(Left) Amba Raghavan, Dr. Radha Gourishankar, and Dr. Bhamathi Sudarshan at Presidency College, Chennai, India in the early 1950’s
Quick! Think of ten famous inventors. Now, ten literary giants, please? How about ten composers? Now, ten philosophers? Ten groundbreaking artists?
Among the names and the faces that flashed, how many were women? And of them, how many were women of color?
That gap is not a reflection of talent or any proof of difference in biological strength of cerebral calibre… It is the legacy of a historical narrative shaped by the intersection of gender, geography, race, and class. This narrative consistently sidelined, stole from, and silenced brilliant minds who didn’t fit the gender moulds. History is curated by systems of power that elevate some voices and silence others. This series is about the silenced.
The Women We Were Made to Forget
In the archives of human history, there are ghost signatures…There are innumerable artworks, books, and scientific discoveries credited to men, whose foundational effort was women’s… women whose name we never learned.
Chavela Vargas (Costa Rican-Mexican musician), Dr. Tessy Thomas (Indian space scientist), Amrita Sher-Gil (Indian-Hungarian artist), Annie Easley (American computer scientist), Mary Anning (British paleontologist), Dr. Wangari Maathai (Kenyan Environmental biologist and activist), Dr. Vera Peters (Canadian oncologist), Dr. Sunanda Banerjee (Indian particle physicist), Antoinette Brown Blackwell (American thinker and scientist), Thayyoor K. Radha (Indian theoretical physicist)…
To list even these few women feels like a repeat offense: Whom do I name? Whose names do I omit? I name them to remind us that it is no accident we do not recognize half these names.
For every famous male name we celebrate in our textbooks, there’s likely hundreds of women who did pivotal work and got little credit. I used to think halls of fame were neutral, until I learned about the woman who discovered nuclear fission, but could only watch as her male colleagues won the Nobel for it. Lise Meitner is but one of numerous brilliant women contributors who were marginalized or stamped out. That is just the tip of systemic sexism and gatekeeping for you. The quiet, systemic machinery of exclusion at work.
History is not just what happened. It is a series of who gets to tell it. In these articles, I will be focusing on the women whose intellect, courage, and creativity moved humanity forward. Yet, these women received little or no recognition in their lifetimes.
By bringing their names and work back into discussion, we do more than just correct the past. The past can never be corrected. Nor are those our wrongs to right. But we can decide who we remember, and how. This series is an act of recovery and redirection. It is a commitment to ensure that the history written tomorrow does not conveniently forget the women who helped build our world today.
This is an effort to make sure histories of the future do not conveniently miss names of women.
Spell-weaver who turns corporate sludge into beaten gold, I hunt clichés for fun, exorcise bad punctuation, and order boring prose to repent in five languages. I also mentor a coven who shred bad writing.
