Australian aboriginals don't like naming their dead because it calls their soul back to our plane of existence.
As a result their culture is disappearing especially in context with the dominate western culture eclipsing it.
Our (western) history is a story about a collection of men who did stuff. Women are few and far between when it comes to history. But there seems to be a number of things going on.
First of all if a woman accomplishes something and she is married, her husband will be remembered too. Think Lin and Vincent Ostrom, Marie and Pierre Curie, Masters and Johnson, Ada Lovelace and Babbage, although Babbage didn't marry Lovelace, and if you read this article they don't even mention Lovelace or the far more important Grace Hopper. Rather it mentions Alan Turing who I am not sure what he actually did to contribute to computer science at all. History goes from man to man and it is very probable without Hopper we wouldn't have the internet or be using computers now at all. And even Hopper's contribution to computer science is being erased by this wikipedia page, it was she who developed the first compiler and it was her idea in the first place. Without compilers computers wouldn't be the tools we have today.
Another example is Paul Revere who I knew of from childhood even though I grew up outside of the US. Yet I had never heard of Sybil Ludington although she did a better job while being less than half Revere's age.
Women disappear from history all the time, yet there are plenty of women scientists even in history but I bet your list stops with Pierre and Marie Curie and we probably only remember Marie because there is Pierre. But Marie Curie is far from being the only famous scientist, but she is the only one we remember.
History seldom includes renowned women, and when a woman is included it was because it was for a role that was beneath a man to perform such as Betsy Ross, who apparently sewed a flag. The flag may have been a milestone in independence and there is no way a man could do that. Nor is she remembered because she was a remarkable seamstress, it was she was in the right place at the right time.
Women are seldom remembered for being great in their own right, like this article on Patti Smith. Mike Jagger claims Patti Smith some how used her boyfriends to get to the top? That she isn't pretty enough? That she doesn't deserve to be remembered in her own right? Where as her music stands as great in it's own right and her boyfriends' music is often far more forgettable. Yet they are some how more worthy of being considered great? Women's achievements are discredited (especially by men), people read the discreditation and believe it because in this case Mick Jagger did the discrediting, presumably a man who is creditable enough to do this to her.
Rebecca Solnit writes about how women are silenced and assumed to be stupid by men. While Solnit says not all men do it, enough do it and women's contributions are ignored or assumed irrelevant and hence excluded from history.
Where are the great female musicians, composers, artists, engineers, scientists, mathematicians, authors? They existed but they are forgotten.
Similarly the black women in the US who are being raped and killed by police aren't being reported abroad, whereas the black men who are killed by police are.
Like the Australian aboriginals who don't talk about the great people from their history, the men and women who set up the first wildlife sanctuaries, how they developed industries, farms and mines, learned how to live in abundance on a desert continent for 60,000 years, developed boomerangs, medical technology and great art, how much more I don't know, I just know we lost so much with our absurd belief of our superiority. They will disappear like women do from our history books.
As a result their culture is disappearing especially in context with the dominate western culture eclipsing it.
Our (western) history is a story about a collection of men who did stuff. Women are few and far between when it comes to history. But there seems to be a number of things going on.
First of all if a woman accomplishes something and she is married, her husband will be remembered too. Think Lin and Vincent Ostrom, Marie and Pierre Curie, Masters and Johnson, Ada Lovelace and Babbage, although Babbage didn't marry Lovelace, and if you read this article they don't even mention Lovelace or the far more important Grace Hopper. Rather it mentions Alan Turing who I am not sure what he actually did to contribute to computer science at all. History goes from man to man and it is very probable without Hopper we wouldn't have the internet or be using computers now at all. And even Hopper's contribution to computer science is being erased by this wikipedia page, it was she who developed the first compiler and it was her idea in the first place. Without compilers computers wouldn't be the tools we have today.
Another example is Paul Revere who I knew of from childhood even though I grew up outside of the US. Yet I had never heard of Sybil Ludington although she did a better job while being less than half Revere's age.
Women disappear from history all the time, yet there are plenty of women scientists even in history but I bet your list stops with Pierre and Marie Curie and we probably only remember Marie because there is Pierre. But Marie Curie is far from being the only famous scientist, but she is the only one we remember.
History seldom includes renowned women, and when a woman is included it was because it was for a role that was beneath a man to perform such as Betsy Ross, who apparently sewed a flag. The flag may have been a milestone in independence and there is no way a man could do that. Nor is she remembered because she was a remarkable seamstress, it was she was in the right place at the right time.
Women are seldom remembered for being great in their own right, like this article on Patti Smith. Mike Jagger claims Patti Smith some how used her boyfriends to get to the top? That she isn't pretty enough? That she doesn't deserve to be remembered in her own right? Where as her music stands as great in it's own right and her boyfriends' music is often far more forgettable. Yet they are some how more worthy of being considered great? Women's achievements are discredited (especially by men), people read the discreditation and believe it because in this case Mick Jagger did the discrediting, presumably a man who is creditable enough to do this to her.
Rebecca Solnit writes about how women are silenced and assumed to be stupid by men. While Solnit says not all men do it, enough do it and women's contributions are ignored or assumed irrelevant and hence excluded from history.
Where are the great female musicians, composers, artists, engineers, scientists, mathematicians, authors? They existed but they are forgotten.
Similarly the black women in the US who are being raped and killed by police aren't being reported abroad, whereas the black men who are killed by police are.
Like the Australian aboriginals who don't talk about the great people from their history, the men and women who set up the first wildlife sanctuaries, how they developed industries, farms and mines, learned how to live in abundance on a desert continent for 60,000 years, developed boomerangs, medical technology and great art, how much more I don't know, I just know we lost so much with our absurd belief of our superiority. They will disappear like women do from our history books.
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