolutely,
Speaker 1: But it took a while for for Western men to
Speaker 1: actually figure out that they can make women do this work,
Speaker 1: because they were like not convinced that women were smart
Speaker 1: enough to do the solving or whatever. So so most
Speaker 1: computers started off men as far as I can tell,
Speaker 1: until about the second half of the nineteenth century, and
Speaker 1: the first one I found, there's no part of me
Speaker 1: that believes is the first woman computer, even under that name,
Speaker 1: but the first white english woman Mary Edwards. Mary Edwards
Speaker 1: was a white english woman born sometimes around seventeen fifty
Speaker 1: and her husband, John Edwards, was a clergyman who couldn't
Speaker 1: make ends meet, so in seventeen seventy three he got
Speaker 1: himself hired by the British Nautical Almanac, among other people,
Speaker 1: to do astronomical calculations for their almanac. And so he
Speaker 1: became a computer, which is cool until you realize that
Speaker 1: probably mostly what he did is make an almac that
Speaker 1: was used by British sailors to go around and impress
Speaker 1: people all over the world. But you know, um, the
Speaker 1: people who can afford to pay people to do the
Speaker 1: math there often up to no good. So John Edwards
Speaker 1: he's getting paid as a computer, but he's not a computer.
Speaker 1: His wife as a computer. His wife is doing all
Speaker 1: of the computing work. It's possible that he was doing
Speaker 1: some of it. I'm not sure, but I believe she
Speaker 1: was doing the majority or all of it. And I
Speaker 1: actually kind of wonder how many times throughout history this happens,
Speaker 1: where some man just literally gets the credit in the
Speaker 1: pay and and sometimes maybe in a mean way, being
Speaker 1: like ha ha, I'm going to take all the credit.
Speaker 1: And maybe sometimes it's like a woman is like, all right, well,
Speaker 1: I can't get any ship done unless I marry this
Speaker 1: dude and get him to take the credit. You know,
Speaker 1: So he dies in God only knows what he dies from,
Speaker 1: probably just from being alive in the eighteenth century, which
Speaker 1: killed a lot of people young. And when he died,
Speaker 1: she wrote the Nautical Board a letter and was like, hey,
Speaker 1: it was actually me the entire time. Can I can
Speaker 1: I keep having this job? I like having this job?
Speaker 1: And they said yes, and she became one of the
Speaker 1: their thirty five computers and the first woman to work
Speaker 1: under the job title computer, at least in English. Probably
Speaker 1: a bad sign that I was like, oh wow, Luke
Speaker 1: said yes, I know, right, really bad, very progressive of
Speaker 1: But the sad part is it probably was there was
Speaker 1: probably that's a woman taking credit for her labor and
Speaker 1: like being able to continue to do it. Who would
Speaker 1: have thought. There's probably like an entire movies worth of
Speaker 1: drama that happened around that decision. You know, there's probably
Speaker 1: like one of the guys was like, I think we
Speaker 1: should let her do it, and then he like loses
Speaker 1: his job, but then like the head of it all,
Speaker 1: his wife is like, I won't suck you until you
Speaker 1: let him come back, you know whatever. Starring Meryl Streep.
Speaker 1: Obviously I would watch that and one of the things
Speaker 1: that was kind of interesting, right You're like, oh, wow,
Speaker 1: she's and then you're like, oh, she's one of thirty
Speaker 1: five people doing this work, and this is something that
Speaker 1: seems to get left out and a lot of the
Speaker 1: stuff that talks about this is it's less about individual genius,
Speaker 1: although it is about individual genius, but it's about the
Speaker 1: collective genius of people getting together and you know, they're
Speaker 1: checking and rechecking each other's work, and they even end
Speaker 1: up like splitting problems to work on them as if
Speaker 1: basically parallel processing all of the mathematical problems, which I
Speaker 1: think is cool. So her daughter, Eliza Edwards takes up
Speaker 1: the family business when her mom died, and then she
Speaker 1: had that job until they centralized the job until London
Speaker 1: and since she didn't live in London. Uh oh, and
Speaker 1: then England also passed a bunch of laws making harder
Speaker 1: for women to find work because progress isn't linear and
Speaker 1: sometimes people have it better and worse and things get
Speaker 1: better and then they get worse, which I don't like
Speaker 1: reminding myself right now. Hopeful. Yeah, pretty grim reminder, especially
Speaker 1: at today these days. Yeah. Uh well, gay marriage was nice,
Speaker 1: while no, I'm kidding, we're gonna hold onto it all right.
Speaker 1: So the first American woman computer I run across is
Speaker 1: a woman named Maria Mitchell who's also a white woman,
Speaker 1: and she was born in Nantucket in eighteen eighteen and
Speaker 1: she had the good fortune to be born into a
Speaker 1: Quaker family. And usually say the good fortune and kind
Speaker 1: of a sarcastic way, but this time I'm not being sarcastic.
Speaker 1: Quakers come up disproportionately on this podcast, or at least
Speaker 1: in my research, because they're one of the only groups
Speaker 1: of white people are actually they weren't actually exclusively white,
Speaker 1: but majority white people in the United States who actually
Speaker 1: consistently risked their lives to stop slavery, and relevant to
Speaker 1: today's story, they raised their daughters with the same education
Speaker 1: and opportunities as they raised their sons. So like, Quakers
Speaker 1: keep doing cool stuff in history way more than I
Speaker 1: very disproportionately. Yeah, I funk with Quakers. I've been to
Speaker 1: Quaker church and it's like cool. Like I'm not religious,
Speaker 1: but like a Quaker church, their ceremonies are very cool.
Speaker 1: Like sometimes you sit in silence sometimes and whatever comes
Speaker 1: to you, you can speak to the group. It's like
Speaker 1: a very I keep keep being cool Quakers. I like,
Speaker 1: I like what you're doing. Yeah, no, that's cool. So
Speaker 1: Maria she grows up into an educated, maybe middle class family.
Speaker 1: Her her mom is a library worker and her father
Speaker 1: is a school teacher who's into amateur astronomy. Apparents like
Speaker 1: ten fucking kids, and they still found the time to
Speaker 1: teach her all kinds of weird astronomical devices and math ship.
Speaker 1: When she was twelve, she helped her dad calculate the
Speaker 1: solar eclipse, and then she grew up to be even cooler.
Speaker 1: When she was seventeen, she founded a school for girls,
Speaker 1: and the first girls that she took in were three
Speaker 1: quote Portuguese girls, which was slang for immigrant women of color,
Speaker 1: regardless of what nationality. And since schools weren't integrated, basically,
Speaker 1: by by teaching these three girls, she knew that like
Speaker 1: the rich white women and we're going to send their
Speaker 1: kids to her school. And she did it anyway or whatever,
Speaker 1: just like one of these like wow, you passed this
Speaker 1: like bare minimum bar, you know, like I don't know,
Speaker 1: I mean it's like, I mean, get back then. It
Speaker 1: probably was like a very like a very cool radical
Speaker 1: thing to do. Yeah, no, totally. But the downside is
Speaker 1: that since she's seventeen when she starts this school, she's
Speaker 1: a teenager, and so she pretty quickly gets bored I
Speaker 1: think of teaching. Uh so I don't know, when she's eighteen,
Speaker 1: she gets offered a librarian ship at the Nantucket Athenium.
Speaker 1: And I've never heard of an athenium. Have you heard
Speaker 1: of an athenium? I don't even know if they still exist.
Speaker 1: I've never heard of it. My spell check knows what
Speaker 1: they are, so I think it must be a thing.
Speaker 1: But it was this cultural center slash learning center slash
Speaker 1: library hybrid thing that they had going on at least
Speaker 1: in n Tuckett. It seems really cool, and so she
Speaker 1: shakes this job I think maybe closes her school. I
Speaker 1: don't know. I hopefully someone else took it on. And
Speaker 1: so she now starts working at the Atheneum. When five
Speaker 1: years later, when she's twenty three, there's this twenty three
Speaker 1: year old who had just escaped slavery a couple of
Speaker 1: years earlier who shows up to give his very first
Speaker 1: public address at anti slavery conference at the Nantucket Antheneum.
Speaker 1: And the guy's name is Frederick Douglas. And so he
Speaker 1: gives his very first public address about the need for
Speaker 1: abolition and all that ship at this thing, and everyone
Speaker 1: gets really excited about him because he's fucking awesome. Can
Speaker 1: you imagine here, like like I know he was known
Speaker 1: as an orator, Like can you imagine being in the crowd,
Speaker 1: probably like being like, oh yeah, I was there for
Speaker 1: Nirvana's Unplugged totally, totally because this is the very first one,
Speaker 1: and the stuff I was reading about it was like
Speaker 1: he was really nervous. He was like, I don't know
Speaker 1: if these people are gonna like me. And then like
Speaker 1: everyone's just like, he like steals the show. He's just
Speaker 1: like an opening speaker or whatever, and everyone's just just like, no,
Speaker 1: this guy, this guy rules. And so she's she stays
Speaker 1: friends with him, and they reign friends the rest of
Speaker 1: their lives. And I know this is not actually synchronicity
Speaker 1: or it's probably coincidence, but he called his newspaper the
Speaker 1: north Star, and I just anything that's astronomical, I'm going
Speaker 1: to shove into this story. And it's like shameless, yeah
Speaker 1: for you, Yeah, y'all hired a science fiction writer to
Speaker 1: tell a history podcast. I'm not gonna lie, but I'm
Speaker 1: going to look for anything I can't that fits. I
Speaker 1: wouldn't want you to be any other way, Margaret. And
Speaker 1: so this is something that I actually am trying to
Speaker 1: learn more about right now. And I don't totally know
Speaker 1: how I feel, because I I've known for a long
Speaker 1: time that the suffragette movement and a lot of early
Speaker 1: feminism and in the US and UK was racists, and
Speaker 1: there was a lot of like, we want the vote
Speaker 1: for white women and we don't give a shit about
Speaker 1: anyone else. But when I'm looking through the nineteenth century abolitionists,
Speaker 1: I keep coming across all of these places where they
Speaker 1: intertwined with early feminism, and and Maria Mitchell is one
Speaker 1: of these people, and it is part of the abolitionist movement,
Speaker 1: and it seems like there must have been like a
Speaker 1: a bad split, or maybe I'm just like spoiled and
Speaker 1: only reading the people who I come across, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't know, Yeah, I mean, I think it's one
Speaker 1: of those things where I see this a lot where
Speaker 1: people who are historically like marginalized, there's this idea that
Speaker 1: we need to be working against one another, and the
Speaker 1: times where you work alongside each other, it's like you
Speaker 1: really see so clearly that we're strong, our movements are
Speaker 1: stronger together, that unity is so much more powerful than division,
Speaker 1: like the times where there's that, you know, alignment. I
Speaker 1: think in history has always been so powerful. Yeah, no, totally,
Speaker 1: and it's when she gets done, you know. Like so
Speaker 1: she was part of this movement, this abolitionist movement called
Speaker 1: the free product produce movement, which was a slave labor
Speaker 1: boycott movement that was originally started shocker by Quakers. Um,
Speaker 1: and I think both white and black Quakers, but even
Speaker 1: when I'm talking about abolitionists, it's annoyingly hard to find
Speaker 1: information about the Black Quakers. The free Produce movement starts
Speaker 1: in the late eighteenth century, and by the early eighteen hundreds,
Speaker 1: various organizations of free black people are involved, and they
Speaker 1: opened stores that sold only slave labor free goods, including
Speaker 1: sugar and fabric. Maria Mitchell famously wore mostly silk because
Speaker 1: she wouldn't wear cotton grown by enslaved people, which sounds
Speaker 1: like the boogist way to protest slavery. Yeah, you're protesting slavery.
Speaker 1: And also like looking look like like drippy, Yeah, good
Speaker 1: look um. And so they had to set up their
Speaker 1: whole alternate um distribution networks for goods, and they did,
Speaker 1: and this movement ran in one form or another until
Speaker 1: the eighteen fifties into to the decade before the Civil War.
Speaker 1: And overall it was not actually a success. It was
Speaker 1: a valiant effort that a lot of people put a
Speaker 1: lot of work into, but like a lot of boycott movements,
Speaker 1: it did end up failing. And um, basically it was
Speaker 1: too hard for the these goods to compete on the
Speaker 1: open market. Some of them were less high quality, some
Speaker 1: of them were just too expensive. Not everyone can afford
Speaker 1: to roll around in silk, I don't know, and actually
Speaker 1: just to not The Quakers get a lot of credit,
Speaker 1: but she, actually, Maria Mitchell converted to Unitarian, so they
Speaker 1: also get to claim her, I think, And she was
Speaker 1: not afraid of mixing science and religion. One of her
Speaker 1: quotes about her astronomical work is every formula which expresses
Speaker 1: a law of nature is a hymn of praise to God.
Speaker 1: And this is going to be a theme that's going
Speaker 1: to come through as the religious beliefs of all these
Speaker 1: people who are supposed to be like cold heart atheists
Speaker 1: working on science. I love that because, like how many
Speaker 1: I love when someone has like a scientist or like
Speaker 1: a math background, but they're also into astrology or something
Speaker 1: like that. Like I love you know, I love the
Speaker 1: I love the duality. Yeah, well, that's almost everyone I'm
Speaker 1: going to talk about, which wasn't even my plan. I
Speaker 1: just was like writing about all these people and then
Speaker 1: I was like, all these people are really interesting, and
Speaker 1: you know what else is really interesting is the complications
Speaker 1: of being anti capit lists who are supported by advertising.
Speaker 1: Abert you did not, so we have decided um you also, um, Bridget,
Speaker 1: if you have any ideas for sponsors, like very wholesome sponsors.
Speaker 1: One of my favorite sponsors of the show is the
Speaker 1: concept of potatoes. I'm also really excited about tap water,
Speaker 1: like potable water for free and on demand. UM. I've
Speaker 1: also would like our new sponsor, Sophie, would you be
Speaker 1: able to get um don't say anything to cops as
Speaker 1: a sponsor. Yeah concept UM. Shout out to that person
Speaker 1: who sent us that they got an actual water sponsor Twitter.
Speaker 1: I really appreciate you, Bridget. Do you have a wholesome
Speaker 1: sponsor that you would like you you would like us
Speaker 1: to re sponsored by? Uh? Yeah, I think you should
Speaker 1: be sponsored by a good Comb. You know, I really
Speaker 1: appreciate in respect of good Comb me all right, but
Speaker 1: not a specific brand, just the concept, yeah, just the
Speaker 1: concept of a reliable come all right, here's some other
Speaker 1: ads that may may or may not be as cool
Speaker 1: as that. All right, and we are back. So. One
Speaker 1: of the other things that Maria Mitchell did actually that
Speaker 1: I found interesting is that when she was a teenager,
Speaker 1: her older sister bought a piano and Maria pitched in.
Speaker 1: And this was this massive local scandal because Quakers at
Speaker 1: the time didn't approve of music, and her father at
Speaker 1: first was like really disapproving. But basically, when as far
Speaker 1: as as far as I can tell, when the rest
Speaker 1: of the community was like, you need to be mad
Speaker 1: at your daughter's for having a piano, he was like,
Speaker 1: I will not be mad at my daughter's And it
Speaker 1: ended up again, there's so many little micro moments that
Speaker 1: I would absolutely watch movies of. It ended up being
Speaker 1: this thing where like the local Quaker community came around
Speaker 1: and started incorporating music more into the stuff they do. Oh,
Speaker 1: this sounds like a like an old school version of Um,
Speaker 1: what's the movie where dancing is illegal? And then at
Speaker 1: the ends, like the quicker version of foot Loose? Yeah, exactly, Um,
Speaker 1: maybe that's where this foot Loose got it from. UM.
Speaker 1: In eighty seven, she discovers a telescopic comment that is
Speaker 1: one that can't be seen by the naked eye because
Speaker 1: she's doing astronomy this whole time while she's doing everything else.
Speaker 1: And she wins this Astronomy award, which is a gold
Speaker 1: medal from the King of Denmark, whose father had said
Speaker 1: anyone who discovers a comment gets a gold medal, and
Speaker 1: she was the first American to win the award and
Speaker 1: the first woman to win any astronomy award. So uh,
Speaker 1: and some some places will say it's the first telescopic comment,
Speaker 1: but I don't think that's true. But regardless, she became
Speaker 1: one of America's first like science celebrities, or one of
Speaker 1: America's early science celebrities, and she became a household name
Speaker 1: for a while, and she stayed working at the Atheneum.
Speaker 1: She also got computer work for nautical almanacs, which she
Speaker 1: did for nineteen years. And she was the first woman
Speaker 1: computer in the US, which is it's kind of impressive
Speaker 1: that being the first woman computer in the US was
Speaker 1: like the least impressive thing that she did in all
Speaker 1: of the things that I'm talking about about her, because
Speaker 1: that would have been enough, you know, like we would
Speaker 1: be talking about her if that was what she had done.
Speaker 1: She became a professor of astronomy at Vassar College in
Speaker 1: upstate New York. And the reason that rules from my
Speaker 1: point of view is that she did not have a degree.
Speaker 1: But she started teaching as a professor at college, and
Speaker 1: she immediately started turning it around in at least in
Speaker 1: her classes. She abolished grades, she didn't track absences, she
Speaker 1: dropped her class sizes, She refused to enforce social norms
Speaker 1: on her female students, Like female students were supposed to
Speaker 1: go out at night, and she would like hold classes
Speaker 1: at night because they're supposed to look at the fucking stars,
Speaker 1: you know. Yeah, how else would you study astronomy if
Speaker 1: not at night? And I don't know, maybe like you're
Speaker 1: supposed to be escorted by a man or something, you know,
Speaker 1: but not alone because that would also be scandal. And
Speaker 1: so she was such a popular teacher that Vassar College
Speaker 1: was attracting more astronomy students than Harvard. And she took
Speaker 1: the first real photos of the fucking sun, like in
Speaker 1: order to track sun spots. She brought all kinds of
Speaker 1: prestige to the college. Two men named a crater on
Speaker 1: the moon after her, and eventually she realized this is
Speaker 1: gonna shock you. Nothing like this has ever happened again.
Speaker 1: She was getting less money. She was getting less than
Speaker 1: half as much money as the men her male colleagues.
Speaker 1: I'm shocked. I know, I was scandalous. She was getting
Speaker 1: eight hundred dollars a year, plus room and board for
Speaker 1: herself and her father, and that's about two dollars today.
Speaker 1: Her male colleagues were getting plus room and boards, really
Speaker 1: making a lot more than she was. Yeah, yeah, like
Speaker 1: twice as much, more than twice as much, and am
Speaker 1: twice as much. And she's like the biggest draw at
Speaker 1: this fucking college. So and it's this long drawn out
Speaker 1: fight where her in one of another woman professor have
Speaker 1: to like file appeal after appeal, and then they had
Speaker 1: to pass three entire provisions in order to get like
Speaker 1: like that's how fucked up their system was that it
Speaker 1: took three different provisions to get it fixed. But she
Speaker 1: actually got guaranteed equal pay for women at Vassar College
Speaker 1: in the eighteen seventies, which is the Equal Pay Act
Speaker 1: wasn't signed until nineteen sixty three, and of course it's
Speaker 1: now sixty years after that, and women overall earned eighty
Speaker 1: three cents on the white male dollar. Black women earned
Speaker 1: sixty four cents on the white male dollar, and Hispanic women,
Speaker 1: which is the name the term used by this study.
Speaker 1: I'm exciting, earned fifty seven cents on the white male dollar,
Speaker 1: so ahead of her time, ahead of her time. And
Speaker 1: also I have to just shout out that like she
Speaker 1: it sounds like she wasn't just interested in getting equal
Speaker 1: pay for herself, but for other women who came after her,
Speaker 1: so really like lifting as she climbed, making sure that
Speaker 1: she had a legacy. That wasn't just It would be
Speaker 1: so easy to say, well, I got my equal pay
Speaker 1: because I'm the superstar professor here and I'm not really
Speaker 1: worried about women coming behind me. But she didn't do
Speaker 1: that totally. And she also she stays involved in feminist politics.
Speaker 1: She founds the American Association for the Advancement of Women,
Speaker 1: serves as as president for two years. And then the
Speaker 1: weirder part of what she did, at least from my
Speaker 1: point of view, she corresponded a bunch with the Moby
Speaker 1: Dick guy um and provide information about Nintucket for his book.
Speaker 1: And he has he has a name. It's a term
Speaker 1: in Melville but we all know his real name is
Speaker 1: Moby Dick guy. Um, and then call me moby Dick. Sorry, okay,
Speaker 1: it's fine. Well no, wait, wait and see if I
Speaker 1: can do my favorite joke about this off top of
Speaker 1: my head. So there's a fab assigned female at birth,
Speaker 1: a mab assigned male at birth, a cab all cops
Speaker 1: are bastards, and a hab from Hell's heart. I stab
Speaker 1: at the thank you. Yeah pretty good. Yeah, I definitely
Speaker 1: did not make that Radios five Stars and Apple podcast.
Speaker 1: So okay. So she's friends with moby Dick guy and
Speaker 1: then in her thirties, she's traveling around Italy in a
Speaker 1: bunch of Europe doing all this astronomical word and she
Speaker 1: does this thing where she's strong arms her way into
Speaker 1: like the popes of the thing where you look at
Speaker 1: the stars. I didn't write down this word in my observatory.
Speaker 1: She's trying to get into the Pope's observatory and they're like, well,
Speaker 1: you're a woman, you can't come in here. And he
Speaker 1: she gets like special dispensation from the Pope to go
Speaker 1: into the like no women allowed observatory. But the guy
Speaker 1: she's bumming around with around Italy is the Scarlet letter
Speaker 1: guy who also has another name, which is Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Speaker 1: and they probably weren't fucking I know that's what you
Speaker 1: were thinking. She described the Scarlet letter guy as not handsome,
Speaker 1: but he looks as the author of his work should
Speaker 1: look a little strange and odd, as if not point
Speaker 1: of the earth out because all of his books and
Speaker 1: short stories are like kind of creepy and weird. So
Speaker 1: I it's like, oh, yeah, he looks at the kind
Speaker 1: of guy who would write creepy, weird short stories as
Speaker 1: he does. Yeah, he's a fucking edge lord. I'm gonna
Speaker 1: get to them in that moment um. So she's actually
Speaker 1: probably either gay or a sexual. And it's really hard
Speaker 1: to figure that out about women, especially in the nineteenth century,
Speaker 1: um whereas the Scarlet letter guy was absolutely gay for
Speaker 1: Moby Dick Guy and vice versa. Melville once wrote about
Speaker 1: his bud Nathan Already, I feel that Hawthorne has dropped
Speaker 1: Germanist seeds into my soul. He expands and deepens down
Speaker 1: the more I contemplate him, and further and further shoots
Speaker 1: his strong New England roots into the hot soil of
Speaker 1: my southern soul. The strong New England roots. This is
Speaker 1: the only time I'm going to say I hope they
Speaker 1: didn't funk about a gay couple, because the fucking Hawthorne
Speaker 1: is a racist, little fucking edge lord. All of his
Speaker 1: friends are Northern abolitionists. But he was like, no, we
Speaker 1: can't risk breaking up the Union over slavery, whereas fucking
Speaker 1: Melville wrote a whole last book about how shitty slavery
Speaker 1: was ten years before the Civil War and then wrote
Speaker 1: this like book of poems about how great all of
Speaker 1: the people who went and fucking killed the Confederates are,
Speaker 1: And so Melville was, I hope they broke up over that,
Speaker 1: is what I'm trying to say. Oh my god, can
Speaker 1: you imagine like the annoying ask conversations where Hawthorne's just like,
Speaker 1: I'm just asking questions, I'm just playing Devil's advocate or
Speaker 1: are you getting so upset? He is absolutely that guy.
Speaker 1: That is him. I feel like I dated a guy
Speaker 1: like that before. I'm sorry me too. So anyway back
Speaker 1: to Maria. Two years before she died, she finally got
Speaker 1: her degree, which was when Columbia University gave her an
Speaker 1: honorary doctorate, And I like this especially because this is
Speaker 1: my plan. I don't have a college degree. I just
Speaker 1: want someone to fucking hand me one for being cool.
Speaker 1: That is my long term plan. Anyway, that's that's Maria Mitchell,
Speaker 1: America's first female computer, and I think she fucking ruled.
Speaker 1: But while we're talking about words for how we describe people,
Speaker 1: it turns out the words scientist was coined by a man,
Speaker 1: William why Hill, to describe a specific woman, Mary Somerville,
Speaker 1: to quote historian Maria Popova, The commonly used term up
Speaker 1: to that point man of science clearly couldn't apply to
Speaker 1: a woman, nor to what way will considered the peculiar
Speaker 1: illumination of the female mind, the ability to synthesize ideas
Speaker 1: and connect seemingly disparate disciplines into a clear lens on reality.
Speaker 1: Because he couldn't call her a physicist, a geologist, or
Speaker 1: a chemist. She had written with deep knowledge of all
Speaker 1: of these disciplines and more way well unified them all
Speaker 1: into scientists. Wow, I I this is so fascinating, And
Speaker 1: I guess I have a question for the both of
Speaker 1: you if that's okay, Like you know, time and time again,
Speaker 1: I'll hear something where it's like, actually, this was first
Speaker 1: coin to talk about a woman, or the first computer
Speaker 1: was a woman. So this it blows my mind at
Speaker 1: the first that the term scientists was coined to have
Speaker 1: a you know, gender neutral way to talk about a
Speaker 1: woman who practiced science. But why do you think this
Speaker 1: history goes over looks? Like why is that not common
Speaker 1: knowledge even to people who are interested in this kind
Speaker 1: of thing. So if you want to go first, I mean,
Speaker 1: because the patriarchy has had too much power for far
Speaker 1: too long and it's depressing. But I feel like we're
Speaker 1: finally fighting back on it enough where we're learning about
Speaker 1: things that we should have known a long time ago.
Speaker 1: And it's also that there's so many different ways to
Speaker 1: communicate now, and so people that might have been afraid
Speaker 1: to have spoken up face to face are able to
Speaker 1: speak up on what they believe in a safer environment. M. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's interesting. I'm gonna go with that one. Wait now
Speaker 1: I had another. I had another one too, though. Um
Speaker 1: So I think that one of the things that happens
Speaker 1: is that when you know, I get asked like why
Speaker 1: does it matter if this person in history was gay?
Speaker 1: Or like why does it matter that this person who
Speaker 1: invented this thing or that thing was a woman or something.
Speaker 1: Can it just be about the knowledge? And so because
Speaker 1: because identity matters, basically, but people don't want to pretend
Speaker 1: like identity matters, and so that's a way to kind
Speaker 1: of keep us invisible. If like, any time a woman
Speaker 1: does something, you're like, humanity did this thing. And and
Speaker 1: that's also what people say when Aman does something. But
Speaker 1: but if you don't draw attention to the fact that
Speaker 1: someone who has been silenced and shut up and had
Speaker 1: to overcome systemic barriers because of you know, race or
Speaker 1: gender or sexual orientation or whatever, I don't know. That's
Speaker 1: that's my take. Yeah, I think that's so true. And
Speaker 1: I think of all the ways that different people have
Speaker 1: spent further people who are already marginalized are like further
Speaker 1: marginalized by the way that we tell their stories or
Speaker 1: don't tell their stories. Like I'm a huge fan of
Speaker 1: the painter Freed to Carlo. I didn't know she had
Speaker 1: a disability until like recently, because we don't think of,
Speaker 1: you know, her story as being like a story of
Speaker 1: disability justice. Right, Like all the different ways that like
Speaker 1: these pieces of our identity, that things that make us
Speaker 1: who we are and inform our experiences and all of that.
Speaker 1: We are just unseen, and if we're unseen, it takes
Speaker 1: away our power. I think it's I think the work
Speaker 1: that you're doing to like retell these stories and like
Speaker 1: make them gay, make them queer, make them who they were,
Speaker 1: I think is so important and powerful. I think we're
Speaker 1: also a like world of headlines. We read the headline,
Speaker 1: we don't actually read the article. We don't actually read
Speaker 1: the article. People read the the snazzy headline. I think
Speaker 1: that was the same since the beginning of time. You
Speaker 1: don't actually do the work to find out the information.
Speaker 1: And and like, I feel like shows like this where
Speaker 1: we're going and you're learning all these things are so
Speaker 1: vital to our story as as as people. Yeah, And
Speaker 1: it's like and the people who are writing those headlines
Speaker 1: are going to come at it with their biases. Whereas
Speaker 1: you know, when I write short, when I do a
Speaker 1: very quick version of someone's story, I'm absolutely going to
Speaker 1: be like, and he loved fucking dudes, you know, because
Speaker 1: it's not going to get included and the other versions
Speaker 1: of the story, even though that makes no sense, It
Speaker 1: makes no sense to disclude that. And I mean you know.
Speaker 1: I mean it guess depends what you're talking about, like
Speaker 1: maybe not like if I'm talking about someone who, like,
Speaker 1: I don't know, runs a gay bar, like maybe like
Speaker 1: maybe that's implicit, you know that maybe instead of like
Speaker 1: and he was a sexual I don't know. Anyway, writing
Speaker 1: us back into history it's important and so so after
Speaker 1: Maria Mitchell, it wasn't too long before computing became women's work.
Speaker 1: And actually a lot of the early computers I think
Speaker 1: came from her students, basically because she was teaching so
Speaker 1: many women astronomy. And that's something else that also gets
Speaker 1: left out is that you know, you have this like
Speaker 1: individual genius who discovers ideas, whereas teaching isn't as important.
Speaker 1: And and that's actually something that come up a lot,
Speaker 1: comes up a lot in terms of I think women
Speaker 1: in particular breaking through boundaries is that we like teach
Speaker 1: each other and we we take people along with us,
Speaker 1: like what you were talking about earlier about like not
Speaker 1: I got mine, fuck you? You know, So computing becomes
Speaker 1: women's work, and eventually black women's work in particular first
Speaker 1: and foremost, because you can get away with paying women
Speaker 1: less than men. Harvard observatory starting in eighteen seventy seven,
Speaker 1: was excited to maximize their budget. There's there's so many
Speaker 1: numbers they have to crunch, and they could pay women
Speaker 1: cents to fifty cents an hour, or roughly seven to
Speaker 1: fourteen dollars an hour in today's wages. So for decades,
Speaker 1: these people who are doing all of the important, like
Speaker 1: crazy complicated math, we're getting paid seven dollars an hour. Uh,
Speaker 1: to quote that writer Maria Popova again. Decades before they
Speaker 1: were allowed to vote. In a century before NASA's unheralded
Speaker 1: women mathematicians helped put the first man on the moon.
Speaker 1: These women, who came to be known as the quote
Speaker 1: Harvard computers illuminated the composition of stars and classified hundreds
Speaker 1: of thousands of stars according to a system they invented,
Speaker 1: which astronomers continue to use today. Their calculations became the
Speaker 1: basis for the discovery that the universe is expanding. So
Speaker 1: that's what they're So I'm like, oh, they're just crunching
Speaker 1: numbers and discovering that the universe is expanding, and you know,
Speaker 1: learning how to classify stars. Yeah, not actual like stuff
Speaker 1: that would involve you know, analytical thinking or totally the
Speaker 1: secretarial work really yea. And so this goes on for decades,
Speaker 1: and I actually didn't find in a quick search. I
Speaker 1: wasn't able to find the end date of when Harvard's
Speaker 1: computers came to an end, but it ran up until
Speaker 1: at least seven was the one person I specifically tracked
Speaker 1: her employment at that and I think it probably lasted
Speaker 1: until the era of the electronic computer. But I prefer
Speaker 1: to think that they're still there, hopefully better paid doing
Speaker 1: astronomical math by hand, just like some weird caball of
Speaker 1: people hanging out at Harvard, I don't know. So, so
Speaker 1: women started working as computers because they were cheaper to
Speaker 1: hire than During World War Two, computing and programming were
Speaker 1: cemented as women's work because all the boys were off
Speaker 1: at war. So then some women's supervisors come in, like
Speaker 1: Macy Roberts, who oversaw California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the
Speaker 1: nineteen forties, which is later part of NASA and designed
Speaker 1: the first artificial satellite that the US ever put in space.
Speaker 1: And she hired only women because she thought it made
Speaker 1: for a more cohesive team and teamwork focused group and
Speaker 1: the way that they would code. Women can apply to
Speaker 1: this job into job applications because they couldn't say, hey,
Speaker 1: women can apply to so they would say no degree necessary, Oh,
Speaker 1: I like that. And so this attitude of hiring women spread,
Speaker 1: and soon women were calculating everything from the lift for
Speaker 1: World War two bombers to rocket paths. And of course,
Speaker 1: as cool as looking at the stars is, it's even
Speaker 1: cooler to figure how to reach them and reach out
Speaker 1: and touch them, which brings us to Dorothy Vaughn. But
Speaker 1: before we talk about Dorothy Vaughn, we need to talk
Speaker 1: about never talked to cops. The sponsor of this show.
Speaker 1: The sponsor of the show is shut the funk up.
Speaker 1: It doesn't do you any good. Ever, you'd always think
Speaker 1: it's going to do you good, but it doesn't. It
Speaker 1: does not. Yeah, as well as potatoes, I really like potatoes.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna keep hitting good, good, comb and water. I'd
Speaker 1: like to throw out songs that are nostalgic in a
Speaker 1: good way. Yes, that is what we are as a concept. Yes,
Speaker 1: as well as these other things. And we are back
Speaker 1: and we're talking about Dorothy Vaughn was black woman who
Speaker 1: was born in nineteen ten in Missouri. But then moved
Speaker 1: at age seven to West Virginia, kicked ass in school,
Speaker 1: kicked ass in college at Wilberforce University, historically black university,
Speaker 1: and then decided not to go to grad school but
Speaker 1: instead of teach math in high school because the Great
Speaker 1: Depression hit and her family really needed the money, especially
Speaker 1: if her sister was going to get to go to
Speaker 1: college too. In one President Roosevelt desegregated the defense industry,
Speaker 1: which like sort of he sort of desegregated it. He like,
Speaker 1: I think on a federal level he disegregated it, but
Speaker 1: didn't get disegregated at a state level. But it allowed
Speaker 1: black people to start working on the war effort at home.
Speaker 1: So so NAKA, the precursor of NASA, went about hiring
Speaker 1: black women in their quest to make airplanes because they
Speaker 1: were trying to ramp up the US's production from three
Speaker 1: thousand airplanes a year to fifty thousand airplanes a year
Speaker 1: with the slogan victory through air power, and Vaughan left
Speaker 1: teaching and started doing sky math and space math instead,
Speaker 1: even though she'd never flown on an airplane, which fucking
Speaker 1: rules doesn't rule that she never got to flying. The
Speaker 1: play I'm sure she did eventually, but fucking rules that
Speaker 1: she did Space Math and she's one of the She's
Speaker 1: one of the characters in the Hidden Figures, the book
Speaker 1: and then the movie that is really cool and people
Speaker 1: should see. I think it's um Octavia Spencer is her
Speaker 1: plays her character Ma from the movie Mam You've ever
Speaker 1: seen that? I haven't. No. I liked all the actors
Speaker 1: in that movie so much. I have, but exactly what
Speaker 1: you're talking. Octavia is a phenomenal actress. She's so good,
Speaker 1: she's she's fantastic. I personally think she should be cast
Speaker 1: in every movie, just every movie. I think, yeah, maybe
Speaker 1: every character. We got a Ma reference on. This is amazing.
Speaker 1: You know, I saw my opening night in the theater
Speaker 1: drunk and it was one of the best nights of
Speaker 1: my life. Ted out of ten. I love that for you.
Speaker 1: I love that. I have no idea. I have no
Speaker 1: idea what you're talking about. I live under a rock,
Speaker 1: imbarrass I just don't know about ship. You could ask
Speaker 1: me low brush just gonna go over my head to this.
Speaker 1: There was a low brow one last one we recorded that.
Speaker 1: It's so funny working with with Margaret and Robert Evans.
Speaker 1: They don't know, they don't know anything. It's great, it's rushing.
Speaker 1: It makes me feel better and also feel worse at
Speaker 1: the same time. So anyways, before we were all making
Speaker 1: fun of me. Now I'm just kidding. Alright. So, so
Speaker 1: after the war, a lot of the white women went
Speaker 1: back home, but most of the black women stayed for
Speaker 1: a lot of reasons, one of which I believe was
Speaker 1: that they were basically earning about four times as much
Speaker 1: as they would if even though they were getting paid
Speaker 1: way less than the men, they were still getting paid
Speaker 1: way more than they were as black school teachers, and
Speaker 1: you know, especially in racially segregated schools. I believe Duchess
Speaker 1: Hair is the granddaughter of one of the black computers
Speaker 1: at NASA, and she wrote a book called Hidden Human Computers,
Speaker 1: which came out around the same time as Shadowley's book
Speaker 1: Hidden Figures, which is the one that became a movie.
Speaker 1: But they I was like really confused because there's two
Speaker 1: books with basically the same name, But they actually were
Speaker 1: working on the books around the same time, and they
Speaker 1: cover sort of different topics, and they ended up kind
Speaker 1: of teaming up on like going to NASA to do
Speaker 1: some of their like tours and stuff together. So it
Speaker 1: actually became a really cool story about the two books
Speaker 1: as compared to how it first appears. When you realize
Speaker 1: that there's two books that came at the same time
Speaker 1: with the same name. That's my long tangent about the
Speaker 1: two books. So Duchess Harris, when she's interviewed about the
Speaker 1: Black computers and and race relations, she says, this is
Speaker 1: not a story of healing race relations. The government was
Speaker 1: desperate for help. These black women were hired as a
Speaker 1: last resort when they ran out of white women. The
Speaker 1: government wanted to win the war and later to put
Speaker 1: an American in space after the Russians launched spot Nick
Speaker 1: in ninety seven. So a lot of the like feel
Speaker 1: good stuff, you know. Yeah, I mean the movie Hidden Figures,
Speaker 1: it really makes it. I don't know if you all
Speaker 1: have seen it, but it really goes out of its
Speaker 1: way to suggest that, like this was about feel good equality.
Speaker 1: Like there's a scene where, um, the white man who's
Speaker 1: running their lab, I want to say, it's a it's
Speaker 1: a famous dude. Yeah, he's portrayed by Kevin Costner. Costner, Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: like he like thought but the women are having to
Speaker 1: like walk very far away to go to the bathroom
Speaker 1: because it's a segregated bathroom, and he dramatically like, Harrison
Speaker 1: is the name of the character, thank you? Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: He dramatically like takes the whites only sign off of
Speaker 1: the bathroom to be like, no, we can use any
Speaker 1: bathroom you want. And I think I like the movie
Speaker 1: and I like this sort of like warm, fuzzy equality stuff,
Speaker 1: but it does obscure the reality that you Margaret just
Speaker 1: said that, like they were trying to win. This was
Speaker 1: you know, I think it really goes back to this
Speaker 1: idea of like, you know, nationalism can be kind of
Speaker 1: an oppressed system that doesn't really see you when it's
Speaker 1: not really interested in your inequality or like seeing you
Speaker 1: as an individual or a person. And so, you know,
Speaker 1: against that backdrop, it was like, yeah, it was we
Speaker 1: wanted to win. We wanted to you know, further our
Speaker 1: nationalist agenda, and these people were useful to us, and
Speaker 1: so we quote cared about them insofar as they were useful.
Speaker 1: Their labor was useful. Uh yeah, these systems don't see us. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: When I found out what actually happened with the the
Speaker 1: segregation signs and the people who actually did that work.
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get to that in a moment. Okay. Oh no, yeah, no,
Speaker 1: I like I knew some of it before I watched
Speaker 1: the movie. I watched the movie as part of preparing
Speaker 1: the script, and I read some articles about it before
Speaker 1: about some of the stuff it gets right and wrong.
Speaker 1: But um, I don't know. I still really like the movie,
Speaker 1: but with especially that scene. Okay. So a lot of
Speaker 1: Dorothy Vaughan's career gets talked about in Hidden Figures, which
Speaker 1: focuses on three black women who got the first uss
Speaker 1: not into space, and it a lot of it's true,
Speaker 1: although it skims over Vaughan's own math genius. It mostly
Speaker 1: talks about her as like a supervisor. Right, but she
Speaker 1: helped write the manuals and set the standards for all
Speaker 1: of the computers at NAKA, and she worked in the
Speaker 1: West Area Computing Unit, which was a segregated black unit.
Speaker 1: When her white supervisor died in ninety nine, she became
Speaker 1: acting supervisor, and it took two years for that to
Speaker 1: be made official and for her to get the raise
Speaker 1: that should have come along with the increase of responsibility.
Speaker 1: And she was naka's first black supervisor and one of
Speaker 1: one of the only women supervisors, but as a supervisor,
Speaker 1: she intervened to fight for promotions and pay raises for
Speaker 1: all women computers, both both black and white. And when
Speaker 1: NACA became NASA Night, it desegregated the West End Computing
Speaker 1: Unit and integrated the rest of NASA, and she then
Speaker 1: joined a race and gender diverse division working on electronic computing.
Speaker 1: She taught herself the programming language for TROUN and then
Speaker 1: taught it to all her co workers. She fucking ruled
Speaker 1: UM and West Area computers ran from eight They got
Speaker 1: paid an awful lot less than the men. The The
Speaker 1: article I read implied that they were paid the same
Speaker 1: as white women. I don't know, but women in general
Speaker 1: were getting paid a salary, a starting salary, but the
Speaker 1: equivalent of twenty three thousand dollars a year in today's money,
Speaker 1: whereas men were getting a starting salary at forty dollars
Speaker 1: a year, which, like Jesus, not only that disparity, but
Speaker 1: also like damn, even the men are getting fucking ripped off. Yeah,
Speaker 1: everyone's getting exploited here. It's like I know that they're working,
Speaker 1: they're not working eight hour days and then going home.
Speaker 1: You know, but they make about four times as much
Speaker 1: the black women working, and NASA are making about four
Speaker 1: times as much as they would be elsewhere, which doesn't
Speaker 1: make the fucking pay balance not fucked up. It really
Speaker 1: just shows how fucked up everything is, you know, all
Speaker 1: the way down. So Hidden Figures is all about the
Speaker 1: segregated bathrooms. That's one of the main points of tension
Speaker 1: in the story. And Kevin Costner comes and I'm sorry,
Speaker 1: I'm reading this all my script, even we just talked
Speaker 1: about it. But I don't know how to skim fast enough.
Speaker 1: So he gets out of crowb already ripped down the
Speaker 1: colored women's restroom sign and he announces, in the worst
Speaker 1: line in the entire movie, we all pe the same
Speaker 1: color here at NASA. I forgot about that. It is bad,
Speaker 1: not good, I know. And the thing is, there was
Speaker 1: someone ripping down segregation signs during the Naka years when
Speaker 1: the place was segregated, a black woman who worked as
Speaker 1: a computer named Miriam Mann. She was actually the grandmother
Speaker 1: of this the woman I was saying who wrote this book.
Speaker 1: So Miriam Man is all of four ft eleven, so
Speaker 1: her friends call her Big Mama, and there's separate tables
Speaker 1: at the back of the dining hall that are marked
Speaker 1: with a sign that say colored computers. And Miriam didn't
Speaker 1: like that. So finally one day she stole the sign
Speaker 1: put it in her purse. The next day they put
Speaker 1: the sign back, so she stole let it a kid,
Speaker 1: And so she just did this over and over and
Speaker 1: over again before they just stopped putting the sign back.
Speaker 1: I don't know. And so the fact that that, particularly
Speaker 1: because it's already kind of bad that it's a white
Speaker 1: savior move, to have Kevin Costner come to it, it's
Speaker 1: an extra little dig that it was a black woman
Speaker 1: who did it. Yeah, I mean what, like, I I
Speaker 1: know all the like I bet I can imagine some
Speaker 1: Hollywood studio somewhere being like, we have to make Kevin Costner,
Speaker 1: we have to give him this like dramatic moment to
Speaker 1: have him be the like savior, the ally YadA YadA YadA.
Speaker 1: I get it. But like, imagine if they depicted a
Speaker 1: truth a more truthful version of that scene and had
Speaker 1: it be Big Mama who did it, Like I don't know,
Speaker 1: like what would be the I don't know, I just
Speaker 1: I know how Hollywood thinks, But it would have been
Speaker 1: that much more authentic and powerful to have a black
Speaker 1: woman be the person who who did that, because also
Speaker 1: like it would honor the fact that doing that took
Speaker 1: a lot of risk and a lot of like gumph
Speaker 1: and hutzpah. You know, like it's sort of races that
Speaker 1: that fact, Like having a white the white guy who's
Speaker 1: running ship do it, it's not as cool as having
Speaker 1: the black woman with everything to lose do it. But
Speaker 1: that's what happened, Like the like the reality is more
Speaker 1: badass than the Hollywood version, totally, yeah, because he's taking
Speaker 1: no risk and exactly. Yeah, And apparently her husband was like, honey,
Speaker 1: probably shouldn't do that. You're gonna get fired and we
Speaker 1: need this job, you know. Um, And she was like,
Speaker 1: I can't fucking know. I'm taking this fucking sign. You know.
Speaker 1: It's this thing that like seems like a little petty
Speaker 1: thing like had it's mischief. I stole the side, you know,
Speaker 1: but it wasn't she like really put herself out there
Speaker 1: to do it. Yeah, So another West Virginia raised black
Speaker 1: girl who did math there. Well, she was a woman,
Speaker 1: but I wrote it in the script about she's a
Speaker 1: girl because she was raised in anyway, Katherine Johnson, who
Speaker 1: did a lot of the math, who put the first
Speaker 1: people into space, who's also in this movie. And I'm
Speaker 1: not actually from West Virginia, but I live here now,
Speaker 1: so I have to do this whole thing where I'm
Speaker 1: like contractually obliged to get excited about anything that's to
Speaker 1: do with West Virginia. So that's why I'm pointing this out.
Speaker 1: And her county didn't even offer public school for black
Speaker 1: kids past eighth grade, so her entire fucking family knew
Speaker 1: how smart she was and how important school was for her.
Speaker 1: So they moved two hours away so that they could
Speaker 1: go to school elsewhere, and they spent like basically, and
Speaker 1: then summers they would come back home to where the
Speaker 1: rest of their extended family live, I believe. But she
Speaker 1: was smartest, fucking her parents weren't gonna see that go
Speaker 1: to waste. So she graduated high school, which she was
Speaker 1: fucking fourteen, because I she was smart at fuck. She
Speaker 1: went to West Virginia State University, which is another HBU,
Speaker 1: historically black university. She graduates at eighteen from fucking college,
Speaker 1: and then for grad school, She's one of three black
Speaker 1: students who went off to West Virginia University, a white school,
Speaker 1: to be the first students to integrate it. In nineteen
Speaker 1: fifty two, she got hired by NAKA as a computer
Speaker 1: and soon she was assigned to the all male, all
Speaker 1: white flight research team, where she was quickly and aggressive. Basically,
Speaker 1: she showed up and and actually did kind of act
Speaker 1: like she does in the movie where she pretty aggressively
Speaker 1: proves herself and I'm not going to take any ship,
Speaker 1: and she ends up being like the First Woman and
Speaker 1: her planning meetings just by saying like, no, I need
Speaker 1: to go into this fucking meeting. She calculated the trajectory
Speaker 1: for Alan Shepherd's May five flight, the first time a
Speaker 1: US astronaut went into space, the first US astronaut to
Speaker 1: actually or with the Earth. John Glenn had his trajectory
Speaker 1: calculated by a computer like an IBM, not a person,
Speaker 1: and so he insisted that Katherine Johnson double check all
Speaker 1: the numbers, like specifically asked for her by name, which
Speaker 1: is kind of interesting to me because he was a
Speaker 1: hell of sexist, which I'll get to later. Um. And
Speaker 1: then she goes on to help Apollo eleven get to
Speaker 1: the moon. As she described her time after NACA became
Speaker 1: NASA and segregation ended. We needed to be assertive as
Speaker 1: women in those days, assertive and aggressive, and the degree
Speaker 1: to which we had to be that way depended on
Speaker 1: where you were. I had to be. In the early
Speaker 1: days of NASA, women were not allowed to put their
Speaker 1: names on the reports. No woman in my division had
Speaker 1: had her name on a report. I was working with
Speaker 1: at Skapinski and he wanted to leave and go to Houston.
Speaker 1: But Henry Pearson, our supervisor, he was not a fan
Speaker 1: of women, kept pushing him to finish the report when
Speaker 1: we that we were working on. Finally Ted told him
Speaker 1: Katherine should finish the report. She's done most of the
Speaker 1: work anyway, So Ted left Pearson with no choice. I
Speaker 1: finished the report and my name went on it, and
Speaker 1: that was the first time a woman in our division
Speaker 1: had her name on something. I don't know. She fucking ruled.
Speaker 1: She lived to be a hundred and one. She lived
Speaker 1: long enough to see herself as a major character in
Speaker 1: a major film, which I can't even imagine what that would. Yes, Oh,
Speaker 1: we have that like, you know, the saying like give
Speaker 1: people their flowers while they can still smell them. I've
Speaker 1: seen pictures of her like getting celebrated while she was alive,
Speaker 1: which I love and fun fact, I have a picture
Speaker 1: of her on my water bottle here, see that, a
Speaker 1: little car, a little cartoon, a sticker of her. That's cool. No,
Speaker 1: I mean like it's like that, Like people should google
Speaker 1: pictures of her later in her life. Getting to meet
Speaker 1: I think it was Taraji p Henson who portrayed her,
Speaker 1: and like getting to meet Obama, Like, I'm happy that
Speaker 1: she was on this earth while she got to really
Speaker 1: see people celebrate her legacy. It really is an important thing. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: cool people who did cool stuff. The last person I'm
Speaker 1: going to talk really briefly about today is the opposite
Speaker 1: of a cool person. Oh good. Chief architect of US's
Speaker 1: lunar mission was a fucking Nazi. Oh no, like in
Speaker 1: a had been a member of the Nazi Party since
Speaker 1: Verner von Bione was the director of the Marshall Space
Speaker 1: Flight Center in Alabama, but before that he lived in Germany.
Speaker 1: In ninety seven, he joined the Nazi Party. Later, when
Speaker 1: he defected to the US, he claimed he joined in
Speaker 1: nineteen thirty nine, but he was lying. I think he
Speaker 1: wanted to look a little bit less zealous of a fascist,
Speaker 1: but he really was. Probably he's like the ultimate bad
Speaker 1: version of the I don't care as long as I
Speaker 1: get to do science guy, which kind of underpins the
Speaker 1: whole thing about how science is often divorced from politics
Speaker 1: and sometimes that's sort of cool and sometimes it's really
Speaker 1: really not cool. So he's a Nazi rocket scientist who
Speaker 1: joined the s S and used slave labor to build
Speaker 1: his rockets. Like literally he would walk down the halls
Speaker 1: of concentration camps and pick out prisoners he wanted to
Speaker 1: enslave to make his war machines. And then he became
Speaker 1: one of six hundred scientists and engineers and ship that
Speaker 1: the U S grabbed from Germany and what gets called
Speaker 1: Operation paper Clip, as they were looking for an advantage
Speaker 1: in the Cold War against Russia. But to be clear,
Speaker 1: just to both sides of the ship, the USSR was
Speaker 1: no better. They recruited folks of their own from the
Speaker 1: Nazi scientists, just fighting over the spoils of war. And
Speaker 1: I feel like the like the understanding of what you're
Speaker 1: talking about, how like like the US government is like,
Speaker 1: we don't give a ship, We just want to win
Speaker 1: this fucking war. It goes both ways in a really
Speaker 1: a grim way. So that's where I want to break
Speaker 1: it today. With all the women computers who did all
Speaker 1: the wildest calculations in history, How are you feeling about
Speaker 1: these people? Well? I I like that so many of
Speaker 1: them were, like you said, doing cool ship, even if
Speaker 1: it was for like not like nations that couldn't really
Speaker 1: it's it's almost like I wish that they were living
Speaker 1: at a time where they could do this ship for
Speaker 1: institutions or organizations that could really see them like you know, yeah,
Speaker 1: but I I this is very much like these are
Speaker 1: These are my heroes, These are my idols. These are
Speaker 1: the people that like allowed me to see myself in
Speaker 1: technology and computing and all of that. Um, yeah, I
Speaker 1: love them. Yeah. Is there anything I missed about them
Speaker 1: that you want to like shout out or talk about, Like,
Speaker 1: uh no, I think you really did a great job.
Speaker 1: But only the only thing I love, the only little
Speaker 1: thing that I love is when I was researching this
Speaker 1: for another project, I learned that the word kill a girl.
Speaker 1: Did you come across that in your that like computing
Speaker 1: was so associated with like women and secretarial work that
Speaker 1: the phrase kill a girl kind of like kill a
Speaker 1: lot was that meant roughly the computing power of one
Speaker 1: girl working for one hour, and so they used to
Speaker 1: describe it as like, oh, kill a girl, like that's
Speaker 1: the computing power of one girl working for one hour.
Speaker 1: So fun fact, that's amazing. Cool. Well, when we come
Speaker 1: back on Wednesday, we're going to talk about gay computer scientists,
Speaker 1: Soviet space cults, astronauts, cosmonauts, weird people, a whole bunch
Speaker 1: of people, cool people that did cool stuff, perhaps mostly amazing. Bridget,
Speaker 1: you have any plugables for us? Yeah, this has been great. Um,
Speaker 1: please check out my podcast. There are no girls on
Speaker 1: the Internet on this very network. You can follow me
Speaker 1: on Twitter at Bridget Mariana on Instagram at Bridget Marie
Speaker 1: in d C. I want you to know it's very
Speaker 1: hard for me to not write a terrible joke that
Speaker 1: you've heard a thousand times about the title of your
Speaker 1: podcast into my introduction to you about what it's just
Speaker 1: gonna be, something like you say there's no girls on
Speaker 1: the Internet, but here we are or whatever. I don't know.
Speaker 1: I really the world is better served that I took
Speaker 1: it out of the script, but you added at the
Speaker 1: end of goodness, you know, they say there's no girls
Speaker 1: on the internet, but here's three of them talking about
Speaker 1: technology and computer so you tell me, yeah, there it is,
Speaker 1: and we'll be back on Wednesday. Cool People Who Did
Speaker 1: Cool Stuff is a production of cool Zone Media. For
Speaker 1: more podcasts on cool zone Media, visit our website cool
Speaker 1: zone media dot com, or check us out on the
Speaker 1: I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get
Speaker 1: your podcasts.