Reads the editorial in the Indian Express today. Can the work of a woman really be mapped ? She is remembered only due to her absence. Never credited for the work done.
As Betty Friedan says ,’ The only way for a woman…. to find herself, to know herself as a person, is by creative work of her own’. I would go a step further & say, what if her work is stolen or someone else takes the credit???
What did Anne Walker look like ? Basically, who ??? Had she been a man, her portrait would have graced the hallowed halls of the Cambridge University & perhaps even the Royal Society. Yet, both during her lifetime & for decades after she died in 1940, one of the most significant figures in the history of astronomy was all but unknown.
The recent evidence confirms that Walker was the first British woman paid to map the heavens. Now, the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge has appealed to readers of The Guardian in UK & Australia for a picture of the forgotten scientist to correct a historical injustice.
What about the years lost? We have pictures of eminent scientists on the walls of our science labs or in the science wings, but barring Madam Curie, I haven’t seen any woman up there!
Walker isn’t the only woman ignored by history, Rosalind Franklin did pioneering work with DNA, proposing the double helix model that is the foundation of modern genetics. Her contribution was ignored when the Nobel prize for work on DNA was given to Watson & Crick in 1962.
Why couldn’t they give credit to the X ray crystallographer , whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structure of DNA & RNA ? Award went to Watson, Crick & Wilkins. A fourth name could not be added & she died in 1958, so the award could not be given posthumously.
If it was a male scientist who would have fought for his right? There must be some provision for exceptional cases. Franklin is referred to as the ‘wronged heroine’ , ‘forgotten heroine & also the ‘Sylvia Plath of molecular biology’.
So, I looked into Sylvia Plath. She is known for The Colossus & other Poems (1960), Ariel (1965) & the Bell Jar, a semi autobiographical novel published shortly before her suicide in 1963.
The Collected Poems were published in 1981, which included previously unpublished works. She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1982, making her the fourth to receive this honor posthumously.
In literature, Zelda Fitzgerald , the wife of F. Scott Fitzgerald was demonised for decades, in no small part because of how Ernest Hemingway portrayed her in ‘A Movable Feast’. She not only helped her husband to write & edit but could do little as he plagiarized & plundered her private diary.
For years it was believed that Walker was a mere human calculator , helping men chart stars. In fact she mapped & identified thousands of heavenly bodies.
Women, workers, those marginalized across human history – there are many whose portraits are lost. People know the architect but not the mason, they remember the ‘gentleman’ astronomer but not the miller’s daughter who actually did the astronomy.
Walker left after the Cambridge Observatory came to be headed by Robert Ball, who disapproved of women working. A science that looks at the infinite was hobbled by petty prejudice.
Today the scenario remains the same, women walking away- because of marriage, child birth or for elderly care.
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