Lady Science Podcast

01:09:42

Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg 

Guest: Dr. Amy Chambers 

Producer: Leila McNeill 

Music: Careful! by Zombie Dandies

In this episode, Anna, Leila, and Rebecca talk about why the BBC series Call the Midwife is the best show on TV. Guest Dr. Amy Chambers joins in to talk about her work on women and minorities in entertainment media, particularly science fiction. 

VIDEO: Behind the Scenes | Thalidomide

Thalidomide scandal: 60-year timeline

Bury Your Gays

Dr. Amy Chambers

If She Can See It, She Can Be It: Women of STEM on the Small Screen by Amy Chambers

Communicating he Nature of Science Through The Big Bang Theory: Evidence from a Focus Group Study by Rashel Li & Lindy A. Orthia

Science and Entertainment Laboratory

Unsettling Scientific Stories

J Botting, "The History of Thalidomide," Drug News Perspect 15, no. 9 (2002): 604-611.

Neil Vargesson, "Thalidomide-induced teratogenesis: History and Mechanisms," Birth Defects Research 105, no. 2 (2015): 140-156.

The Woman Who Stood Between America and an Epidemic of Birth Defects by Leila McNeill

Transcription by Rev.com

Rebecca: Welcome back to episode five of the Lady Science Podcast, a monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science. With you every month are the editors of Lady Science Magazine.

Anna: I'm Anna Reser, co-founder and co-editor in chief of Lady Science. I'm a writer, editor, and PhD student studying 20th century American culture and history of the American Space Program in the 1960s.

Leila: I'm Leila McNeill, the other founder and editor in chief of Lady Science. I'm a historian of science and freelance writer with words in various places on the internet. I'm currently a regular writer on women in the history of science in Smithsonianmag.com.

Rebecca: I'm Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor. When I'm not working with the Lady Science team I can be found writing about museums and public history around the internet and managing research projects at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia.

Rebecca: This month, we're super excited about this episode. The three of us will be discussing and fangirling over one of our favorite TV shows "Call the Midwife" and then writer and researcher Amy Chambers will join us to talk about her work on women, gender, and science in entertainment media.

Anna: Okay. Call the Midwife. I'm so excited.

Leila: Yay.

Rebecca: Yay.

Anna: I did want to say also that I think this is such a good discussion for us to have this episode because it comes out with our 40th issue so it's a little bit of an anniversary and Call the Midwife is one of the first things that Leila and I ever had the kind of critical discussions that led to working on women and gender together and for Lady Science itself. It's one of the first things that we wrote about for the magazine so it's just nice little full circle.

Rebecca: Yay.

Rebecca: Yeah it is. I didn't even think about that. That's great.

Anna Reser: Yeah. I guess we should say just a little bit about the show. In case people don't know, it's a British television show and it's a period show set in I think the first season starts in 1957 right? Just at the end of the 50s and it's set in East London in Poplar, and it follows these midwives who work with other midwives who are nuns but it's the young nurses and they live with these nuns and they take care of all the people in Poplar and deliver a bunch of babies and do community care and have all kinds of extremely charming adventures.

Anna: The main reason that Leila and I got so excited about this show and wanted to write about it to begin with is for me it's just incredible. It was the first time I'd ever watched a television that was just exclusively about women and women's lives and the things that are particular to being a woman in a way that wasn't gimmicky or ... it just has a very straightforward angle on the lives of these women and they're all very different, and they have their own trajectories and very little of it has anything to do with men and it's so incredibly refreshing.

Leila: I think it's in the beginning of episode two or three of season one where they have the voiceover. Who's the actress that does? It's Vanessa-

Rebecca: It's Vanessa Redgrave.

Leila: Yeah, and she's doing her traditional voiceover that she does every episode and I think it even starts with her saying something like, "And the men were just extra."

Anna: Yeah, absolutely. I think I was rewatching the second episode of the first season last night and a lot of that stuff is kind of explicit in the first season about taking care to say, "This is a show about women and this is the way it's going to be," and they do that through the voiceover a lot where Jenny's talking about understanding her life in Poplar as being centered around women in a way that it might not otherwise be if she worked at a hospital or something, so the setting is really important for making the show focused on women in this way.

Anna: I just wanted to talk more generally about the show and it's aesthetics and production and why I think it's special and why I love it so much. The biggest thing for me that I, in addition to not ever seeing TV that was just about women, I'd never seen labor and delivery portrayed on TV the way that it is on "Call the Midwife." It's incredible. Like I said, it has that very straightforward kind of gaze. It isn't ashamed or afraid of the bodies that it's looking at in a way that just filled my heart up.

Anna: Babies have good and blood on them when they're born and that's okay and you see some goo and some blood and stuff, and the way they just really get the camera ... it's not explicit, you don't see any genitals or anything, but they get the camera right up in there next to the mother's hip and you see the midwives working. It's a bodily practice. You see bodies touching each other, and I think that maybe there's a cultural thing about American TV, especially portraying women's bodies. It felt almost taboo to me growing up watching American television.

Leila: They don't just focus on the delivery itself, the baby and the mother, but the actual practice of midwifery with the way that they show how the midwives place their hands on the mother and on the baby during delivery. This is a legitimate practice that you had to do in a very specific way.

Anna: I think sometimes it's almost like that cooking show magic of television logic where you see the mother in labor and then you see the doctor and then some stuff happens that you don't really see that they fill in with B-roll of the dad being upset or something and then through the magic of TV a baby is born. They show the midwives saying, "You've going to have to turn over", or, "I'm going to have to put my shoulder into your thigh and push on you this way." It's stuff I've never seen before so I kind of learned a lot [inaudible 00:07:10].

Rebecca: Yeah and they talk about, I feel like especially early on, there's a lot about enemas and just other awkward bodily functions that have to do with being pregnant and giving birth and they always mention the afterbirth. Again, they talk about all of the good of giving birth and women's bodies and they don't forget that.

Anna: Yeah, exactly. It's just part of the texture of the world. I was just reminded of that episode where the midwife give the afterbirth to the husband because he wants to put it on his tomatoes because it helps his tomatoes grow and I was just like, "This is fantastic." That's the big thing for me. The physicality of the portrayal of pregnancy and labor and delivery. It's unlike anything I've ever seen before.

Anna: More broadly, the show's perspective on its setting of Poplar and East London, there's a lot of poverty, and in the 50s, there's people that are still dealing with these sort of haunting legacies of the work house and things are better now in the time the show's set. They talk a lot about the NHS and how there are more social programs but a lot of the people in Poplar grew up with nothing. There are characters in the show they had rickets or one time they talk about someone being deprived of sunlight. That they grew up somewhere without windows, and they couldn't see the sun for a long time. There's a really sort of disturbing past that everyone in Poplar is dealing with and coming to terms with, and the show doesn't hide it and it also doesn't fetishize it. It deals with people from all different classes, different races and there's never any leering or judgment. This is true of things that you would never see on American television.

Anna: There's an episode about incest-

Rebecca: I was literally just thinking about that.

Anna: That is handled unbelievably sensitively. I've never seen anything like it. There's an episode about people with developmental disabilities having a sexual relationship. That's something I've never seen before. All of these thing are handled extremely sensitively and openly in a way that is just really refreshing.

Anna: You guys have other stuff you want to talk about specifically, I'm just gushing about the show. The one last thing I wanted to say is that I didn't realize this because I'm an American watching British TV on Netflix so I'm not embedded in the culture of it but apparently "Call the Midwife" is viewed as like fluffy feel-good TV for women. We did a screening of this with our students a couple years ago and that's what one of them said. They were like, "This is just British feel-good TV." I guess that's something we could maybe talk a little bit about how stories about women that are focused on women and interested and admit that there's something interesting about women are marginalized as just feel-good TV. I think Lifetime stuff in the U.S. is billed that way, but I gave that student a talking to and then we had a good discussion about how it's not feel-good TV.

Rebecca: Yeah, it's funny how it gets discussed as in this cozy British TV category or, "Oh, it's really saccharine and there's always a happy ending", or, "Oh, it's not explicit, it's just there to make you feel good", and I'm like, "There's a lot of dark stuff in it", but doesn't fetishize the dark stuff. I think that there's also a degree to which because it's about women and women's issues that I think we could bill it as this happy, squishy, feel-good thing, but I also thing that so much serious TV these days is about fetishizing terrible things that happen. Then they say, "Oh well no, life is hard," and here's the show where it's not fetishizing that but is saying, "Well, life is hard and terrible things happen, but people keep getting shit done because that's what you have to do." That's so much more powerful-

Leila: So much of TV has to be dark and gritty and the protagonists have to be these anti-hero types of characters where you have to feel conflicted about who they are as people and whatever. You don't get that with really any of the protagonists, any of the nuns or any of the midwives, and the music is often very uplifting no matter how dark that episode is that it ends with a narrative-

Rebecca: And it's Vanessa Redgrave who's telling you everything will be okay.

Leila: Yeah, and it really does a good job of weighing reality with the sentimentality that comes out of these types of stories, and I think it's the sentimentality angle that makes people bill this as puff rather than something that's a serious show or doing actual serious storytelling, and I'm going to talk about in a minute, actual serious historical work. Just the idea of it being sentimental, the fact that it makes people cry all the time, that label of sentiment being so closely associated with things that are feminine for such a long time is what makes it seem not like a serious show.

Anna: But it is a really serious show so Leila, I want you to talk to us about the thalidomide arc, which, I don't understand, is there anything more serious than thalidomide? How do we even have to have this debate about this show?

Rebecca: It's so dark and so horrifying, everything about it, but Leila, have at it.

Leila: So the thalidomide story arc, they tease it at the end of season four in really the most absolute soul-crushing way if you know what's coming. The way that season four ends is a mother who had to be, she was hospitalized, right, because her morning sickness was so bad. She couldn't stay at home. She had to be constantly medicated for her morning sickness, and Dr. Turner prescribes thalidomide to her and it ends with her being able to go home after taking this miracle drug, and she's putting on her coat in a very jaunty way and she's heading out with her children and that's kind of how the season ends, with the promise that something like this had for women who had really bad, tough pregnancies.

Leila: Then in season five, the baby is born, and it's baby Susan I believe is the baby's name, and she's born with a birth defect and this is the beginning of the thalidomide story arc. Some historical context for what thalidomide was, and I don't think that maybe in the U.S. there's as much consciousness about what happened there because it didn't happen in the same way in the U.S. We only had 17 reported cases of birth defects from thalidomide in the U.S. whereas in Europe and Australia there were thousands. Worldwide there are about 10,000.

Leila: The drug was manufactured by a German company in 1953 and it was originally used as a sleeping pill replacement for barbiturates. Then it was used to treat morning sickness in pregnant women and that started being prescribed for that specific purpose in 1957. One of the side effects that was well-known and wasn't always marketed with the medication itself was peripheral neuritis, which is inflammation of the nerves and can be really painful, but no one really asked, "Well what will this do for pregnant people if this is affecting nerves?"

Leila: It was manufactured and distributed pretty much all over Germany, came to the U.S. after it was marketed in Britain and Australia, and throughout the 1950s there was really little to no oversight in how drugs were manufactured and also how they were marketed. Someone could sell thalidomide as curing morning sickness and leaving off the side effect and that would've been completely legal. You can't do that anymore.

Leila: So the result of what this did for babies and for pregnant women was very severe birth defects, and we don't even know how many fetuses died in utero because of it, there's no way of knowing that. One of the most visible birth defects was phocomelia which is limb deformities and that's what they really show in the show. They do that with prosthetics. Usually in the show, and the reason why things look so real with the babies is because they use 10-day old babies as newborns ,and the mother sign up to have their babies on the show before they even give birth. I'm sure they just have a constant flow of newborn babies coming in and out of that set. But for these they use prosthetics instead of the real babies and they look incredibly real, it's pretty amazing actually.

Leila: After the thalidomide thing, governments had much stricter regulatory processes. In the U.S. we had the Kefauver-Harris Amendment and then in the UK, which what where this was taking place, was in 1963 the government set up the Committee on Safety Drugs and then in 1968 the Medicines Act, which established the Committee on Safety and renamed it Committee for Safety of Medicines and that's very similar to what we have now in the U.S., so similar to the FDA.

Leila: So season five starts off in 1961. That's the same year that thalidomide was withdrawn from the market because of the birth defects. The timeline of the history that they're showing is really great and really spot on and in general the history the history of what they're showing is really spot on. One of the things that I really really like about the way they handle this story arc is that it seems like they all felt a big responsibility in the way that they told the story. They kind of felt the weight of what they were trying to portray and what they were trying to say.

Leila: Heidi Thomas, the series writer and she's also the executive producer, she was a child when this was happening so she saw some of this stuff going on, so it was somewhat of a personal history for her as well and you kind of had these different angles of history coming in. She said in an interview that, "This isn't just history. People affected by thalidomide are still fighting for the recognition of their injuries." She says that they're telling just the beginning of the story that is still ongoing. A lot of the babies that were born with these birth defects are still alive and their families are still alive and they what, just got an apology less than ten years ago? They had to fight even for an apology, much less any financial assistance from having to live a life with a disability.

Leila: I think that the show does some actual really good historical work aside from just being a good TV series, good storytelling. I think it's doing actual good historical scholarship, and I think that the way that they feel responsible for telling that history and telling that story is a really good lesson for historians in general. For us, for me studying 19th century and earlier is that we see the effects of history, making connections and threading those things, but this is completely different because these people are still alive. Not only do we still feel the effects, we can see them and so certainly do the people that lived through this time. I think it shows what a responsibility that historians have to do justice to the subjects that they're studying. That's one of the things that I love about this show but specifically this story arc that they took such care on.

Leila: I also really like that since they followed this one family through the process of the pregnancy through to birth and into trying to go forward from there that you get also more of a feel of the personal aspect of what this could do to families. Especially since they're working in the East End, what this could do to poor families. I really like that you get kind of the larger history, but then you also get the more personal aspect of what this did to people and especially to women.

Leila: One of the things that they show in the story arc is how women were constantly blaming themselves for what had happened to their babies. Women are historically and presently positioned to be the one's responsibility for reproduction because it's their bodies and so if something goes wrong that blame is placed on the mother.

Rebecca: One of the things that I think is really interesting about this plot arc is if you were to make one historic medicine criticism of the show it's that there are times when it dips into a "everything new is better and modernization is an upward track," and honestly, I think it does a better job of not falling into that than a lot of history of medicine on TV, but there are moments that in creating a happy ending the happy ending is, "Well these people now have more technology available to them, isn't that great?" This whole plot arc skewers that entirely, and they're really explicit about that because it's presented as this legitimately important medicine that is helping women. Especially if you're a working woman, morning sickness, even if it didn't send you to the hospital, could be totally debilitating. What do you do if you can't go to work because you're throwing up all day? That's a serious issue for someone who is heavily reliant on that income.

Rebecca: It presents the importance of that. That hope of a magical solution and then skewers, I don't want to call it hubris but I'm going to call it hubris, the hubris of saying, "Oh, we can find a solution to every problem and it will be easy."

Anna: I think it actually demonstrates the show's growing self-awareness as it has matured because, I think it's the one I was watching last night, an early episode from the first season talking about the woman who had was it rickets, I think? She had some scarring or something that made it really difficult to carry a pregnancy to term and that storyline wraps up with her being able to get a cesarean section without charge because of the NHS.

Anna: We could probably do a whole episode about cesarean section and the history of that particular procedure but that I think is one of those "all progress is good progress" kind of storylines, but they very often overturn that sentiment and I think, especially with the thalidomide thing, they do it in a way where they pattern the beginning of that plot line after the earlier progress narratives and then they flip it on you in a way showing their own self-awareness about what they've written before and how they've constructed this history before. You expect when the mom to be comes home and she can finally stop throwing up and she can take her kids out, it seems like one of those progress upward and onward kind of narratives and then you find out what drug it is she's taking and it's totally devastating.

Rebecca: Yeah. They kind of tease the contrast between what they're doing Nonnatus House with the midwives and what they're doing in the hospitals. Especially, I can't remember exactly which season, when Jenny goes to work in the hospital, and they don't let her be with the mother and the babies the way that she would've been in a woman's bedroom delivering that baby with her own hands. Instead she's kind of the nurse that stands back now while a doctor takes over in a hospital ward. The setting is very different, her place in that setting is completely changed, and it shows a really nice contrast between what midwives do and why that matters and why that's important versus the more modernizing of childbirth in the hospital ward.

Anna: Are you ready for this amazing segue? Is it not when she goes to male surgical at the hospital that she meets Patsy? That's how that happens right?

Rebecca: I think so, yeah.

Leila: Yeah.

Rebecca: Or at the very least it's in that season transition period with Jenny. Yes.

Anna: Smooth, so smooth.

Rebecca: Duh, perfect. Yeah.

Leila: I love Patsy.

Rebecca: I love Patsy. I'm going to explain who Patsy is and why I love her so much. But to step back with the plot with Jenny. Jenny is the character that up until about halfway through season three, the show is following. The whole show is based on a book written by a woman named Jennifer Worth who Jenny is, while doesn't have quite the same name, I named after and represents. The first two and a half seasons, while it's very much an ensemble show, it's about her. She's a little bit higher than the rest of the ensemble.

Rebecca: Then, as happens often in British television, the actress who plays Jenny decided that she wanted to do other things, and the show had to figure out what to do. They made made a really interesting choice which was they accepted. They said, "Okay, the show is still super popular and we're not going to do anything dramatic with the fact that we have to shift the show," *cough* Downton Abbey, *cough* "We're just going to accept that these women are midwives, they're women in their early 20s who are upwardly mobile and are either going to go on to other careers or get married or both. It's sort of a transition moment in their lives and so let's accept that midwives are going to come and they're going to leave and we're going to let them have natural story arcs", which I think honestly adds to a lot of the emotional realism of the show and why you feel like someone is being kept there for artificial reason because they need the character to keep going. That's really great.

Rebecca: It also means that they're able I think to diversify the main cast in many different kinds of ways and I think are going to continue to do so as the show goes on. It starts with the three midwives are three middle class white girls, three straight middle-class white girls, and that starts to change after they realize that Jessica Raine is going to leave, and they should bring in another midwife to not replace that character, but to have another midwife in the show.

Rebecca: the character they bring in is Patsy Mount. Halfway through the season she's introduced and I swear she waltzes in to Nonnatus House like a ginger-haired Katherine Hepburn of my dreams. I didn't go back and watch the first couple episodes where she is so I can't tell you exactly what it was that made my wife and I go, "Yeah, she's definitely queer, right? This isn't just us, right?" It took us about two episodes and we were like, "There's something about how she wears wide-legged trousers and doesn't talk about her personal life and seems knowing but doesn't join in on Trixie's boy crushness that makes us think please tell me she's a lesbian. Please tell me this isn't just our desperate desire for some queer representation on this show", which up to that point there hadn't been.

Leila: Anna actually texted me and she said, "Is Patsy queer?"

Rebecca: Yes.

Leila: I was like, "Yeah, I think so." That wasn't just you guys.

Rebecca: I'm glad it wasn't just me at least or just us, but it was great, and it does take another season of the show before it is revealed that Patsy has a girlfriend. It's another nurse that works at the hospital nearby and the nurse's name is Delia, she's adorable, she's Welsh. They start to tease at the fact that yeah, they're super happy and adorable together, they'll obviously because this is the early 1960s their relationship is very much under wraps.

Rebecca: There's this whole, as it goes up to the end of season four, which the season four finale morning sickness plot arc is the happy story in the season four finale because also in the season four finale is when Trixie goes to AA and it's really devastating and also Patsy and Delia think that they are going to get an apartment together and immediately before that happens Delia gets in a traffic accident, is in a coma, wakes up, and has amnesia. It is the most infuriating plot arc of "Call the Midwife." I was so mad at the show. I was never going to give up on the show, I don't want to go quite that far, but it was not only a super out of left field melodramatic soap opera-y thing for the show to do, but it was in a way that is very very common way to deal with queer characters on TV, and especially queer female characters on TV.

Rebecca: This was something that actually in 2016 came up a lot, people on the internet might remember, because of a number of high profile shows that killed off their lesbian characters including, and I am about to spoil a few shows, Lexa on the "100," Poussey on "Orange is the New Black," and Denise on the "Walking Dead." I'm familiar with the first two shows, actually I've never watched the Walking Dead but in all of these cases my understanding is not only were lesbian characters killed off but the characters were killed off right before or immediately after their happily ever after moment essentially.

Rebecca: That is this really terrible trope in stories that has been true for a long time where girl meets girl, girl falls in love with girl, girl almost lives happily ever after, then one of the girls dies. It really speaks to a lot of awful stereotypes about how queer people, LGBT people can never be happy, that society is always going to get in the way or their own inner demons are always going to get in the way, and it's really problematic. This season of "Call the Midwife" that did that kind of happened around the same time that people were talking about it a lot. That was incredibly frustrating for me-

Leila: Can I ask a question real quick?

Rebecca: Yeah.

Leila: Do they treat male gay characters the same way as they do lesbians?

Rebecca: Yes and no. I want to say that there's definitely still the sort of like, "queer people can never be happy" thing that exists through so much of pop culture and literature. I think that the whole almost being happy and then having it snatched from your hands thing does tend to affect queer female characters more or at least is seen as affecting them more. The conversation in 2016 in particular was about queer female characters and the problems. I can't remember if it was GLAAD or someone else that regularly does surveys of LGBT characters on TV even showed in the 2016 survey it was like, "Representation was better for everyone, except for queer women", so that was also part of the conversation in there.

Rebecca: There're the trope, if you want to go on TV Tropes, which is a glorious black hole of a website if any of you have never been there before, the trope is referred to as "bury your gays" because it affects queer characters of all genders. There is this particular storyline that especially affects queer women.

Rebecca: They don't kill off Delia, and thankfully they don't kill off Delia because that means that they can decide to fix this. I don't know if they were always planning this or if someone told someone in the "Call the Midwife" writers room because they bring Delia back. Delia gets better, she comes back to Poplar, her memory has returned, she has to deal with some health issues, it's not like she just magically gets better. It's actually a really sweet story where she has to kind of fight with her parents for her independence to come back to Poplar and obviously without telling them that a large part of the reason why she wants to come back to Poplar is because that's where her girlfriend is.

Rebecca: There able then to spend some time letting Pasty and Delia just be happy and to negotiate what it means for them to have a relationship. Delia ends up moving into Nonnatus House, so they're living in the same place and seeing each other a lot and there's some interesting negotiations that happen there. It is teased that Pasty has never thought about herself as a lesbian or having what we'd now call a queer identity. At one point, they go to a lesbian bar and Patsy is super uncomfortable with the idea essentially being in a queer space in a way that Delia isn't so much, which is just interesting, but it's not overwrought and it's not like they are beset with moral quandaries and it's not that they're fearful all the time of the danger that they are in.

Rebecca: It sort of goes back to what we were saying earlier also about the idea that the show gets knocked as a feel-good show or a saccharine show because it has a positive outlook on the lives of the people in it. The fact that it just kind of lets finally, though it has some fits and starts to get there, let's these two characters be happy and live in the world and that this is also happening in a historical drama means a lot and it speaks to the importance of representation on TV and also in the stories we tell about history.

Rebecca: It's easy to, in a lot of traditional historical narratives, to essentially make it seem like gay people didn't exist until the modern age and that can be a really devastating thing and even more foolishly sometimes it feels like non-white people didn't exist until the modern age, which is also terrible. This representation matters and I hope that "Call the Midwife" continues with that trend they have had a wide diversity of people in the community of Poplar, but I think it's always great when the main characters, the midwives, are also a diverse group of women with a diverse group of experiences.

Rebecca: I have seen a tease for the season that's coming out in 2018 they are going to have an Afro-Caribbean midwife. I am super excited about it. I highly recommend you guys can go and look at this, Leila is making excited faces-

Leila: I had not heard about this.

Rebecca: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. They seem to be continuing to expand that idea and I hope that they do that because of the way the show is structured, because of its willingness to center on women's lives and looking at women's lives, it's also super important that they continue to expand the variety of women's lives that they focus on.

Leila: While I think we could talk about "Call the Midwife" literally all day, I think we should bring in our guest, Amy Chambers, who is joining us from Manchester where she is a senior lecturer at Manchester Metropolitan University. In her work, Amy looks at representation and projected futures of women and minority groups within scientific cultures and imagined futures in Anglo-American entertainment media. She also regularly contributes to the great popular culture blog Science and Entertainment Laboratory, and she is currently working on a book titled "From Star Child to Star Wars: Science, Religion, and Cinema from 1967-1977" in which she explores post-Hollywood science-based cinema and how mainline U.S. religious groups have influenced, responded to, or appropriated science on screen.

Leila: I can say personally, after reading your posts on the Science and Entertainment Laboratory and talking to you on Twitter for a couple of years, I'm so happy to have a real life conversation with you and welcome you to the podcast.

A. Chambers: Thank you very much for having me. It's great to actually finally get to be involved and sort of meet you, if only virtually.

Anna: Okay, well I will echo what Leila said, when I first started grad school and sort of started using Twitter for work, you're one of the first people that I started following which was really fortuitous because your work made me realize like, "Oh, we could do pop culture stuff, it doesn't have to be all Galileo all the time." It was just a really nice thing to inject into my brain really early on and break the cycle of Galileo, which is just shorthand for stodgy, boring studies of science.

Anna: You do not do stodgy, boring studies of science and I'm just fascinated by how interdisciplinary your work it and so to kick us off, can you just tell us how you managed to carve out such a cool niche for your research and talk to us a bit just about how you came here and came to be doing this work?

A. Chambers: Yeah, it's kind of flukey really, because a lot of it comes from unexpected moments of academic introduction. I started off as a bachelor's undergraduate looking specifically at history. I had a program set up on looking at military and naval history, specifically post American Civil War military and naval history, and that's what I did for my first three years of my undergraduate program. I also picked up a couple of modules in film studies but the only thing that would fit in my first year program to fill out my first semester was a module on the introduction to film and I thought that sounded fun. I went in and the first clip they showed was a clip from "Singing in the Rain," which is one of my favorite movies of all time. I used to watch it with my mom on Sunday afternoons and I loved it and I rang her up as soon as I came out that class to tell her that I'd be changing my degree to history with a minor in film studies.

A. Chambers: I always thought of them as two separate spheres and so as a student it was my relief from the history was to do the film and vice versa and then when I got into my fourth year I ended up taking some cultural history modules, one of which was called America on Film which looked at the history of the U.S. and across the Hollywood system and thinking about how points of history intersect with the industry, how they're represented not only through historical films and political films but also through entirely fictional films. I did a presentation on "Planet of the Apes," wrote a massive dissertation on how we could use "Planet of the Apes" as looking how the '68 version transitions through to the 2001 Tim Burton edition, thinking about how the issues and ideas across that changed across history and across time. It didn't go down very well in a traditional history department doing "Planet of the Apes" and pop culture.

A. Chambers: Then I ended up following that into a entire thesis, my PhD on "Planet of the Apes" as a reflection of counter-cultural trends in America in the 1960s into the early 1970s. It's a long story. After I finished my PhD I went to work in a history of science department on a project that was looking at the intersection of religion and science and entertainment media which is where the science and entertainment love comes from. The rest is history.

A. Chambers: It was just this sort of shift, little things that came in and it was just this project that came up. They wanted someone who had a background in science fiction, was interested in science, and could speak to religion as well. I'd done a couple of chapters that looked at science, technology, and "Planet of the Apes" and religion in "Planet of the Apes" and that seemed to be enough to get me into that project. Just those little moments where you're not quite sure how you got to where you are but a weird and wonderful move history from-

Anna: That's so awesome. To go from military history to writing your thesis on "Planet of the Apes" I think that's fantastic. Good job.

A. Chambers: I don't know quite how it happened but it did. It was like, "Oh, obviously you did military history to start off with", and I was like, "Yeah." Then I randomly took a module in film and then I picked up a module in film and history because it looked fun. It just sort of snowballed.

Anna: So you said that your master's project did not really go down all that well in a traditional history department and I think we find also sometimes that kind of stuff is a little bit of a hard sell to capital H historians and that sometimes there's this disconnect between historians or other humanists who do pop culture work is like it's on the side work and then they have their real history work. I was wondering if you, aside from what you eluded to about your master's project, if you've had to deal with any of that kind of academic pushback, either about your specific research topics, working on science fiction in general, or about how public-facing your work is. There's sometimes among academics a disdain for being on the Internet or writing blog posts or things like that. I wonder if you've had any of that.

A. Chambers: I get the discussion a lot of, "Why do you use Twitter? Why be on social media?", and it sort of makes it sound really boring and, I don't know what's the right word for it is, but using Twitter specifically for research academic work and academic networks, it is social for me in the sense that sometimes it's nice to know that there are other people out there working on similar things or totally different things who are interested in what you're working on.

A. Chambers: People struggling with this idea that being a historian and being very engaged with Twitter especially in my case and blogging and sort of putting your work out there in three different formats you get a lot of people assuming that it's either a bit low culture and a bit trashy way of engaging with and communicating research, but for me I've actually found it really exciting. I've met people that I'd have never have met at an academic conference or in a traditional setting. Women of science, people who work as scientists, research groups that are engaged with promoting women in STEM, all of these things have come through this sort of online stuff. For me it's integral to me as a researcher but also that public-facing stuff which is so important to me as an academic is integrated into that.

A. Chambers: I've been pretty lucky thought academically. There is a community of historians that work around and publish in and go to a conference called Film and History, which was one of the first journals that engaged directly in the discussion of film and history together as connected and equal disciplines. It still tends to focus on historical films, so films about a particular historical moment or historical figure our character or films that are particularly important historically, but there's definitely a set of us that look at totally fictional, non-history based stuff.

A. Chambers: I have to say the first time I went to the Film and History Conference which is generally held in either Madison or Milwaukee in Wisconsin, it was like I'd found my people. It was great. Suddenly I'm like, "Oh, I don't have to explain why studying film is an entirely helpful way of thinking about history", especially for someone who looks at history specifically post-1960s and as someone who's interested in cultural history and cultural trends. Film and television are so integral to that, especially within American popular culture. I get pushback in a sense that I always get that question at conferences like, "You can do that with a film?" And I'm like, "Yes."

A. Chambers: But then I've been to lit conferences where I've explained the processes of filmmaking and drafting and redrafting and scripts changes and editors and the whole industry that sits round it and they're sort of like, "Oh, it's the same", and you're like, "Yeah, it's a similar process." It's not pushback, it's more fascination that you're actually able to do this, combined with the, "Your job is so cool", and I'm like, "Yes, it is."

Anna: Agreed. In that case, I do want to ask specifically about the period that you're working on in your book project, the decade the 60s into the 70s in science fiction. This is also the period that I work on so as a sort of selfish interest but can you talk to us a little bit about this moment in the genre and why it's important for understanding American culture in general?

A. Chambers: I look at specifically to do with science-based fiction and science fiction and for me those dates are an important book end, A, because you're writing a book and you've got to get it to fit into something reasonable so you don't end up writing a student essay "since the beginning of time", it's not very helpful, so it gives you a nice boundary. I specifically look at '67, '68, through to '77 because of a turn in American science fiction, British science fiction as well, but predominantly book ended by American films, that start in '68 with the release of "2001 A Space Odyssey" and "Planet of the Apes" and resolves in 1977 with the release of "Star Wars" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind."

A. Chambers: '68 is an important point in the history of Hollywood because it is the official end of censorship in Hollywood. You have had films that have broken the censorship rules and have been released that engage with ideas and stories about science that would not have been permitted during the censorship era, but you've got this sudden burst of creative cinema that comes out from 1968 where directors have suddenly got a lot more freedom to produce and create images and ideas, in my case about science, that haven't been available prior to that.

A. Chambers: You get this fascinating series of films that are all squished into this period which are very much engaged with ideas about science and it's science fiction where science is the main propellant in that particular narrative rather than just being something in the background that allows the story to happen. You get things like the "Andromeda Strain," which is about viruses and about that experimentation; it's so central to that particular narrative. When you get to '77, "Star War"s comes in an ruins everything. Those things on Twitter is like, your most unpopular opinion that no one ever agrees with, I hate "Star Wars." It's never done anything for me. I can research it, read about it, write about it, but I just never didn't ... I watched "Silent Running" as a child with my dad, not "Star Wars" so that gives you an indication of the type of science fiction that I got into and how I got into them.

A. Chambers: You get this moment where you've got "Close Encounters of the Third Kind," which is much more [inaudible 00:54:39] 2001, that sort of science and wonder and communicating with aliens and this much more philosophical science fiction released almost exactly the same time as "Star Wars." Lucas doesn't even refer to it as science fiction, it's science fantasy. He never intended it to be this stalwart of the science fiction genre that it becomes so it's this interesting moment. So they historically link into the history of the industry, but also in terms of the content of science in the movies at that time they're quite important beginning and end points.

Anna: Oh man. Good luck with the backlash after this podcast comes out.

A. Chambers: It's my favorite unpopular opinion. I used to teach a module on science fiction and the week that did "Star Wars," because if you don't put it in students are like, "Why did you not put "Star Wars" in our module?" I did it on merchandising and the importance of popular culture and ephemeral culture and that was how I got round teaching Star Wars.

Anna: That's great actually. Well, let's talk about stuff that you've managed to get a little bit closer to. Rebecca?

Rebecca: Yeah, of course us being Lady Science we especially love the work that you have done about women scientists in the media and women in science in the media and women in sci-fi. In one of your essays where you talk about this, you quote something that I feel like is kind of a cliché but is a useful cliché, which is, "If she can see it, she can be it." I was wondering if you could just take a moment to unpack that and explain what that means for you in your work.

A. Chambers: It was a phrase that I came about when I was researching that. The whole women in science thing comes from a rant I had about "Planet of the Apes," more specifically "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes." There's always a link. I was really frustrated that the two female characters in "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes," which is the second of the most recent cycle, you had Erin, the girl one, was a former CDC, they don't even give the female ape a name, it's only in the marketing material. It sort of spawned from the fact that I was irritated and ranted at lots of people about this.

A. Chambers: I started researching women in STEM on screen and thinking about it in recent representations and how far it'd come forward and "if she can see it, she can be it" was a phrase that came up a couple of times because a lot of the research that's been done female representation in Hollywood is being conducted by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media who have a campaign called See Jane and the whole campaign is about what can a girl be if she can imagine it and where in culture should we be trying to engage young women in thinking about their future careers and what they can actually achieve as women in the future.

A. Chambers: They've got a campaign at the present moment which is called Reel Girls, R-E-E-L, Inspire Real Girls, R-E-A-L and they're talking about in that case Merida from "Brave" who's Disney Pixar's first woman [inaudible 00:58:20], Merida, I got really tongue-tied. So the campaign of Reel Girls Inspire Real Girls is to do with young girls wanting to be archers which will be Merida from Brave and Katniss Everdeen from the "Hunger Games." That was what I was trying to say, but the names all go mixed up in my head. It's all archery.

A. Chambers: So you get this idea of thinking about how things that appear on screen can actively encourage young girls to think about what they could be in the future. That project is much broader and is intended to be a much more broader thing about putting professional women on screen but for me, that phrase was really helpful about thinking about why and where the issues come from in terms of how girls get involved in sciences and how they don't get involved in sciences.

Rebecca: You've written about and you've done some interesting surveys about women scientists on television so I was wondering if there were any conclusions in particular that you've drawn from looking at a pretty wide variety of women scientists on TV?

A. Chambers: I looked specifically at post-2000s women. I'm interested in that change-over and thinking about because there's previous studies that ran up to "2000" but there's not anything on post-"2000" representations of women in science. It's not to say that that's a moment of change historically, but rather those studies just don't exist. It's something that I want to look at in much more detail in my future research on this because I think there's a distinction between the television and film representations and the volume of women scientists seems to be higher on the small screen than it is on the big screen. Perhaps some of this is down to the fact that it's less risky in a small screen setting. You can introduce these characters, you can develop them over a long period of time rather than asking an audience to automatically believe that there's a woman and also she is a scientist. Rather than having to build it up, don't worry guys, she's a mother, she's a daughter, she's a sister, she's a lab assistant, and a scientist.

A. Chambers: In the case of TV, you can build them up and you get characters like Temperance Brennan, "Bones," who's introduced as a scientist character and the core of that show straight off, but she develops as a character and becomes normalized and less frightening by becoming a member of a family, both scientific family and a literal mom, dad, and two kids family as well. I think there's a higher volume.

A. Chambers: They also tend to be more bio scientists as well. Women tend to be associated with the bio sciences so you have the scientists on the "Big Bang Theory" who I tried to keep a record of every female scientist who had appeared in the show and there was only one person that I could find who wasn't a bio science. Not that there's anything wrong with the bio sciences, there's not anything inherently problematic but there is this sort of idea of the softer sciences versus the hard sciences and often when you get women represented as physicists they are kooky or unusual. You get Jillian Holtzmann, in "Ghostbusters" is the kooky physicist. The lines of what a woman can be in that representation is something I'm really interested in and if it's just what I've seen or if it's actually a larger trend. It's part of a bigger study.

Rebecca: Excellent. Again, you mentioned the "Big Bang Theory" which I thought that your writing about that was interesting. I have mixed feelings about the show, I watched it regularly for a while and dropped off watching it and there are definitely things about it that make me crazy as I think is true of everyone but I do think that as you know in your essay there are some unique and varied portrayals of women in science so I was wondering if you could expand a little bit on that.

A. Chambers: It's this idea that in order to give a rounded representation, it's not just to have a woman scientist but also show them as part of a community as professional womens. As professional women and the challenges that come with being at a certain level in any field regardless of gender. They do offer that in some senses but it's something that as a show they develop across the series eventually sort of.

Amy Chambers: They sort of introduce the alternative women to Penny later in the series and you get Amy Farrah Fowler as that first introduction as this socially incapable oddball and the fact that she's a scientist she's just really the same nerdy scientist stereotype but a girl one. That is not great and the more they develop her I think she gets better as a character, but it's also helped I think in terms of the fact that she is played by an actual woman neuroscientist, which helps that in terms of how it's spoken about in broader popular culture rather than just in the show itself.

A. Chambers: They start off again as stereotypes and then become a bit more developed but I think that's the same with the male characters. I think it starts off as like a one-note series that they don't think's going to be ... if you told me when it started that this was going to be a 10 season plus series that was going to be West's top rated comedy, I wouldn't have believed you but I has this odd longevity that continues. For something that doesn't have particularly big story arcs or anything other than the characters to draw you back in.

Leila: I wonder if you have any thoughts about how this seems to be a very generally popular show, but scientists that I've seen tend to hate it very much. I'm wondering if you have thoughts about what's kind of going on there between the different communities that the show is speaking and not speaking too.

A. Chambers: There's some interesting research done by, I think she's Australian National University, a researcher called Rochelle-Lee who's looked at the "Big Bang Theory" within a sociological project and asking people about how they've understood it in terms of science and how they have seen the show and then been inspired to go look at a particular scientific theory or a particular idea that's been in the show. There's this interesting narrative around it as a piece of science communication that actually inspires people to go and look things up and go, "I didn't understand what they were talking about", and rather than letting it blow over, actually go and look it up.

A. Chambers: I can imagine the frustration of a scientist as this representation of it as this real life portrayal of what it is to be a scientist and the ease of grants and ease of discoveries and collaborations and the way they work and the representation of the university as a wider institute is quite problematic I think throughout the series. I can imagine it's frustrating if that's one of the main ways that a lot of people learn about research scientists and that's how you're represented and people want you to align to that stereotype.

A. Chambers: That's why we come with problems of like, "This is not what a scientist looks like", or "This is what a scientist looks like it should be." This idea of what we expect a scientist to look like in comparison to the reality of what an actual scientist looks like and the problem that we all have of being young women with or working towards a PhD and that assumption that you're not old enough or you're not the right gender to have a PhD and to have a title and those problems that come with people's expectations of what you can be based on what you look like. I think "Big Bank Theory" attempts to engage with that but at the same time confirms a lot of those stereotypes that we try to work against.

Leila: Does anyone have any final questions or anything for Amy?

Rebecca: No. This has been fabulous, thank you.

Anna: Yeah, this was really fun.

A. Chambers: Thank you very much for having me. I was very excited that you invited me to come and ramble at you.

Anna: Thank you so much for coming and talking with us and we'll be sure that we include links to all the articles of yours that we talked about today and to your page so that people can keep up with the stuff that you're posting on Academia.edu.

A. Chambers: I don't usually use that but I currently am because I'm just about to start my new post. I don't have a proper one yet at the university so once that's set up, I'll send you the link to my proper university one because Academia.edu has lots of problems technically ,and I just feel bad promoting them.

Leila: Cool. Well we'll be sure to include whatever way people can reach you and keep up with the stuff that you're doing. Thanks again for chatting with us, it was a real pleasure.

Leila: So this month we are going to forego our last segment of one annoying thing because this episode has literally been curse. We have dealt with all sorts of problems including a blackout during recording, so we're going to quit while we're ahead. Anyway, if you liked the episode, what you heard of it today, head right on over to iTunes and leave us a rating and a review so that others can find us, questions about any of the segments today, tweet us at @ladyxscience or #ladyscipod, for show notes, to sign up for monthly newsletter, read monthly issues, pitch us an idea for an article and more visit ladyscience.com. We are an independent magazine so we depend on the support from our readers and listeners. You can support us through a monthly donation with Patreon or through one-time donations. Just visit ladyscience.com/donate. Until next time, you can find us on Facebook at Lady Science Mag and on Twitter at @ladyxscience.

00:18:27

Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg 

Guest: Dr. Marie Hicks 

Producer: Leila McNeill 

This bonus episode is an excerpt from our interview with Dr. Marie Hicks that was cut for time from Episode 4. We talk about identity and historical practice and history as a social justice project. 

Transcribed by Leila McNeill

Leila: Welcome to a lady science bonus episode. This short episode is an excerpt taken from our interview with writer and historian. Dr. Marie Hicks from episode 4. We had a great conversation about how identity shapes historical practice and about history as a social justice project. Unfortunately, it did not make it into the final cut for the episode because of time limits.

So here is that conversation now.

[Break]

Leila: I want to I highlight something that you said in the introduction that really stood out for me: "Throughout history it has often not been the content of the work but the identity of the worker performing it that determines its status." Identity in history is something that we've talked about before on this podcast and also something we've written about in the magazine.

So, I'm curious, how do you think identity both one's own and that of the historical actors shape historical practice.

Dr. Hicks: That's a really that's a really good question. A really tough question. I think you know, I think we're still really struggling to figure that out with every single project we do. Nobody for instance thought that the book Hidden Figures was a narrative that could be written until -- well some some people, you know, sort of had more knowledge, but in general, you know, the popular consciousness -- Margot Lee Shettlerly's book was a real bombshell and so much of the reason why she was able to write, not just an interesting story, but a truly excellent history in a few -- I think people who have seen the movie like they they [00:02:00] probably think "oh, you know, well, I know what's going on," but as you probably know from reading the book the book is way way better than the movie and it does all of these really fabulous things with historical practice and institutional history and social and political history.

But anyway, I mean her having grown up in that community was, you know, she says it was a primary reason why she knew to tell the story at all and why she was so invested in telling it and telling it right and giving the folks that were the main characters in this study real agency, you know, not just talking about them, but letting them have agency in this history or showing how they had agency in this history.

So yeah, it's a difficult thing and I mean I can say from my own experience that obviously the job I did before I went to grad school that played a role in what I decided to study, and you know, the fact that a lot of the stuff in my book that I talked about is actually about like heteronormativity and how sexuality plays a role in constructing gender. That also has to do with you know, who I am, the fact that I'm queer and I'm looking at a whole class of women whose lives were essentially structured around the presumption that they were straight, whether they were or not, they essentially were thought to be only good in the workforce for as long as they weren't going to be married and having children and that everybody would, you know, eventually go that way.

I know that the way that I look at that and talk about that is a lot more maybe critical or fleshed out because of who I am and what I'm interested in.

Anna: So just to wrap up in [00:04:00] the forward that you wrote for us for our 2016 anthology you wrote that "history by nature is a social justice project," and if we could just wrap up by talking a little bit about what that means you as historian and how your work um fits into history as a social justice project.

Dr. Hicks: Sure. I mean, I think it's something that I took for granted for a long time, but never really articulated in that way. But when you think about it, um, the whole reason that we do history the whole reason that we study and research and write history is because we think that we can somehow make things better in the present and in the future by understanding the mistakes of the past.

And so that's you know, it's what I mean when I say it's a social justice project is just that old idea of we learn from our mistakes and we try to make our present and our future better. So I think it sounds you know, it sounds very fancy and radical when I say history is a social justice project, but it's the same thing that you know every undergraduate saying, "So, well you learn from history so you don't repeat it or you don't repeat the bad parts."

I'd be interested actually to hear your thoughts on this because I know that you um, why shouldn't say I know but it appears from the work you do that you sort of see, um, the historical uh discipline in in a similar way.

So I'd actually be interested to hear your take on this.

Rebecca: I think it took me a while to realize that other people didn't think about history that way in part I think because... [00:06:00] the most basic reason of studying history is as you described and I think that so much then the of academic history seems to be an attempt to like drag all of that like out of people: the idea that we can learn things from history and make the world better is something.

And a lot of them academic history feels as the thing that, juvenile thing, that like undergrads think. I think both that that was something that kind of need like dispense with that way of thinking about history has often frustrated me and the lack of social justice in academic history has frustrated me, but I hadn't thought of them as connected before. Uh, so I really appreciate that way of framing it. That's so interesting. I can totally see what you're saying. Yeah, I definitely see that that sort of framework where it's may be seen as not um, it's somehow biased or it's not as intellectual to have a political tie in or be explicitly tying your work to what's going on in the present.

But I guess that also like shows me how lucky I was in terms of where I was educated because, for instance, I mean, I wouldn't have gotten um an education at some schools that really encouraged me to do the work of you know, not like overt activism but making sure that you know, there was a place for my story in the present as well as in the library. So I think I got really lucky in terms [00:08:00] of where I went and who I worked with as a graduate student.

Leila: I find that with the work that I do with Smithsonian I try to include like critical historical points and gender analysis in the work that I do in public writing there. But I don't even have to apply, you know, a really critical gender analysis to the work that I do. All I have to do is try to recover the history of a woman. That in and of itself makes people mad. I don't have to say anything necessarily radical in the history that I write but that it's about a woman is something that even upsets some people -- that I am inherently overstating her importance.

And I feel like it's my identity as a woman writing about women that somehow makes people think that I am biased about the history that I do, rather than seeing this as my practice of kind of recovering women from history is really no different than a white man recovering other white men from history as well. And so I feel like just by writing about women for me that history can be a social justice project.

Anna: It's interesting, I was just speaking to some students yesterday, and they were asking me about my work and then my work for Lady Science. And my personal work is not explicitly about women, but the [00:10:00] actors in my stories about the Space Program were actually buildings and stuff. But in thinking about that in answering their questions about my practice, I was just thinking that one of the things that I think we've all encountered a lot is that studying women and/or gender is its own like specific sub-discipline instead of a method that can be applied to any kind of history and that there's a lot that I can do with the buildings that I study that has to do with gender and being able to talk about the women who worked in them and how sort of scientific or technological spaces are constructed for certain people. So I know just sometimes I feel a little weird that my personal work isn't specifically about what women, but there's I think there's a responsibility that I have not always seen taken up by historians to account for that even if you're not going to talk specifically about women.

Saying that there are no women around first of all usually isn't true and second of all, doesn't matter -- there's still a way to talk about why they aren't there and where they went. I don't know. And that's something we always try to do with Lady Science. We try not to just run straight profiles because we do want to be able to get to kind of the larger systemic issues [00:12:00] going on in the histories that we we talk about. And even if someone does like pitch us an idea that is a profile that we try to push them a little bit harder to identify more of the the structures in place that kept us from knowing about this person and stuff like that so that we can actually get to some of those more root causes of of what we're talkin about.

Dr. Hicks: Yeah, and I really like the way lady science does that because while you're surfacing individual women you never do it in a way that's kind of the old-fashioned. We'll add women and stir, right, like we're gonna just add women to the historical narrative. That's one of the things that I think we still have to try kind of really hard to push back against especially like now in a moment when actually like talking about women in history is kind of hot, like especially recovering women in the history of technology and computing is having a real moment in the popular consciousness, but a lot of it is about well, let's just talk about this one woman and in fact also, let's just talk about like the same three white women over and over again. And then you know Hidden Figures has helped a lot to maybe talk about like a couple of black women, but it's like you say it's talked about in ways a lot of the time that is kind of um, it's hagiography. It's you know sort of hero worship and it doesn't actually tell us much about history because it focuses on these folks as though their exceptions rather than explanatory of larger social and political structures.

Anna: Yes. There's the great rushing stream of history, and then there's women over there or something standing on the bank or something.

Rebecca: And I think I think we try to keep in mind with Lady Science and that [00:14:00] has often been whatever I can make it important to my work as a public historian.

I try to make it important is the question of sort of who is telling the story and who they are telling the story for or two is I think important part is important part of the sort of the social justice history project. I think it's it goes to what we're talking about earlier about identity and the way that we see stories differently based on who we are and sometimes that means history from people who have different kinds of education and different levels of education and come from different kinds of backgrounds. And also sharing different kinds of history with not just broader audiences in the very generic sense, but really thinking about sort of who different people who want to know history are the kinds of and the kinds of stories and history that they can tell and bring to light that get lost in traditional and academic historical narratives. I think that's really important to this kind of yeah, social justice project of history.

Dr. Hicks: Yeah, that kind of reminds me of the example that um you started out with I forget if it was Leila who mentioned the example in my book of the woman who trains her new trainees to basically help with all the programming and operating and testing work she's doing in this major computer center and then her trainees step into management roles and she gets demoted into an assistantship below them simply because she's a woman and they're men and when I talk about this example in an [00:16:00] academic context, you know, you get a lot of nods and so on but whenever I've been at tech companies and I've talked about this example women in the audience will become like visibly angry, visibly agitated and they'll come up and talk to me after. It's painful to me to see how much they identify with this woman from decades and decades and decades ago and the question that they always have in a lot of men in the audience have and a lot of people of all genders in the audiences at these tech companies have is “Well. What do we do now? You know look you've been outlining how this problem has been around forever. How do we actually change things?” Because the history unfortunately resonates with them so much and that's where I kind of bring it back to labor and class and now I just kind of straight up tell people to unionize, you know, don't be above labor organization as a white-collar professional, you know.

And I think that very much goes for our profession as well. I shouldn't say our profession but sort of like, academics, whether they work inside of universities or outside of universities, but especially if they work within the confines of the corporate university. It's becoming all but essential to essentially be organized and have a have a union.

[Break]

Leila: We hope you enjoyed this short but sweet bonus episode. If you did be sure you head right on over to iTunes and leave us a rating and a review so that other people can find and listen to us

As always, if you have questions about the segment today between us at at lady science or hashtag lady side pod to sign up for a monthly newsletter, read monthly issues, pitch us an idea for an article, and more visit [00:18:00] ladyscience.com.

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1:26:49

Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg 

Guest: Marie Hicks

Producer: Leila McNeill

Music: nononoNO

In this episode, Anna and Rebecca challenge us to expand our definition of technology to include women's work with technological foods and sewing. Leila breaks down the class and labor implications of a net neutrality rollback and urges feminists to include net neutrality in their activism. And finally, guest Dr. Marie Hicks joins us to talk about their book Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing. 

Technological Food and Women's Labor by Anna Reser

Nicholas de Monchaux, Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo (MIT Press, 2011). 

New Poll: Americans Overwhelmingly Support Existing Net Neutrality Rules, Affordable Access, and Competition Among ISPs 

More than 60 million urban American's don't have access to or can't afford broadband internet by Rani Molla

Internet/Broadband Fact Sheet by Pew Research Center

13% of Americans don't use the internet. Who are they? by Pew Research Center

Net Neutrality is a Feminist Issue. Here's Why. by Sarah Mirk

Man Develops App to Reveal What Women Look Like Without Makeup by Madison Malone Kircher

Sewing Science, Sewing History by Rebecca Ortenberg 

Dr. Marie Hicks website

Marie Hicks, Programmed Inequality (MIT Press, 2017).

Gutting net neutrality is a death knell for the resistance by Sarah Kendzior 

Ruth Oldenziel and Karin Zachmann, Cold War Kitchen: Amercanization, Technology, and European Users (MIT Press, 2011). 

Jessamyn Neuhaus, “The Way to a Man’s Heart: Gender Roles, Domestic Ideology, and Cookbooks in the 1950s,” Journal of Social History, vol. 32, no. 3 (1999): 529-555.

Glenn Sheldon, “Crimes and Punishments: Class and Connotations of Kitschy American Food and Drink,” Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 27, no. 1 (2004): 61-72.

Margot Lee Shetterly, Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race (Harper Collins, 2016).

Transcription by Rev.com

Rebecca: Welcome back to the Lady Science Podcast. A monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science. With you every month are the editors of Lady Science Magazine.

Anna: I'm Anna Reser, co-founder and co-editor in chief of Lady Science. I'm a writer, editor and PhD student studying 20th century American culture and the history of the American Space Program in the 1960s.

Leila: I'm Leila McNeill, the other founder and editor in chief of Lady Science. I'm a historian of science and freelance writer with words in various places on the Internet. I'm currently a regular writer on women and the history of science at smithsonian.com.

Rebecca: And I'm Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor. When I'm not working with the Lady Science team, I can be found writing about museums and public history around the Internet, and managing research projects at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. For this episode, we are focusing on technology. So you know all of those awful mid-century molded jello salad things? Or those mayonnaise-frosted sandwich loafs? Or the thick casserole sopping with condensed can soup? Anna is going to share what those foods tell us about patriotism, modernity and of course technology. Leila will talk about how net neutrality intersects with class and labor and explain why a neutral and equal Internet is essential to the feminist movement. And I'll be sharing a family story about fashion, engineering and feminist history in post-World War II California.

Rebecca: To wrap up the show, historian of technology and writer Dr. Marie Hicks will be joining us to talk about gender and sexuality in the history of computing.

Anna: Okay so I want to talk about horrible mid-century food, which is a fairly well known obsession of mine. It's all Kim Stanley Robinson and jello salads over here. That's all I spend my time thinking about. But I wrote a piece, sometime in the past I wrote a piece for Lady Science about these kinds of foods and how we can think of them as technology and by doing so, we can sort of reframe the history of the housewife and the role of women in kind of shepherding modernity into the home and ensuring that it's a ... being enacted at home as well as in the wider business or political structure. So it's a story mostly about the United States because that's what I study. So first I just want to talk about what these foods are. I think maybe people in the US who grew up like in the Midwest or in the South are familiar with these kinds of foods. They're made from manufactured foods which are relatively new in the post-war period.

Anna: There are important changes in the way that food is manufactured and packaged in the post-war period that allow you to have so called convenience foods. So, instead of buying fresh produce you could buy frozen produce. You can obviously buy canned produce for much of the 20th century. But like frozen produce becomes much more readily available and other kinds of foods that are prepared in ways that wouldn't be possible earlier. Certain kinds of like freeze drying. I'm thinking of like the crispy fried onions you put on a green bean casserole. Things like that, that can be produced on a massive scale. Packaged. Put into grocery stores. And so along with all of these prepackaged and manufactured foods, you get extensive libraries of cookbooks and recipes for how to work with these foods. And the cookbooks are pretty prescriptive about not only how you can physically work with these foods, but how you can incorporate them into the expectations that your family would have about what constitutes like a proper meal.

Anna: And that you should use these new foods but you should try to disguise them as much as possible, as fresh foods, or that kind of gets filtered in this weird way as you move into the 50s and 60s that you're not actually disguising them as quote on quote, "real food" but you're like making them in the shape of real food in this very strange way. So like I've seen a recipe for like a hot dog crown roast. But a lot of technological foods while they're marketed to women this period as being convenient, the work that you have to do to make them acceptable to what your family supposedly expects of you, and by family, you mean like your husband, expects you to prepare a meal in a certain way. There's all kinds of interesting work that's been done about gender roles and food and like performing various ideas of plenty and sort of American idealization of agriculture.

Anna: But that gets kind of weirdly distorted in the post-war period with the introduction of these kinds of food. So the reason that I cast these kinds of foods as technological is one, because of the way they are made and the changes in manufacturing that allow for mass production of things like mayonnaise, which you can make at home fairly easily. Even more easily if you have certain kinds of appliances. But once it becomes available and shelf-stable, there's no reason to stand over a bowl with a whisk. So these foods are technological in that they are made by new manufacturing technologies. But I think that where things get really interesting and where you can use these kinds of foods as a way into talking about housewives and these ideas of modernity and performing this kind of American interest or faith in technology is talking about the foods themselves as technologies and the women who use them and who experiment with them and transform them into these elaborate sculptural structural marvels of gelatin and other things, is by talking about them specifically as technologies and the women using them as embracing a kind of technological modernism.

Anna: So, mayonnaise is a good example because in a lot of the recipes that I looked at, mayonnaise is specifically used as a way to decorate the foods but also to keep them fresh. So, you would frost the sandwich loaf with mayonnaise because mayonnaise goes on a sandwich.

Leila: I'm sorry. Saying mayonnaise and frost in the same sentence is just ...

Anna: Slathered on there. But it's meant to keep the sandwich loaf fresh so that you can make it ahead of time. So it's a technology in the form of food that you can buy conveniently to augment your labor in the kitchen, so that you can make things ahead of time so you have your garden party the next day. Make your sandwich loaf the night before. It doesn't get dried out. I also saw mayonnaise used that way to like, for a guacamole recipe that was in the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook that I guarantee you no person who was not white has ever even seen that cookbook before it went to print. So you mix all of the stuff and then you put a layer of mayonnaise on top to keep the avocado from browning and then the recipe says to mix the mayonnaise into the ...

Rebecca: No! why would you do that? You just-

Leila: And we thought it was abominable when The New York Times suggested that we put peas into guacamole.

Anna: They had no idea that there were so many worse options.

Rebecca: Yes. Like the peas-

Anna: [crosstalk 00:09:08] mayonnaise.

Rebecca: ... doesn't make any sense. But it doesn't horrify me on the same like deep level that the mayonnaise thing does.

Anna: It's not cosmically wrong in the same way-

Rebecca: Exactly.

Anna: ... that the mayonnaise suggestion is. And so I am fascinated by these kinds of foods and all the various ways that they augment women's labor in the kitchen and there's this really great, great [inaudible 00:09:41] ... Interesting, I guess push and pull between the things that are supposed to save you time but then you have to spend all the extra time making it look like real food, but you're supposed to use the manufactured food because that means you're embracing technological progress and bringing it into the home which is like a huge onus that's put on women in this period. They're sold this technological modernism in every aspect of what they're supposed to be ... their domain of the home. They're supposed to buy a vacuum cleaner. They're supposed to have a state of the art refrigerator. They're supposed to have all these kitchen appliances, and they're supposed to partake of these new foods but they're still being ... there's like retroactive tug of the lure of the past that fresh foods are sort of more moral, but they're fighting with this impulse to be more technological and buy like frozen foods or canned food or premade mayonnaise. Things like that.

Anna: So, I think that I like talking about the jello salad and the frosted sandwich loaf because everyone kind of has some experience with that. If nothing else, they've seen the pictures that go around especially in the holiday time on the Internet of like, look at this horrible bananas hollandaise or whatever. That's a particular bad one that comes up every year. But, I think that if we start picking apart these little oddities, these little pieces of American life and we apply different frameworks to them, like applying a technology framework to something like a jello salad, for one thing, the story then becomes about women which is what we're going for here and it puts women in a new historical light where we can understand them as not just being sort of swept along by history I guess, but actively kind of understanding these trends and like what counts as modern and what counts as technological and making decisions about that in the domain that they're sort of ... we think of them as restricted to.

Anna: So it's another way to kind of read back same agency into what women are doing and also to talk about spaces where women are participating in a culture of like scientific or technological practice in the home and in this domestic space. We'll put up a link to the article. It has some good recipe images that you will either like or be very disgusted by.

Rebecca: Or both.

Anna: Or both. But I am having a tree trimming party next week, and I'm making a jello salad. So I'll post a picture of it on the Lady Science Twitter when it's done.

Leila: Very nice. I also want to note just because I was looking very closely at this image while you were speaking that one of the mayonnaise frosted things is decorated with radishes that have been like sculpted to look like flowers. So I mean, the decorations on these get super elaborate and I mean that's why they're so fascinating.

Anna: I just love yeah ... There's like, you thought the frosting with the mayonnaise was bad. Like piping mayonnaise onto things with various cake decorating tips? That's a thing. Like put your star tip in your piping bag and then squirt some mayonnaise onto whatever. Anything really. You can put mayonnaise on anything. Sweet or savory.

Rebecca: It's so interesting on so many different levels but it's just such a good example of the performative nature of the mid-century housewife and the fact that so much stuff that is ... that seems on the surface to be labor saving wasn't actually labor saving. And there's a level of self-awareness and self-consciousness almost with these absurd things. Like piping mayonnaise on to something is just this level of absurdity that is I think in some ways appealing because you can imagine the women doing it, kind of knew hopefully how dumb it was, but they also knew that people would think it was cool. It's fun to imagine the women who were using this technology and how they thought about it.

Anna: And there's also ... I mentioned this in the article but one of the scholars that I was looking at for background on this also mentions an important point. When you're using cookbooks as a primary source is to remember that the rhetoric of the cookbook itself is prescriptive in a lot of ways, but you ... it doesn't account ... it can't account for what people actually did. So there is a limit to like the way that I've done this kind of analysis in that I can only say what the cookbooks and recipes are telling women to do and what that says about the sort of expectations of the larger culture they were living in. Because there are women in my family who will have no [inaudible 00:15:44] with any of that. At all. And they don't care about ... At the time, did not care about decorating their food or making it look a certain way. And there were certain women I'm sure who had no interest in technological food at all. So, I guess just as a historian, it's important to say what limits our sources have. But, also that you can ... I think it's really fun to think about these things this way and it can lead to a lot of different places.

Leila: So what I have for us to talk about today with net neutrality isn't historical, but I felt like it's an important conversation for us to have right now just because at this moment, it has a pretty uncertain future. On December 14th, the FCC will vote to roll back Title II of net neutrality and so that means that by the time this episode comes out, we'll either be rejoicing in the continuation of our neutral Internet or we'll be wondering why certain web pages won't load. A July 2017 poll showed that Americans, both Democrat and Republican overwhelmingly support net neutrality at 77%. Which might be the only thing that Republicans and Democrats are actually agreeing on right now. But despite the massively and popular effort to roll back net neutrality, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai, is pushing forward with rollback plans.

Leila: Just a quick summary of net neutral for listeners who might be unfamiliar with it. In 2015, the FCC reclassified Internet service providers, or ISPs as quote, "common carriers." Which basically means that ISPs were subject to regulation that prevents them from speeding up or slowing down Internet access, blocking content or websites that the ISP might not like or agree with and also prevents them from creating fast lanes that allows content favored by the ISP to load faster or to charge users extra for a priority access. So for example, back in 2007, Verizon Wireless wouldn't allow the abortion rights group, NARAL, to use its mobile network for messaging. So imagine how that could work if Verizon, as an ISP, didn't have to conform to net neutral protections. It could prevent users from visiting that site or just block it all together. And also, fun fact, Ajit Pai used to be a lawyer for Verizon. So there's a little bit of conflict of interest going on there.

Leila: And so today there's three things that I want to talk about which are generally overlooked a lot in discussions about net neutrality. And the first thing is how net neutrality intersects with class and race. And despite this being 2017, when the Internet should now be considered a utility and not a luxury, there are still millions of people without access and millions more without reliable or fast Internet access. And these issues of access fall predictable along class and racial lines, just about how everything else in the United States does. So in 2015, Pew Research Center found that people who make less than 30k a year are less likely to be connected. And a third of adults with less than a high school education do not use the Internet.

Leila: Hispanics and Black people are also less likely to have Internet access than white people. And then in a newer January 2017 study showed that both of these groups, people of color and low-income Americans were more reliant on their smartphones for Internet access than a broadband connection. So fast forward a little bit to June 2017 and a new report by Wireless Broadband Alliance found that 23 percent of Americans living in urban areas and 28 percent of Americans in rural areas, either don't have access to the Internet or they can't afford it.

Leila: And these statistics aside, there are still areas all over. So urban, suburban whatever that only get served by one ISP. So people in those areas already have no choice in who they buy their Internet access from. And so this just goes to show that even with net neutrality regulations in place, systemic social barriers of race and class create disparities between who can afford reliable Internet and who can't. And so without these protections that net neutrality affords, these disparities will be exacerbated even more. And one of the big things that I see this effecting is job opportunities. So, I don't know about you guys, but the last time that I filled out an application, a job application with pen and paper was probably over six years ago when I worked at Starbucks for a summer. So, job opportunities are mostly advertised online and most applications are also online. So more expensive or slow or unreliable Internet access will make it harder for already disadvantaged people to find and apply for jobs.

Leila: And several years ago when I was teaching at a community college, I also worked in the writing center there, and they had computers there for public use. And I don't know how many people from the surrounding community came in to use the computers just to apply for jobs. So this could put even more of a financial burden on public libraries and places like the community college that I worked at that also provide Internet to their communities. And it's not like the GOP hasn't already been trying to kill public libraries in higher education. So rolling back net neutrality is just, it's inimical to public good on multiple fronts. And the second point that I want to make is about labor and specifically women's labor and the Internet. One of the great things about the Internet is that it has really allowed for women's labor to become visible, either through social media or personal blogs and online publishing.

Leila: Women in other underrepresented communities have been able to find a place to cultivate a voice and sometimes even a career outside of traditional industries. Publishing for example has historically prioritized white male writers. Basically creating entire canons out of their work. And though this is changing very slowly, the publishing industry has typically been averse to accepting work by women, people of color, LGBT folks and others. And so the Internet has been a place where we could work around those closed systems and those gatekeeping tactics. Find other people like us and create new communities and cultivate new readerships online. So, net neutrality not only protects Internet users, but also content creators like us who rely on open networks to share their work. Lady Science for example is independent media and we are still small, but we have finally gotten to a point after three years where we can pay people for their work and the people that we mostly pay are women. And that's something that we're proud of.

Leila: We exist solely online, so it would be a big financial strain for us if we had to pay for priority access from an ISP just so that we could post content to our website, or run our social media accounts. So, money that should go towards paying women for their labor would go to paying an ISP. My last point about this is that I'm sure everyone has noticed unless they have had their head in the sand for the last couple of months is that right now our country is undergoing a really, really long overdue reckoning of male violence and sexual predation. And the media has undoubtedly played a major role in making that happen. And not just through media outlets, newspapers and magazines and things like that, but also people being able to share these stories online like with the MeToo hashtag on Twitter. And so this is the time when we need even more women's voices amplified and prioritized, not silenced.

Leila: Just because an ISP can be bought. So net neutrality intersects with class and race and gender and so many other issues and I can't stress enough how important it is that feminists get behind supporting net neutrality. Not only does it kind of protect the work that feminists do online, but it also it intersects with a lot of the issues that feminists are supposed to care about.

Rebecca: One of the things I want to sort of highlight that you mentioned that I think is important and that we forget in so many discussions of the Internet and by we, I mean like middle-class educated people who have Internet at home. Is that it's easy to lose track of how most people access the Internet. Like I feel like this comes up in discussions of public libraries and that there's a lot of people who access the Internet via the public library and a lot of the people that are making regulations about both the Internet and libraries don't realize that. There are just so many ... Yeah, intersectional issues that are buried in discussions of the Internet that don't always get highlighted and this is a better place where that's the case. I'm thinking about how most people actually use the Internet and what they use it for is so important.

Anna: And the point that you brought up about applying for jobs, I think is a really important thing to mention because quite apart from the difficulty of motivating people who already use the Internet all the time to do anything about this is we still are fighting people who think that the Internet is not real life and that you should have to pay for your Netflix or whatever. And who seem completely incapable of understanding that it is impossible, almost nearly impossible to live in a developed country and not have access to the Internet and it's something that argument that gets trotted out about welfare all the time. How could the government be paying you money if you have an iPhone? Or this idea that like, well, I saw a homeless person who had a cellphone. So they can't be doing that bad.

Rebecca: It's because if they're going to own one piece of modern technology, it being a smartphone is actually a really logical thing to do.

Anna: Absolutely.

Rebecca: Before you own a TV or a laptop or a car, owning a smartphone makes sense. And it's cheaper than all of those things.

Anna: And it's like having access to the Internet even for basic things like I was just thinking like maybe you live on the other side of town and you need to get to a food pantry and it takes you a long time to get across town and you need to plan and know what the hours of the food pantry are. And sometimes those places won't even have a phone that you can call. And so being able to have access to that information is hugely important. And I just ... I'm so incredibly fed up with this idea that the Internet isn't real life when so many of us rely on it for the most basic needs. Not to mention the people who work solely on the Internet, like us.

Leila: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Well, and like there was a 2014 article that Bitch Magazine put out when this was coming up the first time around. And one of the points that they make in there is how net neutrality is really important for people to be connected to just what's going on in the world and I can't remember what the exact statistic was but like that the majority of Americans get their news and information through social networks by following those organizations on Facebook or Twitter that most people aren't sitting down and watching CNN or heaven forbid, Fox News, to be informed. That they're getting this on their own through the Internet, and seeking those things out through the Internet. And that when we block off those opportunities, that we're disenfranchising people from knowing about the world that they live in.

Anna: There's also this idea that I think is related to these arguments that always seem to come from like older people or just, I don't know. People who have a retrograde sensibility about the world that like ... that because the Internet is relatively new and because it provides things that we didn't have access to before that they are unspeakable luxuries that we're not entitled to. That, well back in my day, we had to use a dictionary to know what words mean, or what ... that's the kind of obnoxious example. But that either you're not entitled to them or you should have to pay for these luxuries like being able to Google for things or being able to watch TV on the Internet, just because the people making the arguments didn't have access to those things in the past and it's like ... especially in the United States it's such a weird argument to make in a country that spends so much of its time patting itself on the back for its technological progress. And it's just more proof that our politics are so ill equipped to deal with the technological progress that we appear to be capable of. Because we still think that it doesn't belong to everybody.

Leila: Yeah. And like these technology and all of this stuff is so intricately connected to the way we think about American progress and so what does it really mean when we're connecting America and progress but at the same time, disenfranchising large portions of its population to this progress. Like, progress for who? First of all. And can we call that progress when these systems that we've built disenfranchise most of its population? Or I guess not in this case, most, but a large majority.

Anna: Well, and that's the essential question is like who is the progress for? And it's for whoever can afford it. Because the death of net neutrality doesn't mean anything to you if money in general doesn't mean anything to you because you can pay for to open your throttle on all of your services all the way and so your Internet will look neutral anyway because the money isn't an issue for you. And the money issue like as it stratifies according to all of these categories of difference and disenfranchisement that we deal with in the rest of our political lives. And so the people who like you said, will be hurt most by this are the people who are always hurt most by American politics and it's just more piling on.

Rebecca: Well maybe if we are very lucky by the time this comes out, net neutrality will live to fight another day. Though, I don't think that this conversation will stop being as relevant because if we also don't have a permanent solution for this. So.

Leila: Yeah. And that's a big problem is that we don't have a permanent solution for this and because our politicians are so, they lack so much foresight and so much understanding of what the Internet is as a concept even that we can't have permanent solutions to this if our politicians aren't even taking the time to understand it.

Rebecca: We are now going back to the history time, so we've been talking about modern technology and now it's history times again.

Anna: History times.

Rebecca: It's 1947 in California. Southern California. My grandfather, David Hill was a young engineer hired by the Northrop Corporation to work on a new military project at the Edwards Air Force Base out in the Mojave Desert. Side note to all of this, at the time, the Air Force base was actually called Muroc. It was renamed Edwards just a little while later, so and that's what it's known as today. So that's just want I'm going to call it. Don't at me aerospace nerds. You know what I'm talking about.

Anna: I'll just delete that tweet I was going...

Rebecca: So, anyway, my grandfather is married to my grandmother who's name is Eileen and at the time in 1947, I think she would have been pregnant with my uncle and my mom wasn't born yet. So this is actually a pretty exciting time to be an aerospace engineer like my grandfather was. Chuck Yeager had just broken the sound barrier at Edwards Air Force Base, like the year before and a number of Air Force engineers and doctors and other scientists are investigating just how much gravitational force the body can endure if they were to send it out on a plane going really, really fast. Because it turns out that you can break the sound barrier and not die. So maybe you can go fast for other reasons like who knows? Going into space someday.

Rebecca: So, to do this, my grandfather and other engineers on this project, they built this sled and they attached some rocket bottles to it. And they hook up some sensors and they shoot ... they put a person on it, eventually and they shoot them down this track that was originally used I think to test V-2 rockets during World War II if I remember correctly. They start out with doing this with dummies but soon the main person doing this is, riding on the sled is this guy, an air force doctor named John Stapp who was kind of the head of this project.

Rebecca: And is sometimes called the fastest man alive, or the fastest man to ever live because of how fast he would go down this sled on it and would have some pretty terrible like medical thing happen to him because of it. But that's a whole other tangent. So getting back to Murphy's law though, the family story goes, so one day someone screwed up the sensors. That someone was maybe my grandfather or possibly one of his assistants, and so the sled goes out and it comes back with no readings on it. So they don't know anything about what happened with this particular sled test. That day, there was another air force major around who's name was Edward Murphy. He's visiting the test site, and he gets really angry about the screw up. So, at some point in his frustration or John Stapp's frustration or another engineer, makes the comment whatever can't go wrong will go wrong.

Rebecca: There's obviously multiple versions of this story. Some people say that this ... some obviously different versions of this idea of Murphy's Law existed already but it's a fun goofy story that my family usually sums up by saying, "Grandpa invented Murphy's Law", or "Grandpa was responsible for Murphy's law." And all of the silliness aside, this is really kind of a story about how my grandfather was part of history. So he's just a humble engineer. He was just like one of like the normal guys but he knew some important people who were doing this like cool, cutting edge science. He literally had his hands on the technological guts of the early space race and Cold War science, and so the specifics of the story don't really matter. It's just this idea of saying, "Hey, he was at Edwards Air Force Base for all of this like cool, science history stuff was happening." So I think that has had a lot of power for my family and it's just like a fun, wacky cocktail party story to tell.

Anna: Yeah. The one in my family is that my grandmother was a riveter working at Boeing during the war, so she was Rosie the Riveter, and it's a way to sort of like pin your family history to the larger timeline in a way that feels ... it makes things feel significant in a way, I think, and places you in the stream of history in a way that I think is really satisfying.

Rebecca: Eileen Hill, I think, also had her hands in the technological guts of history, but my family doesn't have the same kind of tidy story to illustrate that. That, I think just says a lot about the way we talk about gender and technology in history, and our families and that's really got me thinking about this topic and writing a blog post for us. And so my grandma, she was a seamstress. Sewing was really something she was passionate about and loved. She sewed most of my mom's clothes growing up, which my mom always joked she hated at the time, though it sounds like really amazing now. She always wanted to like buy a dress at the department store, dammit!. And in the 1950s, my grandmother was ... professionally sewed bathing suits and later designed them as well and she worked for two different companies based in the Los Angeles garment district. The more famous of those was Rose Marie Reid, but then she also worked for a company called Tobi of California.

Rebecca: And I think both of those companies still exist in some form or another today, though the 50s and 60s were really like the height of their work. So, my family does talk about my grandma's career all the time. I've known about my grandma bathing suit designer for awhile and my grandma loved telling stories. I think that she probably is who I first heard the Murphy's law story from. And she has plenty of stories about her childhood and the Depression and various kinds of things that she did. But, it's like we don't have that sort of historical context, weightiness to her stories about her being a seamstress. And that's really despite the fact that she is working in this technological industry because she's making bathing suits. And this is a time in the 1950s when there were a lot of new stretchy fabrics that are coming out and ideas about what women should wear are changing. And so designers and seamstresses like my grandmother are really being tasked with engineering puzzles. Despite my pedigree, I don't know very much about sewing. I can sew a button, but that's about as far as I can go.

Rebecca: But it seems like if you stopped and think about it, constructing a bathing suit actually seems pretty complicated, because you've got this garment that is totally form fitting. It's got to be sized to support a wide array of body types and the fabrics they're using in the 50s were really just invented and new fabrics are coming out. New like kinds of fabrics are coming out all the time. So, you've really got to know a lot about how to engineer your materials. And so, in writing ... in the essay I wrote, I kind of come to the conclusion that my grandmother was a kind of engineer. She was an engineer. Why shouldn't we talk about her that way? And why shouldn't we talk about women like her that way? And why don't we talk about the fact that she was designing clothes at this pivotal moment for both fashion and in women's relationship to the workplace.

Leila: Yeah. And I think part of that is that you're grandfather is attached ... they're attaching him to a really big world event, right? That that history in and of itself weighs or is just more present in people's minds and in people's memories than say a fashion revolution. But it also, those are also gendered histories, right? Like military history, rocket history, those types of things are men's history. Fashion is, that's women's history. So there's kind of a lot of layers as to who we're attaching to what historical story, and then which one of those stories is more important.

Anna: So in true to story and fashion, I have a reading recommendation for people who are interested in this kind of ... the way that differently gendered kinds of technologies get attached to that longer timeline in history. There's a book about the development of the spacesuit that's written by a design historian named Nicholas de Monchaux and I'll put a link in the show notes to the book. I have to say, as a space historian, I have problems with the way this book is put together, but what he does do is talk about the way that the spacesuit was only made possible because of certain innovations in the lingerie industry and made by Playtex specifically, and materials that Playtex was developing for their lingerie products and techniques and stuff that were ported over into the design and manufacture of spacesuits.

Anna: And because of those innovations, that's part of the reason that spacesuits are soft instead of hard. So sometimes you'll see like prototypes that are made out of fiberglass or sometimes they're made out of aluminum. That they are hard shells. But the spacesuits that we used in the United States are soft and made out of multiple layers of innovative fabrics that were being used to make women's garments before.

Rebecca: I do want to say that one thing that I find also interesting and kind of frustrating about yeah, the way we talk about connections between spacesuits and women's garments and Playtex and all of that, which it's an awesome story, and it's fun to share that with people and it's totally worthy sharing. But there's always a little bit about that to me that it's like, what Playtex did was valuable only because it went and like was part of this super manly industry.

Anna: Yes. Like I've seen that book described as like recovering the origins of the spacesuit in technology of women's garments. But to me it seemed like there's plenty of fashion history that's been written about that but it's just not considered as glamorous as other kinds of history. So he wasn't recovering anything, really. He was just saying that we could think of it as something worth our time now because it was connected to spacesuits.

Rebecca: Right. Yeah. Yeah. And like I think the connection is really neat, but yeah, sometimes there is ... you hear that story enough and you start to wonder if like it's really about how these things don't matter until they're part of spacesuits and-

Anna: Yeah. Well, and literally it's like they don't matter, this material and technology doesn't matter until it's been transformed into a garment for men.

Rebecca: Exactly.

Leila: Well, I think that is as good of time as any to bring in our guest for today. Our guest is historian of technology and writer, Dr. Marie Hicks who is currently an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin. Her research focuses on the history of computing, labor, technology and queer science and technology studies. She is also a Lady Science contributor. She wrote the foreword to our 2016 anthology and in January of this year, she published a book with MIT Press titled, Programmed Inequality: How Britain Discarded Women Technologists and Lost Its Edge in Computing in which she explores how Britain's computing industry, once top in the world after World War II, had diminished by the 1970s. Welcome to the podcast, Marie.

M. Hicks: Thank you so much for having me.

Leila: Yay.

Rebecca: Yay.

Leila: We have a very adult podcast.

Rebecca: Yep. We're [inaudible 00:46:18]. Definitely.

Leila: So, a question of origin that I like to ask people is how did you come to research gender and computing in British history?

M. Hicks: Well, there were a couple of different parts to that. I was a history major as an undergraduate ,and I always sort of thought I might like to go back to graduate school but I knew that would be a little bit of a hard slog. I knew jobs weren't plentiful and so I worked for awhile after I graduated from college. And I ended up actually working as a Unix systems administrator. And it was odd in that job. I was in my 20s then. So all of the young folks like me, we were all ... the gender imbalance was really stark. So for awhile, I was the only woman there. And our bosses, our older bosses were all women actually. And so we had these conversations about well why is there this seemingly backwards gender distribution? And our bosses would tell us stuff like, oh well, you know you don't really understand. History is not progressive. There used to be a lot more women around. And then that was sort of what got me interested in the germ of the story about what happened with that gendered labor flip.

M. Hicks: I knew it had happened in the United States and later on when I went back to grad school to try to figure out what was going on with this story, I thought about making it a comparative story for a little while, but the reason I didn't is because the history of technology and particularly the history of computing, it's really, really over studied in the US context. And that means that we lose a lot. We miss a lot of things when we're only looking at the US. So I decided to just kind of do a deeper dive into another national context that has a lot of interesting stuff going on in computer early on.

Rebecca: So another interesting thing that I learned from all of this is that in 1944, Britain led the world in computing. So can you explain a little bit about why they were so far ahead of other countries at that time?

M. Hicks: Sure. Well one of the points that I make in the early part of my book is that we really have to think about computers as war machines because that's what they start off as being. And that's why the UK is so ahead because they are getting the shit bombed out of them. And they need some way to try to survive this war. And the US has the relative luxury of going slower but the UK doesn't and it's in this context of aerial bombardment that they're trying to create the first electronic computers in order to break codes more quickly so that they can figure out more effectively how to fight and how to survive. And so that's the frame into which these first digital electronic programmable computers come. And they're designed by a guy named Tommy Flowers at the post office which was kind of like the place for cutting edge telecommunications and electronics research at that time. But they're put together, and they are trouble-shot and they're operated by women.

Anna: You describe in the book that by the 1970s, a really short period of time, just over 20 years, Britain had already fallen behind in computing and you argue that this was in part the result of the feminization of labor and gendered technocracy. So can you explain I guess the argument of your book and what you mean by that?

Leila: That's kind of a big question. Yeah.

M. Hicks: Sure. Yeah, I mean, I went in to the archives wanting to write a story about how the field of computing went from being seen as feminized work early on to being seen as male-identified and really male-dominated. So I just wanted to explain why this gendered labor shift had occurred and when I got in there, as often happens, when you get into the archives, you find out other stuff and so there was this thread that I kept pulling going through the archives about what was the effect actually of trying to get women out of the field once the government decided and once industry decided that essentially these jobs which had previously been seen as low skill and they had been perceived as rote and unintellectual. Well, these programming and computer operating jobs eventually began to be seen as actually very important because people started to understand the importance of computers.

M. Hicks: And the content of the work didn't change, but because how it was perceived changed, it led to this huge push to get women out of the field and to get men trained in the field. And what I found out which was kind of surprising but I guess in retrospect it shouldn't have been was as the British government is ramping up for all of this computerization, while they're pushing out all of the people who have the skills because they're women, and this leads to disastrous things on a national level. It essentially causes the British computing industry to implode. And that's why the UK goes from this very early strong lead in the war time period but also in the post-war period, to basically in the 60s, in the late 60s, just crumbling.

Leila: You do make a distinction between labor feminization and work that is just performed by women. And so I was wondering if you could kind of unpack that difference a little bit.

M. Hicks: Sure. Labor feminization means that the work is performed almost primarily or predominantly by women, but it also has this element of deskilling, right? Not always that it actually is deskilled, but that there is a perception of deskilling. Which allows things like wages to be depressed for instance. And so there are actually ... I mean there are a few fields where there's a majority of women doing the work like some sub-specialties in medicine, but we would never call those fields feminized because what feminization actually entails is essentially seeing workers as less valuable because they're women and because they're doing work that's seen as appropriate to women who are unfortunately still a lower status workforce. And so one of the things that I always talk about in my class when we talk about like labor feminization in either the Industrial Revolution or in the 20th century with what I study, is I bring out like some of the archival examples in the book and I show the students how when equal pay gets introduced into the British government, the women who are doing all of this machine work, they don't get equal pay.

M. Hicks: Because even though there are men's pay scales, the government says, "No look, this field is so feminized. Women have been doing it in such majority for so long, that's the market rate for the job now. So of course we're not going to raise your wages to the men's pay scales because we never use the men's pay scales." And so what that shows is how it depresses wages across the board because once that wage is set at that lower level, all the other jobs around it that are done by mixed gender workforces, they get tied to that rate and further more, if men come back into the field, that doesn't just automatically mean the wages go up. So, I just try to show how feminization is, obviously it's bad for women but it's bad for all workers. This is really an issue of labor and of class.

Leila: Yeah. There was a part in the book where it was like, well all these people are making a fuss about wanting equal pay. How are we going to deal with that? Oh, we'll just create an underclass of workers and put the women in there.

M. Hicks: Yeah. And exactly so, it was like a whole class of workers. In fact, the majority of women who worked in the civil service, they didn't get equal pay when equal pay came in because the majority of women were in these machine grade jobs.

Rebecca: So how did Britain as a country become so tied to the success and failure of the computer industry?

M. Hicks: So the argument I'm making in my book isn't necessarily that the failure of the British computing industry dragged everything else down. The UK was sliding into second-rate world power status for a lot of reasons in this period. Essentially they had been an imperial power and then they were losing their empire because around the globe, people that they had colonized and oppressed were saying "no more." And so that was ending and the UK was trying to basically try to figure out how to have a second act as an empire. They were looking for a lever to make them neo-imperial power, if you will. So instead of going around the world and using guns and boats and whatever else to try to dominate, they thought, well we can use computing. We can use technological expertise to compete globally, and not just compete but actually to dominate globally. Maybe dominate areas where we had previously dominated in other ways militarily. We can still dominate economically through technology.

M. Hicks: And so this is why the government thought that computer was so important and was so obsessed with it. And that's why actually in a paradoxical way, that's why they made these really bad mistakes with their labor force, because they were so invested in computing. And so that's basically why they saw it as so important. And it's certainly when things didn't go well, and the computing industry imploded, a lot of people lost their jobs. It dragged down the gross domestic product. It hurt their balance of trade. We don't have Silicon Valley coming out of the UK. Depending on your perspective, that might be a good thing or a bad thing. But they lost that engine of their economy.

M. Hicks: And I mean, if I feel like we have a lot of that stuff going on even today and certainly going on in the US context and when we talk about like falling behind other countries or falling behind China technologically. It's all sort of part of kind of a cold war in a sense and that's one of the reasons that I do think it's so important to remember that computing technology not just comes out of the war but was specifically designed for warfare and was specifically designed for cold warfaring throughout the period after World War II. I think a lot of things that are going on now make a lot more sense when we think about it in that way, instead of having this idea of like, oh the computers we use are descended from the personal computer. 1970s, 1980s. It's much harder, I think to understand cloud computing and what it does in our economy if we think of personal computing as the nearest cousin of the computers we use today. It's really not.

Leila: Yeah. And I think because you take such a longer view of the history of this, by starting in the 40s, that it gives a much better understanding of that this was kind of ... that this was a process that was ongoing, and so if you start like in the 60s, or you're starting in the middle of the story. You're not really getting that long view that provides for that ... the type of long analysis that you do over time.

Anna: So, once in awhile old advertisements for computing sort of make the rounds on social media and there's usually a young white woman next to a machine of some type and then usually there's some kind of boring commentary like, see, women have always been programmers! But you spend quite a bit more time with these images and analyzing them, and you talk about how it's a little more complex than women just being there. And so, I wonder if you could talk about why showing these gendered bodies of workers was so integral to the companies making these advertisements.

M. Hicks: Sure. Yeah. And I'll just say too right up front, in terms of like my archival practice, the images were some of the first ways into this story, to actually seeing the women. Because I had to do a lot of like really deep dives into written archives in order to figure out that women were even there. And I had to learn a lot of tricks and sort of what categories were used to refer to women that weren't ... used to refer to men. And that took months of research to actually get to the point where I could find women that way. But the first place I saw them was in all the images and some of these were advertisements and some of them sort of seemed like advertisements but they were the actual workers who were sitting in front of the machines.

M. Hicks: And I would try to talk about this early on with other people who were actually even in my field in some cases and they would say, "Oh yeah, well the women were just there as pretty faces. They were just brought in to stand next to the machine." And that was actually not the case at all and I had to go through quite a lot of trouble to prove that that wasn't the case. And I think it's interesting now that I don't think we have that impression quite as much, but I think that's been a relatively recent shift. And the other thing about these ads or these publicity photos which are actually using real workers was that they weren't just using women as pretty faces, and they weren't just using women to show, oh look, this machine is simple to operate. They were using women because women were a stand in for essentially cheap, non-unionized labor. Labor that was going to have a high turnover. Wasn't going to need a whole lot of training time.

M. Hicks: And wasn't going to be trouble for managers. Again and again in the history of technology and political history we see how machines are often used, automation is often used not necessarily to make things more efficient but so that management can get more control over a process or a labor force. And that's exactly what was happening with computers, but as the machines rise in status, there's this interesting kind of split between how the machines are being advertised: "Oh you can use women to run them," and how they're actually being staffed, because the tricky thing about these ads is by showing women as essentially less valuable workers, they undercut the idea that women actually can do these more important computing jobs. And so when the government and when industry start to see these jobs as more important, they actually end up going to more expensive workers who they think are going to do the jobs better than the women who have been pitched in the ads.

Anna: I think that's a really fascinating, that these images are like, they're advertising to managers of like if you incorporate computing into your business, then you can have this labor force that's easily controllable.

Leila: And in the book, you call it the managerial gaze.

Rebecca: Ooh, that's good.

Leila: Yeah. And there's like that one image of like two men and they're facing ... you just see them from the back. You don't see their faces really. And they're like watching this woman working a machine. And it's like totally creepy and I know that visual culture people, especially feminists, visual theorists would have just like a field day with that image. But, casting it as a specific type of gaze really adds that dimension to the analysis.

Anna: So I want to ask about a different kind of gaze. You talk about the managerial gaze. But there's also an imperial gaze in advertisements for computers in the Middle East and Africa and India, and I just wondered if you could talk about especially connected to our discussion of computing as maybe a substitute or a next step or a re-up of empire for Britain.

M. Hicks: Yeah. I mean, in a similar sort of way that the managerial gaze is kind of gaining power over white women by putting white British women in these ads and arranging their labor in certain ways, things like that are happening with advertisements that are meant to be seen by government, leaders, and industry leaders in other countries. So in the early period, there are a lot of incredibly racist, imperialist ads that talk about how British computing is going to come in and civilize the country. And they're talking about this technology as a civilizing force and all this. And later on, one of the things that you see happening also more and more is this exoticization of women of color bodies in advertisements or not even in advertisements, just when pictures are taken of them working in their job in the machine room.

M. Hicks: I remember in the book there's this one picture of a woman in Ghana working on a British computing installation and the caption says something like, "Hot Stuff." And it's incredibly insulting and honestly it wouldn't have been that same sort of language being used with white women quite as disrespectfully. But because there was this idea that well, these women are essentially not even second class citizens, but third or fourth or whatever and there had just been this tradition of imperialist disrespect that permeates its way through into all of these ads as well.

Leila: So when I was reading your book, it was really difficult to avoid drawing connections between what you show in your book and what is happening in tech fields today. And I don't necessarily think that a historical argument needs to be relevant today to be interesting or important, but it is difficult to not make those connections with your book. So I am wondering where do you see some of these problems and inequalities playing out now?

M. Hicks: Sure. Yeah. I mean the thing is, fields professionalize and then they lose status. This is an ongoing process, and there's always a push to take power away from workers, even if those workers are white collar and relatively high in status. You don't have to really go any further than like walking through a major company today, and if you're old enough to have walked through a similar company 10 years ago, you'll see for instance just how much less space programmers have to even just sit in and do their jobs and how they're packed in tighter and tighter. So even though they're incredibly well paid, they're subject to the same sort of forces that we're all subject to. Where, essentially, if our labor can be undervalued, it will be.

M. Hicks: And that's just kind of like a little minor example. The space issue. But a lot of my friends who worked in RTP. I went to Duke University for my graduate degree and so Research Triangle Park is right around there. So a lot of my friends then who are still my friends, they were tech workers and they were H1B visa tech workers. And I would see them consistently undervalued and abused by the companies that they worked for because they were tied to these special visas. The visa was supposed to be a thing that they got because they had special skills, right? That you couldn't find here in the United States. But in fact what you would see happen again and again is that white people, especially white men who were doing the same jobs, would be treated far better. Would be paid far better because folks who were here on H1B visas, they couldn't move around. They couldn't leave a bad job situation as easily because the visa is tied to the job and to the company to a certain extent.

M. Hicks: And I think it's important, actually, to remember that when we hear like Silicon Valley talking about like, oh, we have a shortage of labor and we need people with these skills. Because, honestly, they're bringing in people who yes, have the skills, but they're bringing in people like that so that they can exert more control and pay them less. It's not a matter of there not being enough people stateside to do these jobs. It's once again, a move to try to undervalue workers and I think that when I used to talk about that maybe like even a couple of years ago, people thought that that was an overstatement but now we're seeing more and more examples of how that's exactly what's going on.

Rebecca: Yeah. I feel like I read an article recently-ish that was even about programmers that get paid well, but because they're on contract, they have no job security and they sort of jump from Silicon Valley, company to company doing different kinds of thing as their contracts run out and so it's like as even ... I think it was, the article was something about like even programmers are suffering because of the gig economy and the way that kind of mindset is even entering what we think of is very professionalized, high-skill, white collar jobs.

M. Hicks: Yeah. Yeah. I remember maybe a little under a decade now ago, I saw an article, or actually my partner saw this article and it was like a ranking of the best jobs you could have in terms of job security and pay and stuff like that. And number one was computer programmer. That happens to be what my partner does. And number two was university professor. And we both had a real good laugh about that because I was adjuncting, struggling, struggling to survive at that point and my partner also understood sort of which way the wind was blowing. And like I said, that was less than a decade ago and it just goes to show how quickly things can change. Like now, obviously adjuncts have it far worse than contract workers in Silicon Valley, but you can see it's on the same sort of spectrum of labor that's being made more and more contingent and being made sort of more interchangeable in ways that serve companies, serve corporate universities far more than they serve either workers or in fact the productivity of our economy.

Leila: That's a great place for us to wrap up. So, we will include a link to Dr. Hick's website in the show notes that you can read more about Programmed Inequality and just keep up with the exciting research that she is doing there. So thanks again for chatting with us. It was a real pleasure to have you.

Anna: At the end of every podcast, hosts will unburden themselves with one thing in the news, their work or the world in general that's just annoying the crap out of them. So this is one annoying thing.

Leila: So this month, I am annoyed with ... and this is kind of keeping with the technology theme. A man invented an app to apply to women's pictures to show what they look like without makeup. And it's called MakeApp and it gives you five free photos before you have to start paying $0.99 to reveal the lies of as many women online as you would like and how much your heart desires.

Rebecca: This thing makes me want to vomit.

Leila: It really does. So, first of all, it is ridiculous concept that men just feel that women are lying to them or something by wearing makeup. That we're deceiving men into thinking we're more attractive than we are because we wear makeup. And there's always been this idea that women in their profile pictures are lying about how attractive they are by the way that they pose themselves in the selfies to make themself thinner than they are. Or lightning their skin, darkening their skin to look like they have a tan. Boosting up their boobs a little bit. And then like situating the camera in such a way. So there's already been like all of this criticism about how women try their hardest to make themselves look more attractive than they are in their profile pictures online. Because men don't do that, right? Men don't try to accentuate the things that they think are more attractive about them but that this does disproportionately apply to women. Just deceiving people into thinking they're more attractive than they are.

Anna: That's the thing about this app that makes me crazy most is that most of the time, men can't even tell when we're wearing makeup and they just think that our faces look like that anyways. So what the ...

Leila: Yeah. And it's ridiculous. And it's still just another filter that you're applying to someone's face. Like this isn't more ... it doesn't make her look more authentic or anything. It's still just as fake as everything else that you're accusing this woman of doing.

Anna: I feel like this is related to the CSI photo enhance myth that we've been fed about what technology is capable of that we can just like, "computer, show me her real face" and somehow a computer can do that.

Leila: Yeah. Exactly. I saw a Tweet going around with this that was like, we were promised flying cars. Instead we get an app that shows what women look like without makeup. It's like, wow is this truly the future that we wanted?

Rebecca: No.

Leila: Anyway, I don't have anything like intellectual to say about that. It's just something that is ...

Rebecca: Yes.

Anna: Ugh. It's just also like to this man who built this app, who obviously has some skills if he's an app developer, I guess, what are you doing with your time? And who hurt you?

Rebecca: And like, and this is actually going to connect to my annoying thing. But yeah, you were saying, it goes to this whole really terrible idea that women lie and that women are inscrutable in some way, and that women have all of these tricks and games so that you can't figure out what's going on with them. So, we have to have this app that takes care of that. Which is like not disconnected frankly from the both the run of sexual harassment revelations that have happened recently, and abuse revelations, and the reactions to them. And the idea that is really insidious and part of rape culture that well you can't just, you can't ... women never say what they really mean, so you never really know. Which is terrible and I think connects to ... yeah. It's all part of that same terrible soup.

Rebecca: And also it comes to this thing that I have noticed happen to me a couple of times since Harvey Weinstein and all the other allegations that are coming out of harassment charges against powerful men where various people have like in a half joking but not really sort of way said to me, "You know, I would give you a compliment, but I hear that could be bad now. I don't want to say it wrong." And it just ... [inaudible 01:17:48]

Leila: Oh my [crosstalk 01:17:52].

Rebecca: If you were genuinely concerned, you could just not say anything first of all. Second of all, you are like a human being in the world. You know the difference between ... you should know the difference between like what makes someone feel gross and what is just, hey you look nice today and we're two human beings like who interact on a regular basis and can you know, have polite conversation with each other.

Leila: Yeah. And I hate that like, I've had this conversation with two men in my life since all of this stuff with, you starting with Harvey Weinstein and everything, then Louis C.K. and all that came out. Is like this like hand wringing over about can I ... what if I've made a woman uncomfortable by giving her a hug or something? And what if she is going to accuse me of sexual harassment. And I was like, "First of all, no one is accusing of any of these men from a hug."

Rebecca: Right!

Leila: These men are like masturbating in front of them. So if you somehow have done that, these cases are in no way comparable.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Anna: And you know what? I don't have any patience for men who supposedly can't figure out all of the inscrutable womanly sorcery we do with like what we consider appropriate or not, because I know exactly when something is friendly, and when it shifts over into being predatory. And that is a very finely honed sense that I have, like a rabbit that I developed over my whole entire life and I've devoted so much hard drive space to honing that instinct and knowing and keeping myself safe. I don't have patience for men who can't just fucking figure out a basic social signals. No. You have to figure it out. You have to figure out how to be a person in the world, because we have to navigate the world in a way that is ... It's like we have to read the Matrix in code and you can't even figure out how to do it looking at it when it's all loaded up. It's just ... Sorry.

Leila: But I also want to note that just citing that the only way you can't sexual harass someone is to not be around a woman-

Rebecca: Oh yeah.

Leila: ... and so therefore you start to exclude them from your circles and your business meetings and your business dinners and your business drinks. Like that is also the opposite end of the spectrum. Don't do that.

Anna: Yeah. The Mike Pence model of being an adult is not what we're looking for either. It's up to men to figure out where to strike that balance. Just so tired of having to teach them how to be people. Okay so, to close this out of our episode that has been about technology and in large part, I think, about labor and those two things are very intimately connected, I just wanted to relate a disappointed conversation I had with my mother.

Leila: Does she listen to the podcast?

Anna: She does not, because she doesn't know what a podcast is and I'm not going to teach her. So ... I've been kind of ... I've been trying to be a little more like forward with my political beliefs around my family because it has come to my attention that they don't know what they are, which I always thought that I was the shrieking communist of the family, but apparently I have not been loud enough. So I was talking to my mom about, my dad works for a company that has a union. We've always had this thing in my family about how my dad's a company man. He's not a union man. I thought people in my parent's generation like working class, were pro-union generally. Just goes to show no accounting for anything anymore.

Anna: But they're not pro-union. They're like company people. And I keep trying to tell my mom, his company is awful to him and the only reason that it hasn't been worse is because they have a union. And they have been on strike like once in like 25 years. Been pretty good so far. But they're still firmly convinced that their loyalty lies with the company and that the union ... all they do is get people's jobs back who were stealing from the company. So, we're talking about this and my mom says something about how even though the company is really bad to him, it gives you this sense of pride to do a good job in an adverse environment. And I said something to the effect of that's what the man tells you to keep you under his thumb.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Anna: And she said, "You don't really believe that. You can't believe that because you are a hard worker." So first of all, the fact that my mom doesn't know that I'm like fiercely pro-union, aside, the idea that you can't ... it just reveals so much about what she thinks a union is for, is to protect lazy people. That I should have no interest in unionization because I want to work hard. Only people who don't work hard need a union. And so I've been seeing a lot of stuff on Twitter lately because the LA Times is unionizing and Fox is unionizing or trying to, and there are really dumb, anti-union sentiment floating around. And this idea that unions are for lazy people is something that I have seen a couple times online with regard to writers especially. Written by another writer, by the way, who quote on quote, "supports unions but not this one". Because it's the ethical center left thing to support a union but as soon as it comes anywhere near you, you just start shrieking about how it makes people lazy.

Anna: So, I'm not really sure where I'm going with this other than the fact that it's very disheartening to me how the status of organized labor, like its social and cultural status, has basically plummeted in the last 30 years, and that it seems like there's a very large swath of United States who thinks the way my mom does, that unions get people their job back when they do bad things at work.

Leila: Like this country does not do a good job or a job at all of teaching labor history as a part of American history in general. Like that is not ... I mean, if you're lucky enough to be in a school district that actually teaches civil rights, labor is left out of that entirely. And I don't remember ever getting it in college either, unless I took a class that was specifically geared that way. But like ...

Rebecca: And that has...also, not teaching that history has real consequences now because when we talk about today, it's often in contrast to like mid-20th century working-class and middle-class prosperity and you can't talk about that contrast without talking about labor history. And yet we do.

Leila: Well I think that's a good place for us to wrap up. We had some good rants today. Good job guys.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Anna: We are the little [inaudible 01:25:46] I think between me and Mar. We took care of it.

Leila: Yeah. So listeners, if you like our episode today, head right on over to iTunes and leave us a rating and a review so that others can find us and listen also. Questions about any of the segments today, Tweet us @ladyxscience or, #ladyscipod. To sign up for our monthly newsletter, read monthly issues, pitch us an idea for an article and more, visit ladyscience.com. We are an independent magazine and we depend on the support from our readers and listeners. You can support us through a monthly donation with Patreon or through a one-time donation. Just visit ladyscience.com/donate. And until next time, you can find us on Facebook at @ladysciencemag, and on Twitter at @ladyxscience.

01:20:10

Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg 

Guest: Jennifer Young

Producer: Leila McNeill 

Music: nononoNO

In this episode, we talk about hormonal birth control advertisements from the 1960s and the ways that advertisers catered to a white male medical establishment. Then we talk about the statue of Marion J Sims in Manhattan and what that says about race and power in the history of medicine in the United States. Lastly, we talked with guest Jennifer Young about birth control pioneer, Dr. Hannah Stone. 

Journal of the American Medical Association, 1961

Journal of the American Medical Association, 1965

Journal of the American Medical Association, 1965

“Protesters Demand Removal of Central Park Statue of 19th Century Doctor Who Experimented on Slave Women” by Esha Ray and Dennis Slatterly

Scientists wade into the historical monument debate and find themselves in familiar waters by Rebecca Ortenberg

52 percent of men say they haven’t benefitted from women having affordable birth control by Laurel Raymond

Here’s How the New Tax Plan Could Hurt Graduate Students by Ariana Figueroa

Molyneaux, Heather. In Sickness and in Health: Representations of Women in Pharmaceutical Advertisements in the Canadian Medical Association Journal 1950-1970. PhD diss., University of New Brunswick, 2009.

Sarch, Amy. “Those dirty ads!”: Birth Control Advertisements in the 1920s and 1930s,” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 14, no. 1 (1991): 31-48.

Tone, Andrea. “Contraceptive Consumers: Gender and the Political Economy of Birth Control in the 1930s.” Journal of Social History 29, no.3 (1996): 485-506.

Tone, Andrea. “From Naughty Good to Nicole Miller: Medicine and the Marketing of American Contraceptive.” Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 30, (2006): 249-267.

Ulrich, Laurel Thatcher. A Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812. New York: Vintage Books, 1991.

Washington, Harriet. Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans from Colonial Times to the Present. Penguin Random House, 2008.  

Transcription by Rev.com

Rebecca: Welcome back to the Lady Science podcast, a monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science. With you every month are the editors of Lady Science Magazine.

Anna: I'm Anna Reser, co-founder and co-editor in chief of the Lady Science. I'm a writer, editor and PhD student studying 20th century American culture and the history of the American space program in the 1960s.

Leila: I'm Leila McNeil, the other founder and editor in chief of Lady Science. I'm a historian of science and freelance writer with words and various places on the internet. I'm currently a regular writer on women and the history of science at smithsonian.com.

Rebecca: And I'm Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor. When I'm not working with the Lady Science team, I can be found writing about museums and public history around the internet and managing research project at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia.

Rebecca: This month we're going to be talking about the history of birth control and reproductive rights. Unsurprisingly, reproductive rights are again under attack in the United States. In early October, the Trump administration made easier for businesses and non profits to deny women birth control coverage on religious grounds. I don't know if it's appropriate or ironic that one of our essays this month is about birth control pioneer Dr. Hannah Stone. A little later in the podcast we'll be hearing from Jennifer Young who wrote that essay for us, and we'll be talking to her about Stone's activism, her work with Margaret Sanger and the history of Planned Parenthood.

Rebecca: But first, the three of us are going to share some work we've done on the history of reproductive rights. Anna and Leila will explain how early advertising for the pill complicates our usual narrative about birth control. And then I will talk a little bit about what a statue of J. Marion Sims in manhattan can tell us about gender, race and power in American history.

Anna: For the past couple of years, Leila and I have been slowly working on a research project about visual culture and birth control in the United States. We first presented research from this project in an advertising panel at the Pop Culture Association Conference in Seattle last year. The heart of the project was combing through all these advertisements in medical journals, advertisements aimed at physicians.

Anna: We used stuff from the Journal of the American Medical Association and a couple of things from advertisements to do some comparative stuff, between 1960 and 1965-ish to see how the pill which was approved for contraceptive use by the FDA in 1960 was being marketed toward doctors, and of course at this time when we say doctors we're talking about almost overwhelmingly white, male physicians, most of them probably a little older.

Anna: What we found in our research was a pattern across all categories of contraceptives, both hormonal and non hormonal. So things like diaphragms and spermicidal jellies, things like that. The pattern is that the advertisers developed this set of strategies that are used for marketing contraceptives specifically to physicians. Advertisements emphasized the importance of physician intervention and control. It's constructing this physician who the patient requires his intervention in order to use birth control.

Anna: They simultaneously construct this ideal patient to whom the ideal doctor is prescribing. The patient is always white, healthy, married, middle-class woman. She's in need of the physician's expertise for family planning. The ads also draw on a set of assumptions that are very common in the 20th century about the dichotomy between nature and reason and utilize rhetoric of medicalization to convince doctors that the best expression of their control and expertise is to prescribe these birth control products.

Leila: The rhetoric of medicalization we found to be very integral and important to these advertisements. It was important in the larger history of women's medicine and contraception so I want to explain what exactly we're talking about.

Leila: In general, medicalization is when we define social ills or human conditions as medical conditions, and then we subsequently try to treat them as such. In healthcare, medicalization also sometimes is called pathologization, and that's the process by which a person becomes defined as their medical conditions and becomes the subject of a medical study. Sociologically, medicalization defines the power relationship between patient and doctor in that the patient becomes a passive agent while the doctor becomes the active, authoritative agent.

Leila: One of the results of this process is that healthy bodies are often pathologized birth control they deviate from a culturally constructed norm, which in the Western world the norm is the cis white male body. In this framework of medicalization, women's reproductive bodies are inherently pathologized as deviant from the male norm.

Leila: In the 1960s with the introduction of the pill, hormonal contraception became yet another way in which reproductive bodies could be medicalized. Menstruation then became a thing that needed to be treated rather than a natural part of the female body. There's actually an advertisement that refers to birth control as therapy. So therapy for what exactly?

Leila: Further, women were removed as authorities over their own bodily experience and replaced with a physician. In the advertisements that we analyzed, the physician figure is constructed in opposition to a female patient, whose presence is sometimes implied or actually present and real in the advertisement itself. She is represented as uninterested in the medical matter of reproduction and considers pregnancy a mere matter of lifestyle. And in some cases, it's constructed as simple vanity.

Anna: The ideal patient embodied in these advertisements is the "normal" woman of the 1960s and she conforms to certain demographic standards like I had mentioned before, white, married, middle class. These ads reproduce these very common mid century stereotypes about women, and cater to the expectations and prejudices of a male medical establishment.

Anna: Unlike the physician who is defined in these advertisements by his ability to actively intervene, the ideal patient is entirely passive and defers to the authority of her physician in matters of reproduction. Poor women, working class women, single women, women of color, women who couldn't tolerate or suffered from the side effects of hormonal contraceptives were pretty extreme in this period. And women who just simply didn't have access to contraceptives or access to the medical care that became necessary to receive contraceptives, these women are written out of the histories that focus on this idealized patient and the liberatory benefits that she gets from using contraceptives.

Anna: Her story, this ideal patient dominates these histories of women's reproductive liberation but at least in part this ideal figure is a total fiction manufactured by advertisers to sell birth control, and it reflect sexist, mainstream ideas about women, and it appeals to a male medical establishment. Where these advertisers do acknowledge that women other than the ideal, a white middle class patient might use birth control, they do so with really stereotypical imagery of poverty. Embedded assumptions about the role of the medical establishment in stabilizing society.

Anna: One of the images we looked at is a picture of a poor woman who is visually signified as being poor by she's wearing a kerchief and hanging her laundry out of doors which is-

Leila: Oh no!

Anna: In the '60s, you're definitely poor if you put your clothes on a clothes line in the '60s. I don't know. Part of the ad copy talks about the role of the physician in helping these benighted women who don't know what kind of strain they are putting on society by having so many kids and it's up to doctors to be able to fix that. We'll include some of these imagines.

Anna: The positive ads about the lifestyle that you could have are reserved for white women. And the ads about doctors saving the world from over population, that's where you find poor women, women of color.

Rebecca: Both that and Leila your comment before about even for middle-class white women, doctors have to... there's this assumption doctors push birth control on women and that it's a matter of lifestyle or vanity. The crazy thing about all of this is of course the history of activism surrounding birth control that we'll be talking about with Jennifer a little bit later. That both middle class women and poor women and women in all parts of society had to push so hard to convince powerful white men that this was an important thing for them. Now that it's been taken over by the medical establishment, they are taking back that power by saying, "No, these ladies don't know what they are doing, we have to be the ones that teach them about it." It's just maddening. Fascinating and maddening.

Leila: You can't really get away from the eugenic implications of that type of thinking. Remembering again that these advertisements are directed at physicians themselves. It's the eugenic thinking that was very prominent in medical science during this time was actually embedded in these advertisements for birth control too.

Leila: Some of the other advertisements that we looked at infantilized women. One of the ads for Enovid specifically calls women "forgetful" "imperfect patients." By constructing women as these forgetful, scatterbrain people, they are required to refill every five months. Women apparently have all this time on their hands to go back to the doctor every five months to get a refill. The copy on that ad says, "You.." remember the doctor, "can count of in to bring your patient back on time for her six month check up." And it goes on to say that, "She knows that is the only way that she can continue her dosage. It makes for practically perfect therapy."

Leila: There's that idea of this being therapy. They did the prescriptions in this conscious way to bring women coming back every six months. That's ridiculous. I can't even imagine having to go every six months to go get birth control.

Anna: And did that, every fix or six months, did they mean you have to go get a pelvic every five months? Or you just have to go to the doctor? Either way, it ensures that healthy women are seeing a doctor twice a year no matter what, in addition to other regular doctor things that they would be doing, getting a physical or whatever. If you want to use birth control, you're basically signing a contract saying, "I will be investing a huge chunk of my time and money in being at the doctor and participating in the medical establishment." It's going to change my life not insignificant way.

Anna: These advertisements, I think they are interested birth control they are directed at physicians so patients would never see these so they are not coy at all. They are just like, if you want to have more appointments on the books, start prescribing birth control.

Leila: And the way... the quote "She knows that is the only way she can continue her dosage," is that-

Rebecca: It's super creepy.

Leila: The power imbalance. Yeah. This woman is totally and completely reliant on you to not get pregnant when she doesn't want to. The power imbalance is just so clear in these advertisements.

Anna: And this whole issue of women taking a daily medication, healthy women who don't have a chronic condition. First of all it constructs being a woman as a chronic condition that you have to treat basically.

Leila: Yeah, that menstruation is an ailment.

Anna: This is super new and unusual. One of the things we want to look at in the future are patient facing ads and how they justify this would be... for a lot of people would be maybe an intimidating thing to do. To take a pill every day seems kind of extreme. Or to see how the patient is constructed in patient facing ads.

Anna: But I think there is just really interesting stuff here about the medical establishment and the way that birth control is controlled by women which is one of the things that gets lauded about hormonal birth control, about the pill in particular. That women are in control of it, you don't have to ask a man to wear a condom and it gives you much more control. The truth is it also gives your doctor much more control.

Leila: Yeah.

Anna: This idea of a totally liberating women controlled method of contraception is not the whole story because there's another figure there that's exerting even more control over the process and it's a man. It's not the man you're having sex with probably. That's what we're trying to do with this research.

Rebecca: It's such a great example of the way that structures of power can stay the same even if they shift a little bit. The underlying structure of power of men having control over women's bodies maybe hasn't changed that much with the pill becoming widespread. I think also the crazy thing about the ads is building on that idea that because these are doctor facing, they are showing their hand. It demonstrates that it was explicitly set up this way, "Here, we are losing power over here so let's reconstruct this thing over here and we're going to literally do that and make sure that patients are coming in regularly. Oh no, they might not come in those silly ladies for regular check ups otherwise." Or, "They don't know things about their bodies so let's get them in here regularly."

Leila: Yeah. The idea that women can't keep track of their own periods is also a ridiculous thing to think. Just one last thing about this advertisement birth control I want to make sure we get to the next one which deserves a thorough lashing. Is that this is clearly aimed at that married, middle-class woman. Because poor women, working women, they don't have time to take off of work and be under this amount of supervision from a doctor. Most of the women who were working at this time, poor women, immigrant women, women of color were working unskilled labor jobs. It's not like they had a whole lot of good benefits that allowed them to miss a day of work. That missing a day of work could have really bad consequences.

Leila: This implies a lot about who they are assuming has the leisure time on their hands to be making doctors appointments all the time.

Anna: Speaking of thorough lashing, one of the more striking advertisements that we looked at is this full two page spread for Enovid. On the left side you see this non specific, indigenous tribal statue which that's a problem in itself. It's just like, it's primitive. On one side. And then you see a birth control pill pack on the other side. The statue curves to the right in a way that points towards the birth control pack. The copy underneath says, "From ritual to reason."

Anna: It associates this tribal statue with pre-history magic, the primitive. And also by association, women managing their reproduction on their own and that it is much preferable to use reason. In the rest of the ad copy it associates the pill pack with science and ethics, and with intelligent family planning. It's setting up this whole dichotomy between the completely backward and unscientific, primitive way of doing things before in the olden times. And also how women have been doing it for centuries. Contrast with science and ethics and things which are clean and modern and not primitive or whatever.

Anna: I think this ad deserves a little bit of discussion because there's a lot going on here.

Rebecca: So much going on.

Leila: I can't get over how racist this image is because they just picked a nondescript, tribal looking statue to stand in for all backward, indigenous women's knowledge. The racial undertones of this are pretty egregious. And then also associating that image with the copy itself as backwards, pre-history all of that stuff.

Leila: They've created this framework in which anything that is not using modern medical science is automatically framed as being backward. With the indigenous statue with that, then you've got the racist implications with that as well.

Rebecca: Just the wording of "ritual" to just represent everything that anyone knew about nature or women knew about their bodies is all by itself pretty terrible and racist. And then you add the statue on top of it to just be like, in case you didn't get the subtext, we're going to make it text and we're going to make it very clear what we're talking about and just how racist we're being.

Leila: They are really pulling on a lot of embedded ideas that we've had for a really long time that associate women with nature and men with science. The way that the image actually works and how it curves to the right, and the statue turns into the pill pack is that you actually have this implied idea that science is eclipsing natural knowledge. When you have those gendered underpinnings of that with women being associated with nature and men being associated with science, you've got that whole idea of control coming back into it. That the control that women once had is now being completely eclipsed by men and this idea of intelligent family planning and ethical family planning with the pill. You can see that image for yourself in the show notes.

Leila: With this project overall what we're trying to do is to complicate that popular narrative of birth control as a tool of women's liberation by showing that from its beginning it has been yet another tool of modern medicine to exert social control over women's bodies. By theorizing the absences in these advertisements, looking at what and who is missing, we can better critique our modern perspective of reproductive rights, which is often exclusionary still to women of color, immigrant women and especially women with disabilities and trans folks too.

Rebecca: I think it's really interesting how this project of yours represents something that you really have to study a little bit of any history but especially women's history to see that all of our grand narratives about progress moving in one direction just aren't true. And that there's always a lot of complicated ups and downs, but that also something can be both liberating and stifling sometimes simultaneously. It's a really fascinating study so thanks for sharing.

Leila: Yeah. And I want to be clear that we're not saying don't use birth control and don't go to the doctor. I want to be real clear about that. We're just saying that what you've hit on Rebecca, with how some things can be both liberating in one way but then on the other hand also not be. And that we need to not embrace certain things as being uncritically liberating. That's all we're really saying here. Please go get your IUD if you want. Go get your annual pap. Do that.

Rebecca: Great. Yeah, definitely.

Leila: Rebecca, what do you have for us to talk about today.

Rebecca: Yeah, speaking of many things that modern medicine being great, but the way we got here having some problems. I'm sure everyone remembers the summer when a lot of terrible things happened this summer, but one of them was people were talking a lot about statues and public memorials. In particular there was the white supremacist march in Charlottesville, Virginia that sparked a conversation about the presence of confederate memorials in major cities.

Rebecca: It's hardly the first time that I have witnessed a debate over what to do with these kinds of statues. It felt like there was this moment where many more historians and public figures and journalists and other powerful people were being very explicit about what they thought should be done with confederate statues, which was to get rid of them. I thought that was very interesting because in previous conversations there'd been a lot more wishy washiness about it and it just felt like a moment when a lot of things were coming together in, I don't really want to call it consensus, but there was kind of a consensus growing at least.

Rebecca: Bear with me, I promise I'm going to get us back to reproductive rights in a second. Let's face it, America we have memorials to many people who did terrible things, not just confederate generals. One of those memorials is located in Central Park in Manhattan, and it's dedicated to a 19th century doctor named J. Marion Sims. I'm imagining that most people who walk by this statue probably don't even notice it.

Rebecca: Interestingly, there is a statue of Christopher Columbus nearby, and I imagine that many people walking through Central Park are more likely to roll their eyes at that statue. But the Sims statue is significant. In late August, an organization called The Black Youth Project staged a protest in front of the statue. And later an anonymous activist graffitied the word racist across the statue's base. And that's because Sims who has been called the father of modern gynecology was also an Alabama slave owner who regularly experimented on the enslaved women that he owned.

Rebecca: He's most known for figuring out a treatment for a certain kind of fistula that can develop during childbirth. He perfected that treatment in surgeries conducted on these enslaved women without anesthesia and without their consent.

Rebecca: I wrote an essay for the Lady Science blog about Sims and his statue and the way that the conversation about problematic public memorials has really shifted. But right now, I want to talk a little bit about Sims in relation to today's topic. With that in mind, there are two issues I want to talk about. The first is the story of Sims' medical contributions and that vaginal fistulas became much more common in the 19th century in women in childbirth in part because of the way that labor changed and more male doctors began using forceps on women in labor.

Rebecca: One of these weird counterintuitive facts of history is that childbirth becomes more dangerous in the early 19th century because more and more women go to male doctors who use these different methods and not midwives who had traditionally taken care of women in labor and tended to actually be more knowledgeable at this time period. There are many books that are written on this. The one that I think is a great read for both scholars and the general public is Laurel Thatcher Ulrich's "A Midwife's Tale," which among other things goes into the historical shift that was happening in the late 18th, early 19th century around obstetrics and gynecology and power shifting from traditional midwives to "educated male doctors."

Rebecca: But the point here that's crazy to me is that Sims is solving a problem that he as a male medical professional is creating at least to a certain degree, creating through their medical practices. It ties so terribly into this very long history of men taking control over women's bodies, especially in issues related to reproductive rights that in so many ways continues to this day.

Leila: I like that you brought up that it is a counterintuitive fact that it was more dangerous for women and infants in the 19th century. A lot of people I don't think know that because we have this idea of modern science being so closely related to progress. If we have all of these modern technologies and tools to help with childbirth and obviously that was progress, but the things that often get written out of those stories are the women who underwent those procedures before we could have progress at all.

Leila: There's one thing that I wrote, the very first issue of Lady Science was looking at this problem with "The Knick," that awful show with... one of the main storylines in the first season was trying to figure out a certain procedure for women. A lot of women died from that. He experimented on women, his procedure that eventually I guess worked. But the whole thing is you don't even get those women's stories. It's all about how he was able to make his procedures work. And what did was leave a whole lot of dead women behind him.

Leila: Those stories are very much often written out of popular histories of medicine.

Rebecca: Yeah. And the fact that they were being actively written out at the time, and that so many doctors are really explicitly dismissing the knowledge that traditional midwives had. Because they are like, "No, we can do it better." And then they cause a lot of problems of their own. They don't go back and go, okay maybe there are some people who know more about this than we do because they have been doing this for a while. Because they get caught up into their own narrative of progress that we often just allow to overwhelm all the ways we talk about history and especially history of science.

Anna: Speaking about narratives, there are Sims defenders out there, contemporary people who argue common arguments that you hear about confederate statues and other bad dudes that we probably shouldn't be honoring. They are like a product of their time. In Sims' case there's a lot of discussion in medical ethics about consent and that in Sims' time there was certainly no such legal concept of informed consent, which is something that we use now. That we use now because of nauseating medical experiments-

Rebecca: People were terrible.

Leila: Because we fought a world war over it.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Anna: Things like the Tuskegee syphilis experiments. There's a lot of awful stuff like that, that you can read about. But the argument that Sims lived in a time when there was no legal conception of informed consent even though the, I don't know human idea of consenting to have someone do things to you definitely existed and has forever.

Anna: But there's all of this controversy about consent and if it's a real thing and if it exists, and if you are enslaved if you can consent. There's these what I think are very disingenuous arguments about that if we say that enslaved people couldn't consent then we are taking away their agency or something. There's a lot of actual philosophical ethical stuff that... in a biomedical ethics course that I TA'd for we use this case. There's a lot of really thorny stuff there.

Anna: I also wanted to say, not to be super explicit or anything but what a fistula is, so we have more material idea of what we're talking about, about what Sims did to develop his procedure. A fistula is a tear between the vaginal wall and the rectum. They can happen in childbirth sometimes and like Rebecca said, more common if you're using forceps. It's extremely painful. That wall is supposed to keep various things separated, and when they are not, you get infections and rashes. It's an extremely uncomfortable thing to live with. But also, being operated on without anesthesia and without being able to properly consent to that procedure is something else entirely.

Anna: Another thing that people always argue about is, "Well of course these women would have wanted to have their fistulas fixed." No one ever talks about the ones that his procedure failed on who just had to endure horrifying pain. Am I right in saying that it was not that anesthesia wasn't available, it was that he made a choice not to use it?

Rebecca: Yes.

Anna: That's right?

Rebecca: Yeah. It was new-ish but available. And in fact, Sims goes on to found the "first women's hospital in American in Manhattan." Which is another, again speaking of narratives, fascinating framing. Because it shows that no one is calling the whatever his medical offices on his plantation weren't a women's hospital. And that says something about the way in which then you frame the operations he was doing on the enslaved women.

Rebecca: But at that women's hospital in Manhattan he did use anesthesia. He perfects this technique, he then uses it in Manhattan with anesthesia, on mostly white women.

Leila: Yeah, he was selective in how he used anesthesia and that was something that was reserved for white women. The idea of consent in these stories of what Sims did, it reminds me a lot of that Teen Vogue article that came out, I guess it's been several months at this point, where it was arguing that slave women were not mistresses. They didn't have the power to deny what was happening to them. That in these contexts, no stop calling them mistresses because that gives them a type of agency that they were by nature denied by the contract of what slavery was. I think that, that applies in this case to medical consent as well.

Rebecca: Yeah. The other thing that relates to the particular medical condition and consent as well is that the other factor that leads to fistulas more often and the factor that makes it in certain very poor areas of the world still a serious issue today, is that it's more likely to occur in women that are malnourished and young. Part of the reason why the women that Sims owned were pregnant when malnourished and young is that they were slaves and part of their expectation is that they were going to breed more slaves. So there was an effort to force women to be pregnant even if they medically should not have been. It's another really important issue.

Rebecca: And I do want to talk a just a little bit more about race in this as well. Sims and many of his medical colleagues had this thought that they had mastery over all women's bodies. But also generally believed that white women's bodies were worth protecting and black women's bodies were disposable. This comes this idea that he goes and he experiments on black women. He perfects the surgery. He then brings those techniques to a hospital catering to white women in Manhattan where he then uses anesthesia and has a lot of success because he has worked out all of the kinks.

Rebecca: And that's where he makes a name for himself. He treats wealthy white women from various wealthy Manhattan families. He travels around Europe and he operates on princesses. And that's how he becomes famous and that's how he becomes a very successful doctor. Because of his fame and success among wealthy people, that's why he has a statue. He doesn't have a statue for helping womankind in general. He has a statue for helping a certain kind of woman. If he had just focused on helping poor women, women of color, he probably wouldn't have gotten a statue.

Rebecca: I think that, that's important to the way that we think about these memorials is why were they memorialized at the time and how does that relate to the way that we tell people's stories and who really benefits and doesn't when medical breakthroughs are happening.

Leila: Yeah, I think that is a really great point. And also, it comes back to some of the stuff that me and Anna are trying to do with our project is theorizing these absences. Who is absent from that story of Sims, really? Who is absent from that progress? It reminds me of the birth control trials that were in Puerto Rico in the 1950s. Those were started by Gregory Pincus and John Rock. They tested the pill at a extremely high dosage on women who barely spoke English. Even if they could somehow argue informed consent, you've got the power dynamic of the colonizer coming into a colonized country and persuading women who barely speak English to partake in this medical trial.

Leila: They suffered extremely bad side effects from such a high dosage of the pill. And then by the time it gets approved in 1960 for women in the United States, we've been able to adjust the dosage and whatever to where some of the side effects aren't quite so severe. It hasn't been until recently that we even acknowledged that, that story happened. Who benefited from that? It was white women. Who was the fodder for progress? It was the women of color in Puerto Rico.

Leila: Now is a good time to switch over to Jennifer Young who is going to join us to talk about her essay that she wrote for the November issue. Jennifer wrote about Dr. Hannah Stone and her work in activism in women's health at the Birth Control Clinic Research Bureau, which we now know as Planned Parenthood. Welcome to the podcast, Jennifer. If you could tell everyone a little bit about yourself and maybe give us a quick run down of your article.

Jennifer: Sure. I am a museum educator, I currently work at the New York Historical Society, and I'm also a freelance public historian and writer. My favorite thing to do is to go into the archives and find stories like this one that tell about the lives of men and women, particularly women, of the past several centuries, and to investigate and to tell their stories. Not only because they are worth knowing for their own sake, but because there is so much the past can tell us about the present.

Jennifer: And this story in particular is about Dr. Hannah Stone, who was one of the pioneering figures of the birth control movement. And she's someone that you don't hear much about. She's not a real public figure or a name within the history for most people of the birth control movement. She was the medical director of the first legal birth control clinic in the United States, which opened in New York City in 1923.

Jennifer: Dr. Stone worked closely with more public figures like Margaret Sanger. But Dr. Stone's work was a clinical practitioner. She was over 10,000 patients a year and published in journals as was well known within medical circles for her work, but she was less known in the public sphere. I thought that was interesting approach to the topic, is to talk about someone who was doing this work and really hasn't been recognized as much as other people.

Rebecca: In your essay you talk about how Hannah Stone worked with Margaret Sanger. Can you talk a little bit about how Sanger's formidable reputation shrouded others like Stone who were really invested in the work of public health and activism.

Jennifer: I think I wouldn't use the word shrouded but I think that social movements need a lot of different kinds of people. Margaret Sanger was very good at being on the front lines and getting arrested and knowing all the right people and knowing who to call. She knew the judges, she knew people in the political and social establishments in New York. That was crucial for doing the kinds of behind the scenes work that needed to get done.

Jennifer: But Sanger herself knew that in terms of the actual goals of the birth control movement of serving women, particularly the most vulnerable women and working class women, that you needed doctors and medical professionals to do that work. That was not Sanger's role, she was not a doctor. She sought out people like Dr. Stone who were able to do that work and she really cultivated those relationships and tried to bring those people into her orbit because without them, her work would be nothing.

Leila: You write in your essay that the inner war periods, the period between World War I and World War II was, "A watershed moment in the history of birth control." Can you explain a little bit about what was going on during this time that made it such an important historical period.

Jennifer: Yeah. It's really interesting because we have this moment where in 1916, Sanger opened her first birth control clinic in Brooklyn actively to challenge the New York State law. The clinic was almost immediately closed because it was considered illegal. Sanger was arrested and spent time in jail. But she knew that there had to be a way to challenge those laws. This was the height of a certain period of the women's movement right at the time where it was just right on the cusp of women in New York getting suffrage. There was a lot of power in the women's movement and a lot of interest both in suffrage and issues like birth control. They were very much tied together in terms of the rights of women and tied into these discussions of motherhood and agency.

Jennifer: Sanger kept pushing at these legal boundaries and taking her case to court. In 1918, the New York Court of Appeals ruled that a licensed physician could provide information for the cure or prevention of disease. That provided the precedent for doctors in New York State to provide birth control. It's interesting, it's kind of a back door way to provide birth control because this was of course right at the end of World War I and there was a lot of concern about service men coming home with sexually transmitted diseases, and there was a huge issue with syphilis at the time. The medical establishment was quite concerned that for the health of men, that syphilis was going to be a public health crisis.

Jennifer: They believed that birth control was a way to get around that, particularly condoms. This really was a backdoor way to find licensed physicians like Dr. Stone who would be able to work with the birth control movement in these clinics to provide contraceptives and contraceptive advice.

Jennifer: So Sanger took, that ruling and in 1923, she financed and organized the Birth Control Clinical Research Bureau headed by this female physician Dr. Stone. They were advising and instructing patients, which was within the law and that was legal. So that was how they got started.

Leila: Cool. I want to give a little bit of context about the 1918 court case, because that was important in helping Hannah Stone bypass charges from the raid on the clinic in 1929, right. It was that ruling that allowed her and her staff to get off.

Jennifer: Exactly. Because she and her staff were licensed medical professionals, they were allowed to provide information for the prevention or cure of disease. What happened in 1929 is that the New York Vice Squad raided the clinic and arrested all of the doctors and nurses. But the charges couldn't stick because even though they were actively looking for any kind of gray area where the clinic would have been prescribing birth control because the law was interpreted in such a way that it was broad enough that what they were doing was legal.

Jennifer: The case was infamous in New York at the time because the police confiscated medical records. They just took boxes and boxes of confidential medical records out of the clinic. Even the members of the medical establishment who were not in favor of the clinic or with birth control in general were absolutely horrified that this was an absolute violation of doctors and patients rights. It was illegal but it also had a lot of... the case had a lot of public sympathy for the birth control movement. It was clear that the judge was not going to proceed with the case and the charges were dropped.

Rebecca: Because yes they got off, but the clinic was raided. There was this whole idea of they took the records and they made them public. Even though it was technically legal, it was still frightening and dangerous to do this kind of work. That's just really fascinating to me and it shows that legal watersheds only give you so much.

Jennifer: That's for sure. One of the things that I found really interesting about this story, one of the reasons I got interested in it is because I was interested in general in the way that women, medical professionals ended up becoming activists almost without realizing it or without going consciously in that direction because the work they had to do involved such precarious situations.

Jennifer: Dr. Stone was not entirely a political person to begin with, but she ended up becoming an activist and getting arrested and having her picture in the paper. She did all this work actually for free. She worked for Sanger's clinic for 16 years and never took a salary because she started out as an idealistic, young doctor who wanted to provide access to health for women, particularly working class women. That was almost impossible to do within the mainstream medical establishment. It was only clinics like this, or often times... my work started out looking at the birth control clinic that existed on 14th street and 5th avenue that was run by a communist insurance cooperative called the International Workers Order. They ran their clinic there from 1936 until about 1950.

Jennifer: Of course, it was an amazingly progressive clinic that served thousands of women, but it was communist affiliated so it was shut down. So the doctors who worked there, also Dr. [inaudible 00:52:48] who was the director of that clinic, also very committed to women's public health was totally anti communist, but the work that she wanted to do had to be done in these marginal contexts, because that's where women's public health was being served and not in the mainstream medical establishments. I think that's really interesting and speaks a lot to what we're going through today.

Anna: I wanted to ask about eugenics. In the inner war period, one thing that's not as marginal as people may assume is the eugenic movement in the United States. You write that Dr. Stone was anti-eugenic, and even if she didn't directly oppose Sanger who was much more in favor of eugenics, she integrated anti-eugenic stance into a book called "A Marriage Manual: A Practical Guide-book to Sex and Marriage" that she co-authored with her husband Abraham Stone. I was just wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that book and about Dr. Stone's stance on eugenics and how it worked with Sanger's more well known stance on eugenics.

Jennifer: Yeah. This was an aspect of Dr. Stone's story that I found quite fascinating because apparently if you delve into the history of the marriage counseling movements in the United States, Dr. Hannah Stone and her husband Dr. Abraham Stone were quite instrumental in this. They weren't just thinking about the clinical factors of health and reproduction, they were also really thinking about what makes a good relationship, what makes a healthy relationship. A lot of that of course has to do with having control and agency over your own knowledge of your own body.

Jennifer: That was what they worked on was this marriage manual, practical guide book to sex and marriage, which came out in the mid 1930s. You can look at it on archive.org it's available. The book is written as a hypothetical dialogue between a married couple and a doctor. They based it on thousands of conversations they'd had with couples at the birth control clinic and in their marriage counseling. It's written with these young people in mind who really have no idea about their own bodies or about the reproductive system, reproductive health.

Jennifer: They ask a whole bunch of questions that might be embarrassing like can a woman have an orgasm? Does penis size matter? All these kinds of things and they patiently go through and explain in very accessible language all the answers to these questions. And then in the middle of the book, they have a whole section about eugenics. The question is, how do we know, the couple asks, if we are fit to breed?

Jennifer: Of course, this ties in very much to the whole issue of eugenics that was going on. At the time eugenics was both a scientific movement and of course a really populist, social movement that really stressed social engineering. Margaret Sanger was very much a part of that. This is a major difference between Sanger and Stone. Sanger wrote a lot of publications in the '20s and '30s where she talked about what it meant to be fit or unfit and moved away from a scientific understanding of that to a social understanding, particularly with regards to immigrants and racialized language around immigrants.

Jennifer: What's interesting about this marriage manual is that it very much without speaking against Margaret Sanger directly goes against that. The Stones say that fitness or unfitness could only be described as a medical category that would need to be determined by doctor. And that in some cases there are groups of people who should be restricted from reproduction such as people from epilepsy. But even say even in those cases, care should be taken to distinguish between environmental and hereditary factors.

Jennifer: They are trying to be very clear that there is maybe a tiny medical basis for these eugenics categories. But really overall, we are talking about social categories. And they say that once eugenics moves from a strictly medical discourse, evidence based discourse to categorizing people as inferior or superior, their claim to the eugenics movement become subject to serious criticisms.

Jennifer: They stress overall that social and economic factors are more important than genetics when it comes to understanding fitness and unfitness and who should be allowed to reproduce and who should not. It's just a small section of the book, but it is very telling because it does in many ways go against what Sanger was saying and writing. Again, from a very evidence based medical perspective.

Rebecca: One thing, it's interesting in hearing you describe that because obviously it's still a very ableist way of looking at reproduction. But you can see the way that Stone is trying to find a kink in that conversation that was so popular around eugenics and trying to stave off the way that it was becoming wildly popular, even if there is still things that are problematic in that conversation. That's really interesting.

Jennifer: Yeah, absolutely. She was very much of her time so there's obviously a lot to critique in terms of the book overall and then that section in particular. But it's interesting that she was trying to carve out a space where she was challenging these really overwhelmingly prevailing ideas.

Rebecca: In 1942 the American Birth Control League changes its name to Planned Parenthood as we know it today. You write this change, "Reflected an orientation towards nuclear families and the private sphere and away from activism and public health." Why do these changes matter and how do you think it ultimately affected women's healthcare?

Jennifer: It's interesting because birth control really does go mainstream after the mid 1930s. By 1937 the American Medical Association, which is not a progressive organization, which is very mainstream medical establishment actually endorses birth control prescribed by physicians for married couples. Moving away from all this language of the early birth control movement about women's rights and about "voluntary motherhood," we move into this realm where we're actually moving into the post war baby boom and it's just assumed that having children is good and important. That's the pro-natalism of the Cold War period which a lot of scholars have written about.

Jennifer: Increasingly, the birth control movement uses that language and speaks in those terms to talk about birth control. What this meant a lot of the time was Sanger and her colleagues reaching out to state public health departments and providing them with information about birth spacing. Again, it's notion of we assume that women are going to get married and have babies, but we want to provide for their health and wellbeing while they do that. The best way to do that is to tell health professionals as well as women that they should not have more than one baby a year, and that they should focus on statistics on infant mortality rates for children that are born too close together and things like that. It really is a significant change in the focus on what women's health is about.

Leila: Okay. That is a good place for us to wrap up today. Thank you Jennifer for joining us. Her piece is titled An Emancipation Proclamation to the Motherhood of America. We'll be including that in the show notes so you can read the full piece there. But thanks Jennifer for joining us and going a little bit deeper into some of the issues that you explored in that essay so thanks.

Rebecca: Awesome, thanks so much.

Jennifer: Take care.

Rebecca: It was really great to talk to you, bye.

Leila: Before we wind down the show with our own annoying thing, we'd like to thank everyone who donated during our October fundraising campaign. Each donation has helped us fund the magazine and podcast for another year. We raised a total of $3205 which is $200 more than our goal, and we gained $65 in monthly pledges. We wouldn't have been able to do any of this without our excellent supporters. Linda Windorf, Shannon Supple, Pamela Gossin, Julie Pigano, Cheryl Muck, Kendra West, Patty and Richard McNeill (thanks mom and dad). Robert Hesselberg, Milissa Acosta, Brian Sletten, Lydia Pyne, Brian Burnham, Irma Mason, Sheila Liming, Victoria Curnut, Samuel Cohen, Carrie Atkins, Chris Martiniano, Megan Formato, Lisa Abott, David Castillo, Jenna Tonn, Kathleen Sheppard, Eileen McGuinis, Michelle Nordwald, Jane Davis, Joseph Klet, Chealsye Bowley, Allan Ray Baw, Megan Ravey, Caitlin McDonough, Joanna Berhman, Catherine Koil, Shirley Hesselberg Wagner and Lara Bergers.

Leila: And our new Patreon patrons are Krista Bennett, Nathan Kapoor, Kristen Schimin, Casia Roth, Anthony Sheveta, Lori Carsen and Christopher Swensen.

Leila: Again, thank you all so, so much.

Anna: At the end of every podcast, hosts will unburden themselves with one thing in the news, their work or the world in general that's just annoying the crap out of them. This is one annoying thing.

Leila: This month I'm annoyed at the 52% of men that say they haven't benefited from women having affordable birth control. A Think Progress-

Anna: Boo. Sorry.

Rebecca: Seriously though.

Anna: Boo.

Leila: The Think Progress article with that exact article made the rounds on social media recently. Even though it was published back in March after the first zombie corps of Obamacare repeal, staggered into the house changed, consuming Planned Parenthood and Medicaid funding in its wake.

Leila: When this article first came out, I tweeted out the article with something to the effective of, and 100 percent of women don't give an F what men think. I still stand by that sentiment. But I also want to unpack some of the stuff here because what I said doesn't really get to the larger problems at play.

Leila: The research in this article comes from the non partisan poling firm, PerryUndem who conducted a survey on a representative sample of registered voters. Before the article gets to that 52 percent figure of the conducted survey, it breaks down how voters believe affordable access to birth control affects families and communities at large. This is how that breaks down.

Leila: 72 percent of voters in the survey believe that access affects the financial situation of families. 69 percent said it affects stress in relationships. 62 percent believes it affects women's ability to have financial ability, 68 percent said that it affects the well-being of families, not just the financial aspect but overall well-being. 67% said it helps the economy, so the economy at large. And then 70 percent said that it helps their community at large.

Leila: Beyond the interpersonal benefits of a woman having access to birth control, most of the people in this survey believe that it does benefit the larger economy and community. That's good. It does do all of these interconnected things. But here's where that 52 percent comes in. From this same survey that found most people believe birth control access benefits personal relationships as well as the larger economy and community, 52 percent of men still don't think that they benefit from women having access to birth control. And it's like they don't see themselves as living in society with the rest of us. Sharing and benefiting from these communities and this economy.

Leila: I'm annoyed that the men in this 52 percent don't seem to have the critical thinking skills to make these connections. The failure to do so could influence the way that they vote and the amount of effort they put into stopping Obamacare repeal efforts. We already know that women are the ones making the majority of the phone calls to the representatives when we have this massive pleas to our representatives to not kill us by taking away our health insurance. Women are already doing more of the work in this regard anyway.

Leila: It shouldn't have to take a piece of legislation affecting you personally to care about it, but often times it does. If men don't see birth control as personally benefiting them, they might fight for it a little less even if they do think women should have birth control. For men on the right, it's clear that unless they are trying to provide birth control from our cold dead hands, that they aren't going to prioritize it as a necessary part of healthcare at all. That's why I'm annoyed.

Rebecca: It's a reminder to me that so many issues that are seen as related to women are just invisible to a lot of men. Like they are just not paying attention and that is infuriating.

Anna: I don't even have anything to... I can't even... I don't have anything to add. That ridiculousness.

Leila: Well, what's annoying you, Anna?

Rebecca: Like you said earlier, boo.

Anna: What's annoying me, I don't know if annoying is the right word or just I've now tumbled into a pit of despair. Apparently, there is a provision in the new proposed Cut, Cut, Cut tax bill. That's what our esteemed president wants to call it. I mentally crunched the numbers this morning, and if it passes I'll probably have to quit my PhD because I won't be able to afford the tax bill on my waiver.

Anna: This is a really good way to kill higher education. It's basically a guided missile to blow up the PhD pipeline and it's going to crush so many people. And it's going to ensure that the only people who can go to grad school are independently wealthy. All of the privilege and narrow perspective that comes with that is just going to be exacerbated by those being the only people who are allowed to get PhDs, the only people who are allowed to go to grad school.

Anna: It's perfect for republicans who hate higher education, and who have a chip on their shoulder I guess about not being smart or something. And so they just want to torpedo everyone else's chance of higher education and blow up the ivory tower.

Anna: I'm really bummed because I've spent four and a half years going through my Master's and then the first part of my PhD. I just got back from a really productive research trip for my dissertation and there's a possibility that I just won't be able to finish any of that. I'm sure as some of our listeners know, the academy is not particularly friendly to you if you don't have a PhD. I can't get a job in it without that.

Leila: Yeah.

Anna: Like I said, not so much annoyed as just a little bit devastated. Call your senators and your congressmen and tell them that I want to keep going to grad school.

Leila: I was annoyed at some of the conversations that I saw... I didn't actually participate in any of the conversations about this on Twitter. I just watched them creepily adding in my own mental notes. And there was one that I saw... everyone just immediately started thinking about how this affects people in STEM and that was really annoying because they already get paid more as PhD students than those of us in the humanities. So, that was annoying.

Leila: And I was also annoyed at a tweet that I saw and I don't think that it was ironic and I don't think that it was joke. I think this person was serious when they said, well this is a way to solve the hiring crisis for humanities majors.

Rebecca: What? Oh my God, what?

Leila: And it's like, what? I'm sorry. That's a terrible thing to say. Yes, there is a hiring crisis for people in the humanities. Taking people's chances away entirely is not a solution even a little bit.

Anna: Even if that was meant ironically, that's just such a cruel joke to make. Being... yeah. People in the job market in the humanities right now are... everybody is in therapy, people can't feed themselves. They have to fly across the country six times a year to do interviews that go nowhere. It's awful. It's not funny to make a joke like that even if it was a joke.

Anna: What you said about the conversation being dominated by STEM, in addition to what you said about the fact that they get paid way more than humanities graduate students do, it contributes to this really problematic assumption or popular understanding of who is in grad school and what they do. It's just another way that people who aren't scientists or aren't engineers or who aren't doing something that society I guess had decided is worthy, just don't matter anymore.

Leila: Yeah. They frame it in terms of usefulness.

Rebecca: Yeah.

Anna: Right. If they were less humanities PhDs, well that's not that big a deal but we need more engineers. And in fact, we don't need more engineers. We are at capacity on engineers too.

Leila: Right. Yeah.

Rebecca: That comment about, "This will solve the crisis." There are lots of people who get PhDs who don't get tuition wavers and what they do is take out loans and make the also student loan crisis worse. Because it's not like that's going to stop universities from pushing to try and get as many students as possible it will just continue to be a hot mess that just harms even more people.

Leila: Yeah. Well that was more of one depressing thing than an annoying thing.

Anna: Sorry.

Leila: It's okay.

Rebecca: There's a lot of overlap. This is just our chance to be furious about stuff.

Leila: Yeah. So, what's annoying you Rebecca?

Rebecca: I am going to circle us back to birth control. Of course as we mentioned at the top of the show, in recent months there has been renewed efforts to limit or to expand actually the kinds of businesses and organizations that can deny birth control coverage. That means that a lot of these arguments defending birth control that we have to continue to have, have returned. They often follow a similar pattern and they followed a similar pattern this time. Which is that a group of people start saying, birth control is super important not just to women who are having sex, but to women with many different kinds of health issues for which birth control is often prescribed. We need to defend birth control because it's not just about morals and ethics and behaviors, it's also about these other health issues.

Rebecca: And then we see a backlash to that, that says, well all reasons for taking birth control are valuable. Women don't say it's only okay if you're doing it for certain reasons because we [inaudible 01:15:46] controlling women and taking birth control. These two camps are getting into a fight. They are both true and they are both important. It represents that anytime discussion of women's sexual behavior becomes part of the conversation, women are going to end up being shamed for what they do.

Rebecca: Women who are taking birth control because they want to be sexually active are being shamed. Women who are taking birth control and are not sexually active but have other reasons for taking birth control are being shamed. We refuse to treat hormonal birth control like a medical treatment, even though the medical establishment are the ones who turned it into, as we were talking about earlier, medicalized a lot of women's reproduction. We get all the bad parts of that, but then we also can't just treat it like a objective medicine without all of these crazy "ethical conversations" that are infuriating.

Leila: Yeah. The troubling part to this is how women's health is seen as some sort of public debate. That my medical choices are public debate, and I have to bear my soul about why I need birth control in order to be legitimate for some asshole on the internet.

Rebecca: And it's none of your business. It's none of anyone's business.

Anna: Yeah, we don't have conversations about why people take aspirin. Maybe they take aspirin because they are sore from having too much sex. You don't know. But we don't have that conversation.

Leila: And that's the whole idea of pathologizing certain bodies, is that those bodies that we pathologize are the ones that their health choices are up for public debate. It's one of the things that Roxane Gay talks about as being a fat woman is that everyone tells her to go see a doctor. Eat better. That everyone disposes medical advice or assumes that she doesn't have a doctor that she sees anyway. These bodies that don't conform to that cis, white male body becomes pathologized, and then we get to discuss their medical choices and their private conversations with their doctor in the internet.

Leila: Anyway, sorry that got me all hot and bothered.

Rebecca: No, I think that, that's, it's all part of the big point. Someone's medical choices being up for debate is infuriating.

Leila: Well, I think that's a good place for us to stop. We circled back around to the beginning of our episode.

Rebecca: Everything is connected.

Leila: Everything is connected in a really awful way.

Rebecca: Yeah. In that everything is terrible.

Leila: So, we are dedicated to making Lady Science accessible, and we are looking for someone to donate their time to help us transcribe our episodes each month. If you are interested in that, please us an email at [email protected]

Leila: If you liked our episode today then please leave us a rating and a review on iTunes. That is how other people are able to find us. And if you have questions about any of the segments today, tweet us @ladyxscience, or #ladyscipod. To sign up for our monthly newsletter, read monthly issues, pitch us an idea for an article and more, visit ladyscience.com. We are an independent magazine and we depend on the support from our readers and listeners. You can support us through a monthly donation with Patreon or through one time donations. Just visit ladyscience.com/donate. And until next time, you can find us on Facebook at @ladysciencemag and on Twitter at @ladyxscience.

01:23:24

Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg

Guest: Kate Sheppard 

Producer: Leila McNeill 

Music: Careful! by Zombie Dandies

The scientific study of the paranormal and supernatural might seem contradictory, but we discuss how fringe sciences have made concerted attempts to break into the mainstream, oftentimes perpetuating the same gender inequalities of modern science and medicine. Historian of science and long time contributing Lady Science editor Kate Sheppard joins in to talk about Margaret Murray and her witch cult hypothesis. 

Visitation and Violence: Gender and the UFO Phenomenon by Anna Reser

Vulgar Women, Queer Men, and Unruly Spirits by Leila A. McNeill

Forced to the Fringe: Margaret Murray’s Witch-Cult Hypothesis by Kathleen Sheppard

#FolkloreThursday

The Darkened Room: Women, Power, and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England by Alex Owen “In the Laboratory of Spirits: Gender, Embodiment, and the Scientific Quest for Life Beyond the Grave 1918-1939” by Beth Robertson

The Life of Margaret Alice Murray: A Woman’s Work in Archaeology by Kate Sheppard

“Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her and Why?” by Jacqueline Simpson

The Resonance of Unseen Things: Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny by Susan Lepselter

Transcription by Rev.com

Rebecca: Welcome back to the Lady Science Podcast, a monthly deep dive on topics centered on women and gender in the history and popular culture of science. With you every month are the editors of the Lady Science Magazine.

Anna: I'm Anna Reser, co-founder and co- editor in chief of Lady Science. I'm an artist, writer and a PhD student. I study 20th century American culture and the history of the American space program in the 1960s.

Leila: I'm Leila McNeill, one of the founders and editors in chief of the science. I am a historian of science and freelance writer with words in various places on the internet. And currently, I'm a regular writer on women in the history of science at Smithsonian.com.

Rebecca: And I'm Rebecca Ortenberg, Lady Science's managing editor. When I'm not working with the Lady Science team, I can be found writing about museums and public history around the internet, mostly on Twitter, and managing research projects at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia. So for this episode, and in the spirit of Halloween, we're going to be talking about some of the historical connections between the study of the supernatural and the study of science.

Rebecca: And we'll talk about how UFO-ology patterns itself on mainstream science and reproduces all of its problems with women and gender. Leila will talk about 19th century spiritualism and the attempt of 20th century scientists to measure and analyze the supernatural. And I'll talk a little bit about folklore Thursday, a place on Twitter where people share interesting bits of folklore history. Finally, a longtime contributing editor to Lady Science Magazine, Kate Sheppard, will join us to talk about her fascinating research on the esteemed archaeologist Margaret Murray, and her groundbreaking work on the folklore of witchcraft.

Anna: My piece about you ufology, it's called visitation and violence, gender and the UFO phenomenon, it's on Lady Science, we'll put a link in the show notes. But basically, the piece is about how UFO narratives, especially abduction narratives, contain all of these sort of anxieties about rape, violation and female body, gender and generation. And they are sort of constructed within this... What's usually considered I think, a fringe scientific field or a pseudo scientific field of ufology, and that ufology patterns itself on so called mainstream science, and tries to construct different types of evidence based on a pattern that we recognize as mainstream science.

Anna: So what I mean by that is that people go out and try to photograph UFOs because that would be considered like very hard evidence, or they try to get like castings of marks on the ground, where a UFO might have landed, they document, cattle mutilation, so especially like physical evidence of things that are supposed to have been caused by extraterrestrials or their vehicles, that's the most kind of important ufological evidence. And that all kind of conforms to what we would expect. And like a scientific field to do go out and collect physical evidence.

Anna: Another thing that comes up a lot is like radiation signatures at like landing sites somehow are supposed to indicate the presence of extraterrestrial craft. So there's this kind of like going out looking for the physical evidence of visitation. And then there's this whole other chunk of you ufology that has to do with these abduction narratives. And like, in person, visitations between humans and extraterrestrials, and particularly in abduction narratives, there's a lot going on there about gender and bodies and sexuality. Think of anal probes, that kind of thing.

Anna: There's like a really pronounced strain of these abduction narratives. It has to do with women, human women being abducted, and impregnated by the aliens. Sometimes, that's accompanied by a kind of like, the woman will have like, she will have been told by the aliens that her giving birth to this sort of hybrid human-alien child is going to like, save the human species. So there's a lot of work, I think that's been done about like these kind of rhetorical tropes about redemption and like, savior narratives that the aliens are going to come and save humanity.

Anna: But what I'm really interested in is the way that if you pick apart this tension in ufology between like the need to have this hard evidence, because that sort of validates ufology as the science, and then all of this, like eyewitness accounts and reports that were kind of like retrieved by hypnosis, or repressed memories of abduction. These are like extremely soft evidence. And so we would see science, as we understand it in the mainstream, not really being very impressed with these kind of pieces of evidence.

Anna: So if there's no physical proof that anything happened to you, and all you have our memories of being abducted, it's very difficult to validate that in a scientific way. So I think, there's something really interesting here about the way that you ufology struggles with these two sort of important sectors of its practice and the kinds of evidence that are involved there. And I think it's worth noting that all of this sort of like soft evidence has to do with mostly women being abducted and all this sort of narratives about impregnation and generation, kind of fall on the soft side of the evidence scale for ufology, and then the hard side, doesn't really have anything to do with human bodies generally.

Anna: So I think, for me, looking at fringe sciences and pseudo sciences, and tracing where they kind of pick and choose, I guess, which parts of science are going to be most useful to them, or which sort of images of scientific practice they can kind of appropriate to reinforce their own legitimacy. And that, just like in modern science, in modern mainstream science, like the eyewitness account, the embodied knowledge of someone who has had an experience is generally much less valuable than, like the body of a mutilated cow, I guess.

Anna: And so that's just one of the things that I've been kind of exploring with, studying pseudoscience is a way that it kind of models itself on science. And that modeling process really, I think, highlights some of the contradictions and issues that what we consider mainstream science has with gender and bodies and women's knowledge and testimony, eyewitness accounts, hard and soft evidence. So that's kind of what I was exploring in the piece. And I'll just say that there was a book called "The Resonance of Unseen Things" by Susan Lepselter that just won a really big anthropology prize.

Anna: And it's about the rhetoric of the uncanny and conspiracy theories having to do with you ufology. The subtitle is "Poetics, Power, Captivity, and UFOs in the American Uncanny." So, I didn't read it, but it sounds really good, but also it sounds like something I would have to read in the middle of the day with all the lights on, just because this stuff really creeps me out.

Rebecca: Before we started recording, you were talking about how the creepiest thing for you is the idea of being abducted by aliens, and then no one believing you. And it occurred to me as you were talking about your piece, like just how fricking gendered that is. Like, the idea of not being believed about, especially a bodily experience is just something that is so thoroughly part of the narrative of women's lives. That again, you see in this sort of fringe scientific field, all of those anxieties reflected as well.

Anna: Yeah, so something I talk about in the piece is that, in these abduction narratives, where there are like physical interventions on the body of the abductee, and the way that the abductee usually reports this or describes the scene is very, very close to like, very recognizable, like 20th century modern medical environment. So there's like instruments and like, shiny, non-porous surfaces, and the procedures conform to like what we would recognize as like, a modern surgical practice.

Anna: And I think, what you said about that experience of women not being believed is really pronounced. For us, for women and like, medical settings. Modern medicine just has very little time for women to have knowledge about their own bodies, on which they might base an intervention. So like, you can tell your doctor what you think is going on in your body until you're blue in the face. And it usually doesn't matter. Because modern medicine has a whole elaborate diagnostic apparatus that does not have any place or your personal experience, your eye witness account of what happened to your body-

Rebecca: They want the scientific evidence, not the eye witness account?

Anna: Exactly. Exactly. And so like the reproduction of this, like the visual culture or the visuality, I guess, of like modern medical practice in these abduction narratives is one of the things that I think gives you that kind of like distorted mirror image of modern science that you can really start pick apart, like rhetorically, you look at the abduction narrative as a text. And as like an exploration of someone's experience of modern medicine and women abductees, their narratives always involve this like kind of powerlessness in this like, recognizable sort of hospital surgical setting.

Leila: So, I have to talk about X-Files in this conversation. Because there's just no way that you can't. Season two is when Scully gets abducted by the aliens, and she's missing for I don't remember how long, comes back, and is unconscious back in the hospital, whatever. Mulder starts losing his shit on the doctors. And he says at one point that what the aliens are doing to these women is medical rape, and actually calls it that.

Leila: And it's like you can't really have a conversation about the images and things like that going on. And what you're talking about this piece and in X-Files without relating that to modern medical science, because while there were male abductees in the show, it wasn't the same, it was the women that were being impregnated, it was the women that were having all of these weird cancers and stuff that were coming, popping up later on, and things like that, because this was a very kind of gendered thing that suppose the aliens were doing, and Mulder calls it what it is, kind of bringing into sharp relief what's going on and modern medical science.

Leila: And one of the things about, that I like about X-Files is Scully is always kind of the science compass, right? She's always the one that's like, "Okay, well, that's not science, Mulder, just what are you doing? You're ridiculous." Kind of just like shouting at the men around her who won't listen to her. And after she has this abduction experience, and then later on when she gets sick, and all these other women who are abducted start getting these cancers. And it's almost like she who is always been kind of like the science center or the science anchor has to contend with that and also her own personal eyewitness experience that is subjective.

Leila: And so like, it's kind of two parts of her life provide a really interesting struggle that goes throughout the series. And what is kind of just embodied in her whole internal struggle is this idea of what is soft evidence, and so what is hard evidence, and even when it's herself experiencing it, but it's still a struggle that she can't quite reconcile.

Anna: I mean, I guess I could watch that. But like I said, I have to do it at 5:00 a.m., maybe at mom's house? I don't know.

Rebecca: Yeah. It's pretty great. But also yeah, very creepy. And yeah, it is interesting. I hadn't thought about that. But yeah, I mean, like, men in the series do have various experiences with aliens. But they're not those same like that those sort of powerless, abduction narratives are saved for a lot of female characters. Whether it's the monster of the week kind of characters or the ones that hang around.

Leila: Anything else?

Rebecca: Awesome.

Anna: [inaudible 00:15:50].

Leila: To add about UFO, is it ufology or UFO- I don't think I say it right. What is it?

Anna: Oh, I just say ufology but I don't know if it's UFO logy-

Leila: Because there's not-

Anna: UF- I don't know. I just say ufology because it's easier.

Rebecca: I think I said UFO ology. But who knows, yeah.

Anna: I think, well, you can just make the argument that since it's not a real science, you can say whatever you want about it.

Rebecca: It's true. [inaudible 00:16:18] word.

Leila: So the piece that I wrote last year was called "Vulgar Women, Queer Men and Unreleased Spirits." And I looked at the gendered underpinnings of 19th century spiritualism and 20th century Psychical Research. Spiritualism was a very popular 19th century practice that attempted to connect the living with the dead by way of a medium, which was almost always a woman, and with some exceptions there.

Leila: One of the most recognizable aspects of spiritualism was the séance. Seances occurred almost exclusively in a domestic setting, either in the mediums home or in the home of someone posting a seance. So that would be like polite dinner entertainment is to have a seance in your home for your guests. And I'm sure you kind of have, you conjure up images of what a seance looks like, it's been on TV, in pop culture. And the dark room, a group sitting in a circle, lights blinking, walls knocking, all of that kind of smoke and mirrors type of stuff.

Leila: And so while we can debate the blinking lights and the spooky sounds, the setting and the aesthetic that the pop culture represents isn't too far off from the real thing. The woman medium was the main event, and she didn't just call spirits to appear, she allegedly embodied them and surrendered her entire conscious self to them, taking on their manners, speech, their behavior, character, everything. Medium ship could be particularly appealing for women who embody gender and sexuality in non-conforming ways.

Leila: So if possessed by a male spirit, she would take on the voice, mannerisms and behaviors of that man, sometimes becoming aggressive, vulgar, overtly sexual or blasphemous. And in the context of a seance, this behavior from a woman could be entirely acceptable. That doesn't mean she could go rampaging down the street, like, cursing at people and whatever. Even though that would have been cool for me. But, so all of that was acceptable in the context of the seance and people who followed spiritual ism and kind of bought into the whole thing. It's totally acceptable.

Leila: But for medical men who did not buy into the spiritualist movement, believe this to be really nothing more than "pathological hysteria," or "sexual deviancy," and saw it as grounds for carding women off to a silence. So there was that kind of risk going on there. But for the most part, the spiritualist movement embraced powerful women in this way. And women were seen as particularly suited for supernatural phenomenon, because of the cultural constructions of women that were deeply embedded in Victorian thinking.

Leila: So they were seen as the appealing in the passiveof sex and that they had a closer connection to nature itself. Men often assume these assumptions about women's nature to relegate them to the domestic sphere. But for medium ship, women could stay within the confines of their prescribed femininity, while also finding power in it at the same time through mediumship. The very qualities that rendered women the supposedly weaker sex in the real world, gave them power in the spiritualist movement.

Leila: So you can see why this is attractive for women, especially women who embody gender and sexuality in the [inaudible 00:19:58]. So fast forward to the 20th century, when science has become crystallized as a masculine pursuit. During this time, you also have the professionalization of the sciences, kind of extra patient, women from these fields in general. And so by the time prominent male scientists of the 20th century kind of resurrected, supernatural study that it was predominantly a boys club, for sure.

Leila: So you have these prominent male scientists making concerted efforts to study the supernatural, and instead of spiritualism, they call it Psychical Research. The darkened room of the seance was replaced by the illuminated lab of the scientist, and spiritualists didn't actually reject science. But they did believe that scientific method did have its limits when it came to the supernatural, that the scientific method cannot be imposed on the supernatural. Psychical researchers though, did believe that rigorous application, the scientific method could uncover the forces behind mediumship.

Leila: Part of establishing Psychical Research as a legitimate field of study is that they had to establish themselves as objective, rational and skeptical observers. All of those things that make you a good modern scientist, right? This however, changed the power dynamics of medium ship. Women's authority was overturned by the psychical researcher because building a case around a woman and her subjective evidence of the supernatural defied the scientific method of objective observable inquiry.

Leila: It was also believed that women themselves cannot be psychical researchers because their femaleness made them too much like the object being studied, the female media, right? So, women were so disbelieved in Psychical Research that in the case of the well known media, Lenore Piper, the researchers actually deferred to one of her alleged male spirits to learn about the phenomena rather than a conscious unaware Piper. So somehow, maybe fake spirit that they're investigating is more reliable because it has a man's voice then the woman, right? It's ridiculous.

Leila: The only part of the women medium that mattered to the researcher was her body as a vessel for phenomena. All the other sciences in the 20th century, Psychical Research had become a boys club. And obviously, Psychical Research did not become a legitimate field of scientific study. And there's reasons for that. Like with ufology, I mean, it's not really hard evidence if someone's just giving you their first hand experience account, right? Especially if it's coming from a woman.

Leila: So whether you're calling this thing spiritualism, or you're slapping some modern science on it and calling it Psychical Research, it doesn't she the fact that it's still a subjective experience that's being studied, and specifically a woman's experience that is trying to be quantified. And you can't really build a science on that, as we know, science to be.

Anna: When you were talking about how the researchers were listening to Piper's spirits, instead of her to get actual evidence, it just reminded me of these studies about men evaluating research about gender bias. And like-

Rebecca: Yes, there was a thing.

Anna: ... They're supposed to be, men are supposed to be the objective rational scientists, and they are, like, overwhelmingly rate fake science about gender bias as being totally legitimate. It's just like, it's another example of where like, men will go to any lengths to be told what they want to hear. And to not have to listen to what women have to say about anything. Like they will listen to spirits, they will validate entirely falsified research papers, like it's incredible, really. But it's also, there's such a long tradition of it. It's perhaps the most storied tradition in modern science, I think. [crosstalk 00:24:32].

Rebecca: ... Study recently. Well, yeah, they were... Yeah, men were more likely to rate fake studies showing that there was not a gender bias in science way more highly than real studies that showed that there were and, yeah, and then I think there were then a lot of comments about those studies about how it was, like there was this whole like inception of sexism around the commentary, around that study, I feel like.

Anna: It's just like a vortex of...?

Rebecca: Yeah. The other thing that your paper made me think of Leila was the kind of the version of ghost hunting that has lasted into the 21st century is that kind of scientific ghost hunting, with all of the ghost hunting shows, but also if you want to go and like poke around an old building of some kind, you have your EMF meter. And, hilariously, the one that's most used by ghost hunters is something that is manufactured by the father of a friend of mine. Originally, there was a bunch of these kind of meters that were created before this new like version of ghost hunting came up, and it was to detect faulty wiring in your house, or something.

Rebecca: That's actually what it can detect. And his was the only one that had like, instead of a dial on it, it had a light that lit up. And so then when ghost hunting becomes a thing, his is the one that people start buying. Because you can see it in the dark.

Anna: That's right. Because they like... I watched a lot of ghost hunting shows, they put the EMF meter in the middle of a room, and they go, they make a big show of going around and being like, "It's not the wiring, we checked the wiring," and then they put it in the middle of the room, and then they stand in the doorway. And like, "If you're here, give us a sign," and the little light will blink. You can see it on their night vision cameras, like...

Rebecca: Exactly. Yeah, but it goes to show that this whole idea of, "Oh, if we can make this scientific, then even in this obvious realm of entertainment, it's more legitimate, it's more interesting." It's the whole, all of the shows, the guys have this skepticism about them. There's always one of the stories that's not true just to like prove that they're being skeptical. And so yeah, it's all based on this 20th century idea of Psychical Research, which is just fascinating.

Leila: Yeah, just sciencing up the whole thing a little bit.

Rebecca: Right. Right, exactly.

Anna: Well, I wanted to ask you a little bit more about this sort of fairly amiable coexistence between like spiritualism and in the 19th century, this like, explosion of interest in natural sciences, and how these things kind of coexisted in this way that like, having a seance was like a perfectly acceptable dinner entertainment, but you would, if you're like a fairly well off middle-class person, you might also visit the Science Museum, or take in demonstrations of electricity. There wasn't like a real conflict. There was sort of this sense maybe that that's more of a spectrum of ways of investigating the world that spiritualism was a part of, I was just wondering if you could say a little bit more about that, because I think that that, that may be like unfamiliar to people who are more used to the like, super scienced up study of the paranormal.

Leila: Yeah. The Victorians were just so weird about so many things.

Rebecca: All the things.

Leila: God. They just [crosstalk 00:28:34] everything about them. [crosstalk 00:28:37] I love them so much. But they were into some weird stuff. And one of those things... Like because it doesn't, on the surface, it doesn't seem to make sense that you have the kind of growing materialism of a science culture with like Darwin, and Huxley, and all of those guys that are very, like not even not spiritually, but spirituality, in general, like separating that from the natural world. And from scientific study, you have that going on.

Leila: And then you also have people really interested in spiritualism and the supernatural. And one of those people was actually Alfred Russell Wallace, who worked with Darwin with natural selection. So it's not like these were fringe people that were interested in this. And then you have also Arabella Buckley, who wrote popular science and natural history books for children. But she was also a scientist in her own right. She was first Charles Lyell's secretary, and then she broke out on her own and created a career for herself writing about science.

Leila: So these weren't fringe people that were also, that were at once interested in science and then we're also interested in spiritualism. Those two things, they were both doing both of them at the same time. And I think one of the ways that those types of thinking about nature were able to come together is that natural history and science were kind of two different things, they had overlap, for sure. But they were a little bit different. So natural history was more about, went really closely with natural theology, so that there was divineness in nature, and that a lot of natural history came from that too, especially when women were doing it.

Leila: So there was already kind of these prevalent understandings in a large portion of Victorian culture, and among natural historians is that there was something spiritual, there was something like that going on, something divine, in the natural world already. And so this was, in a way, just another way of looking at that. So Anna, you said, like a spectrum of looking at the natural world. And this was kind of, I think, part of that, and why those two seemingly opposing viewpoints about science and the world kind of could come together for the Victorians in this way. Does that make sense?

Anna: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Leila: Okay. Good.

Rebecca: Yeah, yeah, and I could be wrong about this. But is it sort of, to me, at least Natural History also sort of implies that you have a certain amount of, I guess, what we call now qualitative data, where there's drawings or written descriptions of things, things that maybe are a little bit closer to sort of first person accounts and experiences and less like numbers and measurements? And so maybe that is... Is there a connection there as well, maybe that kind of qualitative experiences are more understood as part of natural history?

Leila: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the big things with natural history was that it was pretty egalitarian in that anybody could do it, because if you could just like walk out your door and go look at something in nature, then you could engage in natural history in some way. And so it was a very kind of personal interaction with nature. And so with that, there was, the 19th century natural history, that classification, cataloging, observation, writing that stuff down all the time, right? That it, you have kind of that difference in observable, hands-on type of stuff also filtered through a personal interaction with nature.

Leila: And then you have kind of the science that was emerging during this time, which was more theoretical. But natural history was more of like a culture, that is deeply embedded in culture. Yeah.

Anna: Rebecca, what did you have for us?

Rebecca: Oh, yeah. So what I brought here today, isn't a Lady Science essay quite yet, though, it will be I think, eventually, as I pull all this stuff together. And it's also taking a little bit of a turn from investigating historical moments, and looking at the way that we talk about history, and all of these things kind of in the wider world. And that is, I'm going to talk a little bit about the Twitter hashtag, #FolkloreThursday. So if you are not aware, each Thursday, there's a group of folklorist who take to Twitter to share links and articles and images related to folk stories and traditional food ways and legends and folk art, and scholarly analysis of all of these things as well.

Rebecca: I've been following it for a little while. And I've been really impressed by the number and the diversity of the people who contribute. So if you go, you follow the hashtag, or you go to their, they're just like Twitter page, you'll see historians who are sharing their research. You see novelists and filmmakers taking part. Guillermo del Toro too like, contributed to it a while ago.

Rebecca: So did you see enthusiasts who are talking about family legends or things that they've learned about in their communities. And it's just kind of this just celebratory mix of like all this interesting and cool stuff that people have been telling folk stories about. And so I've been really impressed with the speed. It's grown. It's been just about two years since it formally launched. And the work, the hashtags originators have put into keeping it going. So like most public outreach efforts, #FolkloreThursday doesn't happens spontaneously. DD Cheney and Willow Winsham are the founders and creators.

Rebecca: And so each Thursday, they will promote the hashtag, they contribute to it. They remind people to contribute to it, they retweet things that other people are doing, and just continue to kind of curate, to use an overused word on the internet. But that one is that is accurate sometimes to this, the six #FolkloreThursday experience. And I think it's easy to think for a lot of public outreach efforts that they will happen spontaneously, if you the work is good enough, it's kind of a, if you build it, they will come theory, that is not true for anything but the Field of Dreams.

Rebecca: And I feel like the work that they... The fact that they put so much work into it shows that the way in which research and history of science, and women's history can be best shared is really by putting the work out there into making sure that it stays shared. So I recently reached out to Willow about the work that she's done to put into it. And I'm going to turn the conversation that we had into an essay for a future history of Lady Science. So stay tuned.

Leila: I don't want to have you get too much into the actual article that you're going to write. Can you just give a little bit about how they reach out to people, not folklorists, like how they get, have gotten other people that aren't familiar with this work on board to follow the hashtag or even actively participate in it?

Rebecca: Yeah, yeah, definitely talk about that a little bit. I think that a lot of it is that two of them were embedded in a lot of sort of writer and like non-academic writer and blogging communities already. And though they are both folklorist, so they were really kind of building on a lot of those communities, I think as opposed to in some ways, the sort of academic community is that they're a little bit of part of. And so looking at things like Monday blogs, or Sunday blog share, or other, or different kinds of women's writer hashtags.

Rebecca: And so they did have a community, they were already kind of involved in a non-folklorist community. And I think that that really helped them build it up is by being involved in these popular communities already. So people were excited to contribute to them. And it's funny, it's grown a lot. One of the things they say is that at this point, they need to, it needs to stop growing because they can't handle it anymore, it's just the two of them, which sounds like a beautiful problem to have.

Leila: We're now going to bring Kate Sheppard into the conversation. She's a longtime contributing editor for Lady Science. Back in April, Kate wrote an article for the magazine about archaeologist, Egyptologist and folklorist Margaret Murray and her witch called hypothesis. She details how Murray and her work on witches was marginalized in her time, only to be resurrected by a man who ultimately received credit for this work. Welcome, Kate, and tell us a little bit about yourself.

K. Sheppard: Thank you. I'm Associate Professor at Missouri SNT in Rolla, Missouri, in the history and political science department. I'm a historian of science and I focused on women in the history of archaeology. I know that everyone here is on Twitter, and as am I, I am mostly angry on Twitter. But on other platforms, I'm a little bit nicer to people. And I have fun on all of them. But Twitter is the angriest one. Thank you for having me on.

Leila: Yay, happy to have you.

Anna: Yay.

Rebecca: Twitter's good for being angry. I think y'all approve of that.

Anna: So, I guess we'll start at the beginning. What got you interested in Margaret Murray and her work on witches?

K. Sheppard: Well, I really do. I really do love this question. I love when people ask me what got me interested in her because it very much is what I think brings most historians to study women, I sort of found evidence of her and I really wanted to know more. So I was working on my master's thesis about Flinders Petrie. He's this Great Man Egyptologist. And in his autobiography, he mentioned that during a field season in 1904, he said, "My colleague, Miss Murray came out to join us." And that was it.

K. Sheppard: That was the only mention of her in his memoir of 70 years in the field. The title of it is actually "70 Years in Archeology." And so I wondered who this colleague was, so I started looking around and it turns out, she worked with Petrie at University College London for 40 years. And after he retired, she worked with his projects for 20 years after that, and then on her, but on her own, she was an influential Egyptologist, anthropologist, field archaeologist, linguist, and author herself.

K. Sheppard: She's one of those figures in the history of science where almost everyone knows who she is. And so when you mentioned her, everyone says, "Oh, yeah, of course." It's about time somebody is talking about her. So no one really had talked about her in particular. And I was sort of hooked. It's sort of this compulsion that I have about people like that. And I think really, I'm in good company with everyone here, and hopefully a lot of our listeners, it turned out that a lot of her work, and at this point, no one should be surprised by this, had actually been marginalized for one reason or another.

K. Sheppard: One big thing for her, for witchcraft was getting out of Petrie's shadow, which is a really hard thing to do. So she had to shift into fields like folklore, and she excavated in Malta and Menorca really just to get away from him and to sort of step outside of his field. Yeah.

Anna: Literally going to the ends of the earth to get away from him.

Leila: Like just a comment on the fact that he worked with her for-

K. Sheppard: 60, yeah.

Leila: ... Yeah. And that was some just errant comment about this one colleague, one that's like, that is mind blowing. Yeah, they work so closely for that long and she gets like... Sorry, that's just blows my mind is that that's all she got from him.

K. Sheppard: That's it. Yeah.

Rebecca: Like she was... They worked so closely together. But she had to get away from him to like, make a name for herself. But he didn't bother to mention her. Yeah, seriously.

K. Sheppard: And I do have to include that in her autobiography, he gets an entire chapter devoted just to him. The rest of the book very much is about him. Because they're working so closely together, but he gets a whole chapter just like, dedicated to him.

Anna: Oh, boy.

K. Sheppard: Yeah.

Rebecca: So just to get a little bit more into kind of what makes Maurice Murray's work so interesting, besides being in some ways, a perfect example of a marginalized woman academic. In your article, you say, "Murray's work in folklore is not unlike that of powerful women healers of the early modern period who are marginalized, discredited, and then out, it is witches. All well men use their knowledge of the body to create what we call modern obstetrics."

Anna: It's such an interesting comparison. I feel like it's this beautiful simile that brings together all of these things that we think about in the history of science and women's history. Can you say a little bit more about that?

K. Sheppard: Yes, I definitely can. But it's going to be a long answer, sort of, to kind of like tell the story, right. So to get away, and there's really no other way to say it, get away from Petrie, she had to step up a bit outside of her area of expertise, which was Egyptology to study folklore and women in the practice of witchcraft. And to her, it really wasn't that big of a stretch. She worked as though it was all part of the same goal, which was the study of human life in the past.

K. Sheppard: She clearly had some authority in this topic. And she started coming out with ideas such as when Christians moved into England, they persecuted the pagan rituals as demonic in order to prioritize their own deity. This is something that sort of runs through the kind of the history of Christianity spreading around the world, or just other religions kind of coming into new areas. So she detailed a lot of these pagan rituals based on primary source evidence, like testimonies from witches, trials from the early modern period, which she actually took as factual accounts, which ended up being really problematic. Because from these accounts, she sort of pieces together this witchcraft practice, where there are covens of 13, usually all women, but she argued that they weren't really worshiping the devil, but they were worshiping nature, many times in physical ways.

K. Sheppard: So they use their bodies to worship nature. But she argued that it rarely produced sexual orgies, like others had accused them of, right. So trying to marginalize these women who were doing pagan rituals by going look, "It's all about sex." She was like, "No, actually, it's not, it's all about nature," and just sort of enjoying that and worshiping that. So, she wrote three main books that she's pretty famous for "The Witch Cult in Western Europe," which came out in 1921, "The God of the Witches" that came out in 1931, and then "The Divine King in England," in '54.

K. Sheppard: And some people argue her ideas got "crazier" with each book. So the first two argue for the presence of a witch cult in England in the early modern period. And detail some of these things these cults did, which is based again, on this primary source of evidence. I mean, she really did take as factual these accounts from witchcraft trials, saying, they're telling the truth, this is what they really did. But in "The Divine King in England," a lot of people argue that she sort of went off the deep end, there was one folklorist who said, "This is Margaret Murray at her most bonkers." And it's because she argued that these ancient King rituals were brought to England and early Anglo Saxons killed their own kings as part of these pagan rituals.

K. Sheppard: So if they're not fit to lead, then they were killed in a ritual sort of saying, "Okay, you're clearly not physically fit or mentally fit to lead this group. So we're going to kill you in a ritual." I mean, she pulled from anthropological studies of early societies where there was evidence of this, there's even evidence of it in ancient Egypt. So she pulls all of this anthropological evidence and says this was going on in early modern England.

K. Sheppard: First, her ideas spread really quickly, because there was sort of finally someone in England writing about English history. So this was really interesting and really exciting, and everyone was so pumped about it. Finally, someone's talking about this. And it was also a little bit mysterious, these sort of, "Are they really magical spells or what's going on?" But then it got picked up abroad, because it was interesting. So it got picked up on the continent, and here in the United States, also, because she wrote the article on witchcraft for the 1929 edition of The Encyclopedia Britannica. And it basically stayed there for the next 40 years, and virtually unchanged, they just never changed it.

K. Sheppard: So it's possible that millions of people had read her particular version of witchcraft practice. Folklorist were up in arms, they were like, I mean, pitchforks in hand really. And her critics focused on her methods as well as her conclusion. So they called her crazy. They basically, they marginalized her just as a crazy woman, she needs to go back to Egyptology. Sometimes, they really did go in and focus on her methods, which were legitimate arguments. So her scholarship methods were a bit faulty, because she took these primary sources and said, "These are true." And she didn't really back them up with much secondary evidence. Her conclusions weren't completely wrong, but they tended to be sort of on the wrong side of the theory and the method.

K. Sheppard: So they really did attack this, but it was more about her as a person. And saying, "Go back to Egyptology, you're out of place, you don't know what you're doing. You're this crazy lady." But in fact, what is interesting is that her ideas did fit into sort of the current anthropological frameworks of the day. So JG Fraser's framework of survival, anthropological survival, where there are certain practices that remain in religion or culture, as sort of time goes on just because sort of it works. And people are comfortable with that.

K. Sheppard: JG Frazier, who wrote The Golden Bow, and that is all about these dynamic, divine King type of cults. His book just was a best seller. And he's really well known for these ideas. And then hers was sort of like, "You're kind of... You don't know what she's talking about," even though it really does fit. So I'm getting to my point, I promise. So her argument about realistic practice was that these women are working in covens and within the constraints of what nature could do. She argues that there's natural magic. But these women sort of use substances to alter consciousness and do other things with people. But there was nothing really supernatural about it. So she doesn't actually believe in a supernatural force. She was really empirical. She wanted the evidence.

K. Sheppard: But there was a guy in the '50s, 1950s named Gerald Gardner, who read all of her books, and he really liked what she had to say about the practice of witchcraft and why people practice witchcraft. And he wrote a book, I believe it came out in '53, called "Witchcraft Today," and it's still like a best seller among people who sort of claim to be pagans. So he lays out the belief system of witchcraft. And he claimed he was trying to write a book to show people that witches weren't demonic, that they were just normal people who just worship nature, it's a nature based system instead of something supernatural.

K. Sheppard: If you ever meet anyone who practices Wicca, or who identifies their belief system as pagan, or something like that, they know Gardener. They know who he is, they know his practices, and they really hold Margaret Murray up is this founding Mother of Wiccan practice. But Gardener is credited with giving the practice of witchcraft a foothold, and sort of a manifesto. So Murray sort of wrote everything down. He read what she wrote, and then wrote it down again, and said, "Let's really do this thing." Had her... She wrote the preface to his book, like the introduction of his book, and said, "Yeah, okay, so like, he's writing down these things. These are great. You guys should do one. These are nice things."

K. Sheppard: So that's really what I mean when I say that sort of a man came in and pushed her out. Like she was criticized for her scholarship. And then for her conclusions. They didn't just try to discredit her work but her as a person and then Gardner comes in and builds this whole belief system on it that people practice to this day. And from that, I have argued, and one could that you sort of get the foundation for Joss Whedon's Buffy the Vampire Slayer, JK Rowling's Harry Potter, this idea of witches riding brooms. They didn't actually... I mean, they did use brooms to ride on, but they also use them for other things. And I could sort of just go on and on about...

K. Sheppard: Like, anytime I see witches, especially now around Halloween, I'm like, "Margaret Murray, she's just sort of everywhere." But you can't just go up to people in Walmart and tell them like, "Did you know why you're seeing this?"

Leila: Well, I mean, you could. [crosstalk 00:52:01]

Leila: So where did the idea of witches riding up brooms come from? That, I am curious about.

K. Sheppard: So, Drew and I was talking about the substances that that women would use to sort of alter their consciousness, the best way for those substances to be absorbed would be through tissues on your body that are sort of more open to moisture. So they would put these substances on the tip of the broomstick and put them into their vaginas.

Leila: Huh. Well, that's cool.

K. Sheppard: [inaudible 00:52:41] you were explaining that going. Is this going where I think it's going? Oh, it is? It went exactly where you thought it was going. And Murray didn't necessarily say it exactly like that. But that's one of the theories.

Leila: Interesting.

Rebecca: I love your point about, yeah, once you realize kind of the history of these ideas of witchcraft, you really do see it everywhere. And I've been re watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer for the last few months. And I was literally watching an episode before this taping. And it's like, all of these bits are in there, this idea of like different kinds of fantasy writers have gone, "Okay, how can we meld this idea of worshiping nature, but also have some like actual magic in there to play around with. But like, the good witches are the ones that are the most interested in the nature bit. And like, the bad witches are the ones that are more interested in like the supernatural bit." And that seems to be this just a dynamic that plays out a lot, that certain, like so obviously, now that I know all this comes from Murray.

K. Sheppard: Well, and it's also interesting, because you see that in the development of Willow on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. So she's like, let's do this natural stuff. And she's with Tara and things are great. And they're practicing this natural magic. And then she starts to get more powerful, and especially after Tara dies, she goes way supernatural, and that's bad and uncontrollable. But let's work on nature, yeah.

Rebecca: And then she like goes back to the nature thing. And yeah, definitely.

Leila: When Willow goes off the deep end, and it Sander who kind of talks her back from being this uncontrollable natural force, I felt like that was really regressive as far as like, the whole thing leading up in that show, right, that you have a feminist theme that runs throughout it. And then the one thing that brings this uncontrollable natural force back to being tamed, is a man.

Rebecca: And it's also a like, if you look at the whole season, it's like the big bad in that season is misogyny in various forms. And then like the thing that like... Yeah, I mean, I feel like I could talk a lot about how Sander is the worst. And I'm sure that we all could. Yeah.

Anna: And I think that gets to a little bit of our next question, which is, if it was not correct, or her conclusions were sort of problematic, or there are legitimate challenges to be made, then, like, what is the significance of this, witch call theory especially to sort of history of women and gender and science? And I think the Buffy conversation actually sort of addresses that a little bit like there's this enduring, popular culture like afterlife for this theory. But can you talk a little bit more about sort of in the like, history of science side of things like, how does this theory endure? And why is it kind of important? Why is it important to tell the stories of these kind of theories that are not successful, I guess, in the long run?

K. Sheppard: Yeah. So in the end, I think most folklorist, most scholarly folklorist say, "Okay, her conclusions were wrong." But what it actually did do is it really forced scholars to deal with folklore in a scholarly way. So, talking about this idea of covens and what's going on in Anglo folklore, or early modern stories of mysteries and things that are happening, and all that kind of stuff, scholars really hadn't been dealing with that in sort of a measured, evidence-based way.

K. Sheppard: So anthropologists ended up having to grapple with these ideas that were clearly based on faulty work, which meant that Murray ended up giving witchcraft and pagan practices, historical validity. And so she sort of helped the reaction to her, helped to turn folklore studies into a legitimate practice. So there's actually a whole industry in folklore studies about who believed Margaret Murray and why, in fact, that's the title of an article written by a woman named Jacqueline Simpson, just I think, maybe 10 years ago. I mean, it wasn't even that long ago that she wrote this, like, who believed her and why.

K. Sheppard: And also what it does for sort of the history of science is it sort of says, "Okay, we can look at this story, we can go, what did this woman who was clearly influential in Egyptology," you have to dig into find it, but you see it, and it is very clear, but look what she had to do, just to even get people to go, "Oh, there she is, look, she's doing these things." It was kind of like she was over here dancing on the sidelines, going, "Guys, I'm a thing. I'm a person, I say important stuff, just listen to me." And sort of shoving Petrie out of the way, or at least pushing herself away from him.

K. Sheppard: So there's that part. And then also, I argue that really, her witchcraft ideas are still like we were talking about all about powerful women, these covens were based on equality, women lifting each other up, worshiping something bigger than themselves, nature, but not something that they can't actually sort of get their hands on. These women formed small communities, who didn't really need men to validate their existence and one big fear that men had, and they still have about women getting together outside of their families is that all of a sudden, they decide that they didn't need men for anything.

K. Sheppard: And then what are we going to do with them, they're just going to go nuts. And if they're getting together outside of our families, they must just be having sex with each other. That's what witchcraft is obviously about, because that's what women will do if we're not there to control them, right?

Leila: And that would have been fine, too.

K. Sheppard: Yeah. But not for these men who kind of go, "If women can take care of themselves, where do we sit?" They're afraid of it. And I think that there is a part of male society today that's still sort of afraid of that idea of women going just to nuts and not needing us anymore kind of thing.

Rebecca: So why is it that we continue to find this idea of a secret society of magical women so fascinating?

K. Sheppard: Yeah. So again, it's about these powerful women being mysterious. And that mysterious women are really powerful. What sort of crazy power do women have to like grow life inside their bodies, and then push that life outside of their bodies, and then continues to feed that life with their bodies, like women are this weird, like life giving force, and they're just really sort of mysterious and powerful.

K. Sheppard: And on the one hand, kind of going back to this obstetrics side of things like men, historically, have wanted to control that medically. And then on the other hand, there's really no way to explain powerful women, sort of, for some people, except that they're scary, or they're dangerous, or they're mean, or they're nasty, or they need to be kept out of public arenas, because they are, in fact, very scary and powerful. And we just don't know what they're going to do.

Leila: This whole idea of women's bodies being super mysterious, and kind of out of this realm of knowledge for men is that even though, it was kind of out this realm of knowledge for men, they sill had an opinion about what was going on in there. So about the time that these witch cults would have been doing their thing is also when it was kind of this dominant belief that it's just like a mysterious cauldron of life going on in the uterus, right, like that, they didn't really have these expert, scientifically, medical opinions. And so it was just kind of this weird cauldron of life and mystery going on in there, too. So those ideas about what men thought was going on with women's bodies, and what these things that were going on when these witch cults were supposedly active, those kind of coincide together here, too.

Rebecca: And it just, and that kind of pointing out that parallel goes to show I think, also, just how enticing the like, witch cult hypothesis is, because it kind of says, "Yeah, men were coming up with all these like, weird, stupid theories about the history of women's bodies." And then there's group of women over here that are like, "No, actually, we are mysterious and powerful, and maybe kind of scary, but it's awesome." And so it's turning a lot of these assumptions about women's bodies, on their head. And wouldn't it be great if there had been this like parallel world where...? And in some ways there was, and that's also extended distinctness, it's like, almost true in a lot of ways and that women had their own societies.

Leila: One of the reasons that I was so attracted to the history of medicine and midwifery when I was in grad school, was because it was just kind of this robust field of like women's knowledges, and there was a concerted effort to not just, for men not to just know it, but to own it at the same time.

Rebecca: And just that idea that women are supposedly, like, useless and can't create legitimate knowledge. But at the same time, there's this like, massive campaign to [inaudible 01:03:14] that knowledge from women's hands and it's just incredible dissonance between the like, mainstream narrative that women can't do these kinds of thing, can't create, like valuable kinds of knowledge is and then this, like, massive effort to get everything that we can out of women, especially find out what's going on inside their wombs and stuff, you know?

K. Sheppard: Yeah, I totally agree. And there's also... There's one more connection I want to make. And it's a very simple one. But it kind of goes back to this idea of sort of powerful women and trying to control them. These witches, I mean, think about sort of manifestations of witches in pop culture in, yeah, I mean, in these books, in these histories, they're, sort of seen as really ugly. Their skin has turned funky colors, because they've done some of their magic wrong. They're ugly. They're mean, they cackle.

Leila: Old.

K. Sheppard: They're just these... They're old. They're just these evil women, and they're evil, because they're powerful. And they're clearly, they're their old maids, they can't get a man because they just have these powers that clearly, they're just, yeah, or they're lesbians. They're either old maid lesbians, or they're just old maids. So it's like, you just have this, all of this tied in together, and then you turn it into, yeah, I mean, just this stereotype, right, now, it's that powerful women aren't just witches, but they're more than that, they're even more evil than these witches because of the weird powers that they have.

K. Sheppard: So it just all kind of comes, yeah, it kind of comes full circle. We see it in pop culture, but we also see it in our daily lives of just being women in places of authority, and people just don't like it.

Rebecca: Yep.

Leila: Thank you for joining us, Kate, and talking with us about Margaret Murray and all of the knowledge that you have about her and the witch hypothesis, some of the the article that we talked about that Kate wrote, I will be including in the episode notes, and also some of the other articles and other sources that Kate had talked about today too.

K. Sheppard: Thank you very much.

Rebecca: Thank you for joining us.

Anna: Thanks Kate.

Leila: Good bye Kate.

Anna: At the end of every podcast, hosts will unburden themselves with one thing in the news, their work or the world in general that is just annoying the crap out of them. This is One Annoying Thing.

Leila: So this month, I am annoyed with Silicon Valley, it is not specific to this month by any means.

Anna: Yeah, what's new?

Leila: Yeah, what's new. So the thing that's bothering me about Silicon Valley this month, is the bio hacking stuff. The Guardian had a really extensive article about it and they interviewed one of the Silicon Valley executives that is partaking in bio hacking. But before I get to bio hacking specifically, there's this history of Silicon Valley people doing dumb stuff. And one of those things is... And this was I guess a couple years ago at this point, is the Soylent, the Soylent stuff.

Leila: So Soylent was a diet drink that was invented by a tech pro, who actually says he hates food. And he needed this kind of meal supplements to not have to eat. The idea was basically slim fast. The actual Soylent itself was actually awful. Like they weren't transparent about the ingredients. They told vegans it was vegan, and it wasn't. It made people violently ill. And apparently tasted like garbage. And anyway, it still was invested in by venture capitalists for $50 million. So it was a bad product, made people sick, was just a lie about what was in it. And it still got up for $50 million.

Rebecca: Maybe you shouldn't lie about what the ingredients in something that you're also calling Soylent.

Leila: Yeah, it's... Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Anna: Well, why not?

Rebecca: It makes you ill, couldn't be the cannibalism.

Leila: So anyway, he basically was trying to invent SlimFast. So SlimFast is something that has been traditionally marketed towards women for weight loss, they are no supplements, right? You have to can, they even have like the granola bars and stuff like that now, but their meal replacements that they're supposed to have the nutrition and calorie count of a meal, right?

Leila: So he basically was trying to reinvent SlimFast for men and tech people. And there was a article by Rose Eveleth that kind of showed that this was the gender double standard, that they were calling this meal supplement Soylent, a technology. Whereas for women, it's like dieting, right? That when you have these things invented by men from the Silicon Valley, that it's now more science, it's not [inaudible 01:08:45], right. So the same thing is kind of happening with the bio hacking. These Silicon Valley executives are going days without eating, they'll have like black coffee and water. And that's all they'll have.

Leila: And claims that are coming out of this by these men is that it helps them focus. It helps them just, I guess, get in touch with themselves. And they swear by it, say that it works, makes them better at their jobs, whatever. The thing is that this is just fasting, this is cleansing, I guess in a way, detoxing, whatever, all of these terms that we already know about, for weight loss. And they're calling it bio hacking to make it sound like it's a tech thing. And they do monitor themselves.

Leila: They monitor themselves and what's going on with their bodies throughout the fast and all of that. So I guess that's where the hacking, part of it comes in, you're hacking your body for a desired result. But the way that these men talked about it is, they post pictures of themselves with their shirts off, they're saying, they're claiming that it's not about weight loss, and yet, they're taking pictures of themselves with their shirts off, and like, like a gym selfie, so like, claiming that it's not about weight loss, it's not about what my body looks like. And yet here at the same time, they're putting these pictures of their bodies out there, which is, again, another gender double standard, right?

Leila: Is that when women do these types of things, when women don't eat for days at a time for weight loss, because they want their bodies to look better, is that it's, I mean, how can you hate yourself so much to starve yourself to not eat, right? All those types of things, that as soon as you get these men coming from a tech hub, doing these same things that women have been doing, and have been criticized for, in various ways that now it's somehow technology, somehow it's now science, and somehow it's not acceptable. And so that's why I'm annoyed about knowing about these gender double standards that come out of Silicon Valley. I mean, we don't have to talk about the sexual harassment, but that goes on there, too. So I mean, like Silicon Valley just seems like the worst valley that could...

Anna: Okay, well, what I'm annoyed about, this may change by the time you're hearing this episode, we're recording a little bit early. So, we'll see. But I'm annoyed about Star Trek Discovery. And more, I think, more than annoyed. I think I'm just really disappointed and really sad.

Anna: I think that it just, it really sucks that here as we face down the end of the world as we know it. It just is really hard to be let down by Star Trek, which is supposed to be the most sort of like hopeful vision of the future possible. Like I said, I will have seen more episodes by the time you are hearing this podcast, but I've seen the first two episodes. I watched them the day they came out. And I will keep this brief.

Anna: There is a complete disregard... Oh, I should say I will not... There will be spoilers. I don't think I can do this without spoilers. So if you haven't watched Discovery, go do that now. Pause the podcast, watch the show, then you can come back and listen to me, complain about it. So the first thing that really bothers me about it is that there's just sort of this like, total disregard for what are the very well established canonical politics of Star Trek, namely, not shooting first. I mean, Star Fleet doesn't shoot first. It's like that and the Prime Directive are the two most important rules that govern the way the universe works. And they are the things that produce all of the sort of hopefulness and progressive energy of Star Trek that makes me want to watch it.

Anna: So that is a huge bummer. And I won't go into exactly what happens, or how badly they bruise that particular rule of the universe.

Rebecca: But it's crazy pants.

Anna: It's crazy pants, it's really bad. There are a number of scenes and pieces of dialogue that contain some of the most regressive, poorly thought out... I don't see color kind of liberal commentary on race, that I almost had to turn it off and like, take a break. It is unbelievably bad. There's a whole situation with way the Klingons are portrayed. They have really cool makeup, but most of the Klingons have extremely dark skin. And then there's a sort of like, literally, outcast, Klingon who becomes the sort of savior of the situation, who has white skin, and I just can't I can't, I cannot...

Leila: Stand the fact that the Klingons are kind of coded black, right. And they're like religious zealots that are trying to like bring down the Federation, like, oh, my God.

Anna: Yeah, it's like, one of the things that it is so great about Star Trek is like when they actually spend a lot of time developing the different aliens. So like DC Fontana wrote most of the Vulcan lore, and sort of created this incredibly rich world. And the same thing has happened over time for the Klingons. I think like you get a lot of that stuff in TNG, we're Worf is exploring his heritage and like trying to understand the Klingon lifestyle. So you learn a lot about that stuff. And this kind of overturns all that, oh, it takes place before TNG, but it casts the Klingons as this like completely backward religious zealots.

Anna: But they are coded as the black characters. So there's a huge problem there. There's just some, like, stupid, stupid dialogue about like, I would... What is the like the admiral says something like, "Well, I would expect you to make judgments based on race or something like that. You should take it to culture." Like, really facile distinctions and like... Anyway.

Leila: At least with that, he's clearly supposed to be the stupid person in the room. But it's still a terrible life.

Anna: Yeah. And it's just like the whole... All right, got to move on. Or we're just never going to get done with this. The last thing, and this is like a bit of a spoiler. So by the end of the second episode, the show that has been sold to us for months by CBS as like Star Trek is back. It is as progressive as ever. Michelle Yeoh is the fricking captain. And she keeps her accent, and it's the coolest thing ever. And the first officers looks like badass black woman.

Anna: But no, it's the worst bait and switch ever. Because by the end of the second episode, you realize the captain is not an Asian woman. The first officer is a modern black woman because she doesn't even get to be the first officer anymore. And the fucking captain of this show, excuse my French, is actually Draco's dad. Jason Isaacs is the captain of the show, another white dude. Like, it's the worst kind of cynical like bait and switch to like, get you to subscribe to the CBS whatever it is and get you thinking that like this is the Star Trek that you've always wanted. And like here is something that Star Trek has never done like an Asian woman is a captain. She's super badass. A black woman, first officer, this like executive branch of the ship is run by women basically. But it's not. It's run by Draco's dad.

Leila: We have to now put an E rating on this episode because of your little rants.

Rebecca: You know what, Star Trek is worth swearing over.

Anna: I knew that was going to happen.

Leila: I agree.

Anna: It's kind of [inaudible 01:17:31]. I just can't.

Rebecca: My one like hope is that Star Trek pilots are notoriously bad. I feel like-

Anna: Yeah. That's true.

Rebecca: ... Almost every single pilot is terrible. And so like, there's this tiny hopeful part of me that is probably fueled by my Star Trek love because hopefulness that like hopes that it goes somewhere. But it's funny. I was sitting through the whole thing going, "This doesn't feel like a pilot. Why aren't we getting to know people? What the hell's is going on here?" And then every scene I'm like, "Oh, that's why that was terrible because now there's a reset. And I can [inaudible 01:18:07]."

Anna: Like the whole story that takes place in the first two episodes is just to reset into what is the actual story. So there's no point again know anybody like, Michelle Yeoh,dies so who cares about her?

Leila: [inaudible 01:18:23] guest star.

Rebecca: Oh, yeah.

Anna: It's just didn't feel like Star Trek to me. And I just feel like we all really needed some Star Trek. So my advice to you is to re watch TNG, skip the first two seasons and then start in season three.

Rebecca: Cool, well, I'll go last but not least, mine is in no way science related, really. But that's okay. My thing that's annoying me is everyone out there who says, "You know what we can do with statues of Confederate generals. We can put them in museums, that way we'll save history, but they don't have to be in the public."

Rebecca: And to which I say, "No, museums don't want your stupid Confederate statues." To back it up a little bit. So I'm sure many of you know over the summer, the debate over what to do with monuments to Confederate generals and other statues commemorating the Confederacy or other racist bits of history was reignited in part because of the march in Charlottesville, Virginia, which I got the state right this time as opposed to in the SRO where I got it wrong. Where there was a march about a Robert E. Lee statue, and a lot of terrible stuff happened. I don't need to rehash all of that.

Rebecca: But it means all people are talking about this. And this is none of the like talk that's happened around, this is new at all. It's the same debate that we've had every time this has come up. I think finally more people are starting to say, "No, actually, maybe the statues are bad." So I guess that's progress, but it's the same debate. And one thing that comes up a lot is people like, oh, people who try to do like, "We can be moderate and compromise in the like, yes, statues versus no statues debate." And that compromise is, "Sure, okay, let's take them down. But let's put them in a museum."

Rebecca: And most museums don't want the statues. That's not how museums work. Museums are not going to save everything that's old that you have feelings about, [inaudible 01:20:40] policies. Depending on what the museum is about, they're going to collect some things and not other things. Museums do not collect every single little knickknack that out there in the world that was mass produced, which most of these Confederate statues were conserving things takes a lot of money. Fun fact, if you ever want to donate something to a museum, ask them how much money they would like you to donate with it to catalog it.

Rebecca: Because that is a whole other section of money that or they're like donation that they need. And there's just a lot of them. No one, I don't think no one, most people don't think that every like building or piece of public art out there in the world should be put in a museum. So we don't certainly need every statue of Robert E. Lee that was mass produced in the 1890s by a bunch of white supremacist who were members of the KKK. We don't need all those in museums. Maybe a couple of them, maybe the ones that got torn down in significant historical events. Those can go in a museum about race and the Civil War and Reconstruction and all that stuff. All the others can go in the trash.

Leila: Well said. All right, well, that wraps us up for this episode. We are dedicated to making Lady Science accessible, so we are currently looking for someone to donate their time to help us transcribe our monthly episodes. If you're interested, please send us an email at [email protected]. Questions about any of the segments today? Tweet us at @ladyxscience or #ladiesiPod. To sign up for our monthly newsletter, read monthly issues for just an idea for an article and more, visit ladyscience.com. We are an independent magazine and we depend on the support from our readers and listeners. You can support us through a monthly donation with Patreon on four through one time donations, just visit ladyscience.com/donate, and until next time, you can find us on Facebook @LadyScienceMag and on Twitter at @ladyxscience.

Rebecca: Yay!

00:50:04

Hosts: Anna Reser, Leila McNeill, and Rebecca Ortenberg 

Guest: Jenna Tonn

Producer: Leila McNeill

Music: Careful! by Zombie Dandies 

In our pilot episode, learn about Lady Science Magazine, meet its editors, and join our discussion about the history of nursing. We discuss the mythic representation of Florence Nightingale, and historian of science Jenna Tonn joins us to talk about the historical roots of the "naughty nurse" trope. 

Florence Nightingale: Of Myths and Maths by Joy L. Rankin

Why Are We Still Talking About the Naughty Nurse by Jenna Tonn

Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History by Catherine Ceniza Choy

Black women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890-1950 by Darlene Clark Hine

American Nursing: A History of Knowledge, Authority, and the Meaning of Work by Patricia D’Antonio

Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing by Susan Reverby

Rebecca: Welcome to the first episode of the Lady Science podcast. Lady Science is an independent magazine about women in the history and popular culture of science, technology, and medicine. Whether dismissed outright, labeled witches or housewives, or forced to do their work on the margins of the scientific establishment, women have always been a constant presence and a formidable force in science. The story of science is often about the dogged and dangerous work of famous pioneers like Marie Curie, of course, but it is also about the ridiculed and marginalized practices of midwifery and domestic engineering and the unremembered women who were never given a chance to make their names.

Rebecca: This podcast is a monthly deep dive on topics that we address in the magazine, as well as about current events related to women in science and pop culture. You'll hear from writers who contribute to the magazine as well as historians, humanists, and other experts who work to recover the history of women in science. With you every month are the editors-in-chief and managing editor of Lady Science.

Anna: I'm Anna Reser, co-founder, co-editor-in-chief of Lady Science. I'm an artist, writer, and PhD student, and I study 20th century American culture and the history of the American space program in the 1960s.

Leila: I'm Leila McNeill, the other founder and editor-in-chief of Lady Science. Administrative science and freelance writer with words and various places on the internet. I'm currently a regular writer for women in the history of science at smithsonian.com.

Rebecca: And I'm Rebecca Wartenburg, Lady Science's managing editor. When I'm not working with the Lady Science team, I can be found writing about museums and public history around the internet, mostly on Twitter, and managing research projects at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Philadelphia.

Leila: This launch of the podcast marks Lady Science's three year anniversary. Anna and I began Lady Science three years ago as a monthly newsletter, which we released on Ada Lovelace Day 2014. Living in separate places, Anna and I wanted to continue working together after graduate school, and starting a project about women in the history of science, technology, and medicine was a topic that we both cared deeply about. The newsletter consisted of two essays that were written by us for most of the first year. After the first year, the project grew as we launched our own website, grew our readership, and added in contributing editors and writers and expanded our content.

Anna: Now the magazine consists of two core essays published every month on topics related to women and gender in the history of science. We think of the definition of science very, very broadly, which means that we write about women who did things that are not often considered proper science. We've written about women spiritualists, midwives and Ufologists, as well as more traditional fields, like geology or physics. We focus on the social and cultural context of women's scientific activities rather than individual biographies in order to understand how and why women have been excluded from participating in science. Between monthly issues, we publish hot takes on current events related to our interests, special series like our recent technological memoirs, and a weekly digestive feminist reading from around the web.

Rebecca: Right now we have five fantastic contributing editors. Joy Rankin, Kathleen Shepherd, Jenna Tonn, Robert Davis, and Sam Muka, and about a dozen writers who have contributed work over the last three years. You can learn more about all of us on our website, ladyscience.com.

Rebecca: For this first episode, we'd like to talk about one of our favorite magazine issues from this past year. Back in February, we ran two essays about nursing. One of those essays was about the naughty nurse trope in history and pop culture. Jenna Tonn, the essay's author, will be joining us a little bit later to talk more about that. The other essay was written by our long time contributing editor, Joy Rankin, and it was about Florence Nightingale. In that essay, Joy explored a side of the famous nurse that we don't necessarily see. Now, usually we don't like to publish pieces about famous figures like Nightingale, not because we don't love them, but because they take up so much space in people's minds when they're thinking about women's history and women in science, but Joy's essay really does something different. Here, Florence Nightingale isn't a saintly, feminine lady with the lamp that most people have heard about. She's a mathematician who led an incredibly unconventional life for a woman of her time. Appropriately, Joy titles her essay Florence Nightingale: Of Myths and Maths.

Anna: Before Nightingale was a nurse, she studied mathematics as early as age 11. Nightingale's father made sure that she was educated, something that wasn't common for girls in this period. Nightingale was a keen student, and even asked for private math lessons, but her decision to enter the field of nursing was ultimately disappointing to her family. In 1854, Nightingale was sent along with a group of nurses that she had trained to care for wounded soldiers in the Crimean War. It was here, supposedly because she cut an ethereal figure making her rounds in the evenings, though she earned the moniker The Lady with the Lamp.

Anna: But Nightingale was also gathering data about her patients and the conditions of the hospital she worked in. She found that soldiers were more likely to die at home or abroad during peace time than they were during war because of unsanitary conditions in cities. She wrote an 850 page book called Notes on Matters Affecting Health, Efficiency, and Hospital Administration of the British Army, a text that became a crucial part of hospital reform. Nightingale pushed her mathematical skill even further and developed the polar area graph to visualize causes of death from the Crimean War.

Anna: As a statistician, Joy argues that Nightingale saved more lives with mathematics than she did giving direct care as a nurse. Joy begins her article by saying, "The way we tell stories about women matters. The way we remember women matters." So, to sort of kick off the discussion, why, in the case of Nightingale, at least, does this matter? Why does it matter how we tell these stories about women?

Leila: I think this issue really boils down to representation, and this reminds me of the conversation surrounding trademark strong female characters in popular culture and how these women and their characters are usually written as flat characters with little to no motivation and no complex inner life, and, similarly, with Nightingale representing her only as The Lady with the Lamp flattens her and diminishes the other work that she did, and it's been easier to see her as a nurse in a historically gendered feminized field rather than in mathematics, a historically masculine gendered field. And, I think mythologizing her as an ethereal woman who cared for men in the night also sugarcoats the truly gruesome work that nursing could be, especially battlefield nursing. I mean, this was war, after all.

Anna: Yeah, there's something almost infantilizing, I think, about this Lady with the Lamp idea in that her real value to these soldiers was not her direct work as a nurse, or even her statistical innovations, but that she was just sort of a comforting figure and a symbol of femininity in a sort of hyper-masculinized environment, and it's such a powerful image and it's sort of very sticky kind of romanticization of war in general that it's really difficult to get past that, which is, I think, what's so important about Joy's essay. And, like you said, talking about mathematics as a gendered field, a masculine field, and sort of putting Nightingale into that context really sort of upends, I think, the mental image that we associate with Florence Nightingale, and with nurses in general.

Rebecca: Yeah, I think that infantilizing really is the word for it. It also, in some way, sort of, I feel like medicine has weirdly looped back to being, today, a feminine field. I mean, for so long, women were not doctors in the traditional sense, but now, as more women become doctors, now we're back to, oh, well, medicine, at least general practitioner medicine, is sort of starting to be considered feminine again and given kind of these Lady with the Lamp category, giving Lady with the Lamp category to it. I don't know, it does seem relevant to, sort of, women in medical care even more broadly in this way that we kind of are able to put women in medical care in this particular box by giving it these feminized qualities.

Leila: Yeah, and one of the things that we don't typically do in the magazine, like Rebecca mentioned, was that we cover in detail some of these big names of women in history that we all kind of know about, and Florence Nightingale is one of those. And the reason we don't really talk about those big names is because that they do overshadow the work done by everyday women. So, in this case, we remember Florence Nightingale, but we don't remember the hundreds of nurses that she trained and the ones that were also in Crimea. But I think it's still important to examine her life and legacy, because, as Joy shows, we haven't really done a great job of telling her life and legacy to begin with. And I don't think we need to stop talking about these big names, but we do need to be more mindful of how we tell these stories and to what ends we're using them. I don't know, what do you guys think?

Rebecca: Yeah, definitely, and I think that, especially because the way in which we talk about big names can have a pretty significant effect on how we talk about everyday women. So, Joy, in the essay, points out that nursing as a profession has been defined by the Nightingale myth. And like I was saying before, I think there's a certain degree to which women in medicine generally have been defined by that myth. So, because she's delicate and feminine, nurses are delicate and feminine, or she's kind and self sacrificing, and so nurses are kind and self sacrificing, and you're only able to give them the qualities that maybe Florence Nightingale was given. And so, if she's a rigorous scientist, maybe had no interest in social convention, then it, hopefully, opens the door for other women to be that as well.

Rebecca: Another thing I find really interesting about this essay is that it shows how real women who actually lived can still get turned into cliches. I think that there is a way in which we have a hard time, like "we" as in the culture, have a hard time thinking about women as fully fledged people, but also historical figures as fully fledged people, so, how about we talk about a little bit about how women get cast as tropes, especially in historical writing, or even in historical writing.

Leila: Yeah, yeah, and I think this goes back to the issue of representation that I was talking about earlier. We're so used to conceptualizing nursing as a feminized field that Nightingale so easily fits into this category. In this case, the category was kind of built around the myths we tell about her, also, but whereas her work in mathematics and statistics has required more recovery work. We don't typically expect to find women in mathematics, so we tend not to look for them there. This idea that historical figures present themselves to historians in an objective way is just trash, and that if historical women just presented themselves in historical record by merely existing there, then the recovery work done by mainly women historians throughout the, starting mainly in the 70s, wouldn't have been necessary in the first place.

Anna: So, I was thinking about this idea of women being turned into cliches, and I think this is one of those really deep historical issues that isn't confined to sort of like a profession, which is a modern phenomenon like nursing. I think that this goes back to the sort of turning science or logic or various liberal arts sort of into these female figures. Go with me on this.

Rebecca: [crosstalk 00:13:59] and like really picturing the, yeah, liberal arts...

Anna: Right, so there's...

Leila: Yeah.

Anna: Yeah, you can look at the phrontist pieces of, especially early modern printed books really go in for this kind of thing, but the personification of various ideas or concepts as women is like a really tenacious thing. It sort of still happens, I think, but there's also like Columbia as the figure of America, Britannia as the sort of figurehead of Britain, and I think that part of, my theory, I guess, about part of the reason why women are so often turned into cliches like this is because that's just how women have been allowed to exist in public as figureheads for ideas or concepts or, in the case of Florence Nightingale, an entire profession. And maybe part of the reason for that is because if you just have one woman who represents nursing, not only does that sort of control the image of a profession or a field or a concept, it also sort of precludes any other representation because you have this idealized figure that's supposed to encompass all of science or all of the ideals of Britain in this lovely woman in drapey clothing, and there's no reason to involve women in other representations of those ideas because you've created this idealized figure that's supposed to stand for everything that is valuable about what you're trying to represent.

Anna: So, and that's my sort of crunchy visual culture theory about this kind of cliché-ifying of women, and especially in, I think, professions, as we get into sort of the modern period, Nightingale's period, the professionalization of both the sciences and medicine in other fields also meant the masculinization. So, there's a reifying of what it means to be a professional and to be engaged in this field at a professional level, and that kind of reifying force is always going to just sort of shave away women. So, I think what you said, Leila, about how we remember Florence Nightingale but not the hundreds of nurses that she trained is really important for kind of thinking about how these types of representations and this mode of representation is part of the reason we have such a hard time recovering the history of everyday women in science and medicine.

Leila: This question I have goes along with representation as well, and representation kind of how it specifically applies to women, and it's not specific to nursing, but it's this idea of trying to impose sexuality onto historical figures. And Joy addresses the long standing assumptions by historians that Nightingale was a lesbian because she didn't have a traditional marriage that would've been expected of her. Instead, she lived with women companions throughout her life. And historians have also guessed at astronomer Maria Mitchell's sexuality, who also never married and surrounded herself with the company of women. And Joy calls this queer instead of guessing at Nightingale's sexual orientation. So, what are your thoughts on why framing these women as queer instead of lesbian matters?

Rebecca: So, this is one of those issues that I am super fascinated by and never have a satisfying, like straightforward answer for, which is probably why it's so fascinating. On the one hand, there is something weird about the idea that calling Florence Nightingale a lesbian is sexualizing her, but tacitly assuming that she's straight is not sexualizing in any way. But, I also understand all of the cultural context that means that that's a thing. And I do feel, in general, that sometimes historians, they can be too quick to define people, but they can also be too quick to protest when historical figures are given modern LGBT labels. They can say, "Well, these are anachronistic, so you can't call them that, even if various kinds of evidence apply." And that can be a way of erasing LGBT people from the historical record in the name of accuracy.

Rebecca: On the other hand, I do really like the word queer, and I like how it's used in this context. I think it can be a valuable way of talking about Nightingale. I think it emphasizes that Nightingale structured her life in a way that was radical by not getting married by kind of centering her personal life and her professional life around women. It doesn't really matter who she was or maybe wasn't sleeping with, it really matters that she built her life outside the gendered expectations of her time, and that's what I think queer has come to represent in historical writing, which is pretty cool. As someone who has worked in the museum field and as public historian, I've also seen this come up in really interesting ways in historic houses by significant women. Especially, I feel like, it comes up in significant 19th century women.

Rebecca: In particular, the Jane Addams Hull-House in Chicago has done some really interesting work, often publicly grappling with the way to talk about Jane Addams' partners who were women and, I think, at least one of whom she lived with for decades. And the whole house has, their historical interpretation is, in general, been very socially conscious, and so, I feel like they had a place where they could enter that conversation. Also, interestingly enough, currently, the National Trust in the UK in explicitly trying to look at different ways to examine what they call LBGTQ history in historic houses across the UK.

Leila: Wow.

Rebecca: Yeah, yeah. It's because it's the 50th anniversary of the decriminalization of homosexuality in Britain, so I feel like the BBC has all this stuff going on and the National Trust has this stuff going on. They have, of course, gotten pushback from all of the lovely conservative newspapers in the UK, but they seem to be doing some cool stuff there. So, British people listening to this, go check that out.

Rebecca: I can't, I'm sad.

Leila: Yeah, I agree with so much of what you said, and I'm in no way an authority on LGBTQ history in science, this is just kind of the observations that I've made, that historians have made, about women in science.

Rebecca: And I did want to say that neither am I. Although, actual historians of this stuff should feel free to correct us on anything.

Leila: Yeah, yeah. Leave us a comment. But, the imposing, or at least guessing at sexual identities on historical figures who weren't out or clear about their sexuality in their personal writings, this seems to be unevenly distributed in that I find that it seems to happen to women historical figures more than men. And so, I think that goes with your concern, Rebecca, that calling Nightingale a lesbian could sexualize her. It feels like it can border on the male gaze rather than genuine historical recovery. And also, perhaps it is unevenly applied to women because the gender social rules were so, so strict for women that really all they had to do was fart in public to break them. So, when women stepped out of line, it really was so much more visible.

Anna: And I just want to add...

Leila: Yeah, yeah.

Anna: Just one thing about that, what you say about women stepping out of line is much more visible, it's completely acceptable for men in Nightingale's period to have an entirely homo-social group that they build their lives around.

Leila: Yes.

Anna: It is not acceptable for women to do that.

Rebecca: Well, even more interestingly, my understanding is it's acceptable for young women to do that, but then you get married, and you give up all of your girlfriends. Because you're not [crosstalk 00:24:11]. Yeah.

Anna: You're not supposed to have any kind of professional life anyway, you're supposed to be married, and to engage in that kind of professional life and be surrounded mostly by women is just so far outside the norm.

Leila: Yeah. Yeah, and that it was acceptable for men at this time to kind of have a, as you said, homo-social group, is that our expectations of masculinity have changed since then as well, right?

Anna: Oh, yeah.

Leila: That having that kind of close intimate circle of male friends is kind of stepping outside of modern toxic masculinity, right? And so, I think there's that going on there as well. Our changing expectations, and not just what women can and cannot do, but also what men can and cannot do.

Rebecca: And it's also worth noting, kind of, this goes more to the problem of maybe why it feels like it is placed upon women, without explicit evidence that a woman was queer or lesbian or bisexual or whatever, more than men, I mean, besides sexism, but I think also the fact that there were visible gay male spaces in the 19th century and there were not visible gay female spaces also because of the fact that male homosexuality was criminalized. I think a lot of people who research gay men and the history of male homosexuality get a lot of their evidence from police records. And so, even then, you have to come at it sideways, but at least the police records exist, which is terrible, but also really great for historians.

Leila: Yes.

Rebecca: And there isn't an equivalent for women.

Leila: Yeah, that's true.

Rebecca: Only people being snarky about women, and people were snarky about all women who stepped out of line.

Leila: Yeah, absolutely.

Anna: Okay, so, speaking of tropes and representation, let's switch over to Jenna's article, Why Are We Still Talking About The Naughty Nurse? This is an interesting article because it takes a look at the broader cultural and social representation of women nurses, but in the process, Jenna also explores the feminization of the field of nursing, something that has happened in other scientific fields as well. So, please welcome Jenna Tonn, contributing editor for Lady Science.

J. Tonn: Hi. It's great to be here, thank you for inviting me.

Anna: Welcome.

Rebecca: Yay! Happy to have you.

J. Tonn: So, to introduce myself, my name is Jenna, I'm a historian of science. I got my PhD in 2015 from Harvard, and my research is mostly about women and gender in science in the 19th century, so I'm writing a book about the social lives of men and women and experimental biological laboratories in the 1890s to the 1930s. And, currently, I'm a visiting assistant professor in Boston College in history and science and technology studies.

Rebecca: Welcome. So, just to kick us off, what drew you to write this particular essay?

J. Tonn: Yeah, so the idea for this essay actually came from a conversation I was having with my students. Every year, I teach a seminar called Women in American Medicine, and there's a unit where we read about the history of nursing. And my students were shocked how little they knew about the history of nursing and how complicated and interesting and fascinating the topic has to be. And one of the questions one of my students asked is, if the history of nursing is such a serious and complicated topic, why does everyone dress up as sexy nurses on Halloween? Like, what is the deal with this tension between a really serious sort of set of historical questions and the pop culture world where women are overtly sexualized and where you can log onto Amazon and see 10 thousand or more, there are probably more, skimpy nurse costumes that you can buy for a night out in October? So, that was like what was really getting me thinking about trying to connect large conversations in pop culture about the sexualization of women's bodies with these more detailed, and I think really thoughtful, conversations in the history of medicine.

Anna: And this is exactly the kind of thing that we really love to do at Lady Science to just sort of interrogate something that seems like a very normal part of the texture of our modern world and figure out where it came from. So, why are we still talking about naughty nurses?

J. Tonn: Right, that is the question. I mean, I think people have different answers, but one of the things that I found myself concluding as I was doing the research for this article is that thinking about nurses in the context of pop culture actively erases the hard work that mostly women do as nurses. It, in some ways, takes the caregiving role, it sets it off side, it sets it in a more demeaning place, and it allows us not to have to think really hard about the fact that caregiving is really central to our experiences at home and in the hospital, and it also allows us not to think really hard about the fact that we all are sick at various times in our lives and want to get better. And we all have physical interactions with nurses in hospital settings or in doctor settings that are often difficult and uncomfortable because we are not feeling great.

J. Tonn: And so, I think the sexualization of nurses is overlaid onto this larger uneasiness with this caregiving role and its association with women and women's bodies and the feminization of certain kinds of labor practices. So, that was one of the things that I think I found myself getting to towards the end of this article.

Leila: Yeah. Some of the tropey images and stuff that you pick up on that nurses have kind of been plugged into, you included some really great illustrations to go along with that, and I really enjoyed being able to go through them when we were laying out the issue. But, each one of those kind of falls into that, those tropes that you're talking about. There's the one of the angelic representation of a nurse with her arms outstretched in front of a red cross, one that looks like an intimate moment with a nurse and her male patient, and then a couple of others that were really fun, well, you know, kind of fun. Fun in kind of a...

J. Tonn: Fun in a particular way, yeah.

Leila: Yeah, yeah. In a kind of like, "Hm, that's a interesting historical thing." But, what was your favorite that you found while you were doing your research?

J. Tonn: Yeah, so, a lot of these I found from the National Library of Medicine's Zwerdling Postcard Collection, and you can google it and they have like hundreds and hundreds of these, and I think what I really liked, besides being disturbed by a lot of them, was the shift that you see if you put some of them in historical sequence. So, the one that you were talking about, there's one from around World War I, and what we see is we see a white nurse in a very stereotypical nurse outfit kissing a white patient who's come back from the front, and the tagline is not in the prescription, because she's holding a little bit of medicine. And so here it's sort of the chaste, virginal kiss, it's very much in the context of romantic representations of women. You also get the sense of, since men have gone off to war, they then deserve not only to be taken care of, but to be taken care of by sexually available nurses. There's a lot going on in this postcard.

J. Tonn: And then, just a few decades later, around or after the time period of World War II, you have a completely different visual representation of nurses. Like, the nurse is a pinup girl, the postcard that I'm talking about, what you see is you see a very scantily clad woman nurse bending over, so you see her rear end, and there are two clothed men, one doctor, who says, "Read the top line and then skip to the bottom." Who's talking to another male patient who's doing an eye exam. So, hopefully you can post the image so people can see it. And, I think what is fascinating about this is the casual sexism that's inherent in the representation of the nurse and the presumption of the male gaze. So, here we have two basically clothed men looking at a very scantily clad woman, and I think that, the shift from the more chaste kiss to the overt sexualization of women's rear ends.

J. Tonn: Historians talk about this moment as a crisis of masculinity that surrounds soldiers' return from the home front in World War II. So, you suddenly have anxieties around new kinds of injuries that soldiers have, you have rising status of nurses and hospitals that are expanding that actually need nurses who are technically trained to do anesthesia work, to do rehabilitation, to work in these new, one might say, expansive hospital industries. So, as the status of nurses are rising, what do you do to try to reverse that? You create a hierarchy and you use overt forms of sexual objectification to, essentially, undermine the professional expertise that these women have to have to do the jobs that they're doing.

Rebecca: Can I just jump in and say, this just hit me as you were describing it, but the eye exam image, it's literally the male gaze.

J. Tonn: Yes. Oh, yeah.

Leila: He's literally testing his male gaze.

J. Tonn: Right, right. I love that reading of it. I mean, that's the thing that makes it so interesting, it's like so overt, it's too overt in a way.

Leila: Right.

Anna: So, you write a little bit about how race and class intersect in American nursing, but how these complicated dynamics are completely absent from our sort of popular culture idea of what nursing entails and the tropes of nursing. You write that, quote, "Gender expectations allowed women to seek meaningful employment as nurses, they also revealed how relationships between women fragmented along racial and class lines." Can you talk a little bit more about what this fragmentation looked like?

J. Tonn: Sure. Yeah, and I think this is one of the really important aspects of thinking about the history of nursing, and also a really important aspect of thinking about feminism more broadly and women in science more broadly, that it's impossible to talk about all women as part of the same group. And when you start thinking about women as an essential or universal population, what actually happens is you start to see that gender solidarity does not always cross class lines or lines of ethnicity or lines of race or lines of religion, and you see that quite a bit in the history of nursing. So, when you read about the earlier 19th century history of nursing, just the point in time when nursing becomes a professional occupation for women, which is really great for women and also really challenging.

J. Tonn: So, it's really great because it offers them a chance to get paid to do work outside of the home that is appropriate to their gender performance in the world, but it's also really hard because this work is underpaid, super physically demanding, and, often, the oversight is such that women are trapped in a hospital, essentially, so that they're able to do their duties in a timely way. And what you learn about in this context is that you often have sort of vertical forms of harassment among women, so you have head nurses who are quite controlling and abusive towards nurse trainees.

J. Tonn: And the other thing that you see is you often see nurses themselves who form specific cliques based on their origins or based on their class or religion. And when you talk about nursing more in the 20th century, what you often see, especially in the context of the history of African American nurses, is white women who are forming major nursing organizations who are excluding black women for racial reasons. And you also see, I would say more broadly, one of the things that historians of African American nurses talk about is that to think about black women as nurses, you actually have to think about the long history of nursing and slavery. So, in the context of slavery, enslaved women did not have a choice about whether or not they had to assume caregiving roles.

J. Tonn: So, Sharla Fett has this great book called Working Cures, and she talks about how in the context of slave plantations, older enslaved women were forced not only to care for communities of slaves on plantations, they were also forced to care for the white slaveholders' families. And so, to talk about the history of race and nursing in this context means casting your gaze back into the 19th century and then looking forward into the 20th century. So, talking about nursing gets us into all of these other larger questions about women and the very different ways in which they've navigated the world.

Rebecca: That's a great place to end, I feel like.

J. Tonn: Okay. Great.

Rebecca: So, yeah, thanks. Sorry.

J. Tonn: Thanks for having me.

Rebecca: Yeah, thanks so much for chatting with us. Like Leila said, we'll include both the article we discussed in the episode notes, and links to some of those nursing illustrations that we talked about.

Anna: At the end of every podcast, hosts and guests will unburden themselves with one thing in the news, their work, or in the world in general that is just annoying the crap out of them. This is one annoying thing.

Leila: So, one thing that's been annoying me for some time, and calling this an annoyance is an understatement, but I'm getting increasingly uncomfortable with the rhetoric of economics and capitalism making its way into social justice activism. Quote, "It's bad for business" has become a popular argument for opening our borders to immigrants and refugees, and for allowing trans folks to use the restroom that aligns with their gender identity. And in the past few months, Texas, where I am currently living, has been embroiled in issues of immigration and trans rights over the past year. So, these economic arguments are being wielded quite a bit by progressive politicians and advocates against discriminatory immigration and LGBT legislation.

Leila: For decades, immigrants of all stripes have been scapegoated as a drain on the economy, all the while stealing scarce jobs from hardworking, homegrown Americans. And we know this isn't true, as study after study, economist after economist has told us. So, you've seen the rhetoric of economics to avoid legislation that protects immigrants is a compelling one that is grounded in well-documented research. A similar stance emerged in favor of trans rights when North Carolina passed their infamous bathroom bill last year, and this has served as a precedent for what Texas has been working toward also. In the wake of North Carolina's legislation that barred trans people from using the bathroom that matched their gender identity, businesses suffered when high profile bands like Mumford and Sons pulled North Carolina from their tour. And, in an increasingly socially liberal, national, and global society, regressive discriminatory legislation is becoming unprofitable, which is good in its own way, and reaching for economic arguments is low hanging fruit in a capitalist hungry society.

Leila: So, I understand why it's an attractive argument, and it does seem to be somewhat effective. The problem I have with this, however, is that, instead of advocating for immigrants and trans folks as holding inherent value as humans, they are being reduced to dollar signs. Their civil rights are being quantified on a spreadsheet. And quote, "It's bad for business" is not a social justice sentiment, it's a sentiment rooted in the best interest of a capitalist institution. It de-centers the humanity and civil rights of the marginalized communities that are effected. And I don't really have much hope that politicians will abandon economic-based arguments for social justice, but those of us who are interested in civil rights absolutely should.

Anna: Okay, so, my one annoying thing this week is a man congratulating himself publicly of being attracted to his wife. So, if you're on Twitter, you probably saw this, and I have just been fuming about it since I first came across this. There is a person described as an American entrepreneur, I don't know if that means he sells Herbalife on Facebook or what, but Robbie Tripp, who posted on his Instagram a picture of him and his wife at the beach in their beach clothes, and he posted this long caption about, I'll quote a little bit of it but not all because it's gross. Quote, "I love this woman and her curvy body. As a teenager, I was often teased by my friends for attraction to girls on the thicker side."

Anna: So, first of all, this woman is your wife, and you don't get a cookie for being attracted to your wife, no matter what her body looks like, that's just sort of basic human decency. But the thing that got really irritating about this is that it got picked up, the first one that I saw was Buzzfeed picked this up and wrote a little non-story about this, and their subheading was, the heading was something like, Man Is Getting Praised For His Support Of His Curvy Wife, or whatever, and then the subhead was, I'm not crying, you're crying.

Anna: And it's just, I think that it's really, first of all, it's really dumb that we're paying attention to this dude at all. Like, this is not newsworthy. But, the way that it has been made newsworthy by places like Buzzfeed, is trading on this idea that in order for body positivity, which has been historically a movement led by women, that somehow we need men to validate the idea of body positivity, first of all, and to do that by making their sexual preferences public about what kinds of women they're sexually attracted to. And then, another thing that he does is he admonishes other men for having their own sexual preferences about women's bodies. So, that's just what every girls wants to be embroiled in is a conversation between men about whether or not they're worthy of love based on the size of their butts. That's really fantastic.

Anna: And, I guess, the final thing that just really irritates me about this is that women who are, even if they're not explicitly in the business of being body positivity advocates, women who fall outside of sort of straight model sizes posting pictures of themselves or saying things about themselves that this guy has said about his wife, are always, always, always met with concerned trolling about the dangers of being overweight, or just outright harassment of people telling them that they're disgusting whales or whatever. So, there's a real double standard about who gets to be invested in body positivity and who we get to listen to about it, and I don't know. Like I said, it's a non-story, but I find it really irritating and I just, you don't get a cookie for thinking that your wife is attractive. I don't understand. I'll let it go there, otherwise I'll just go on a, I'll spiral out of control.

Rebecca: So, I feel like it's very on brand that we are all annoyed about either the patriarchy or capitalism. I'm going to return to-

Leila: Or both.

Rebecca: Or both. I mean, we're usually annoyed with both, and I feel like this is probably going to be a recurring theme. For my one annoying thing, I'm going to return to capitalism. So, this is something that has been annoying me for a while, and I think one of the things that annoys me is that whenever I think this particular story is over, it rises like a zombie and I want it to go away again, and it doesn't and I get mad. I'm really tired of technology companies who want to reinvent public transportation infrastructure, which sounds really fancy pancy when I put it that way, but it's just driving me crazy.

Rebecca: About a year ago, I was talking to a friend who lives in Oakland, California, which is relevant because said friend knows people who work at Google. And so, there's a guy that she knows who works at Google, and the Google guy was talking about the new plan to attach self-driving cars together in a caravan, and then those caravans would travel along specific routes built only for them, and use them to transport goods a long distance. And, in response, I was like, "You have literally just described a train." And this was dismissed. Then, at Christmas, I guess then this idea became more of a thing, and by Christmas there had been news about it that my family was talking about some article with the related idea. And so, I was still like, "You've just described a train."

Rebecca: So then, back in June, this escalates to Lyft launched their shuttle service, which lets users, and I quote, "Ride for a low fixed fare along convenient routes with no surprise stops." Which sounds lovely until you think about it for two seconds and realize they're talking about a bus. They literally just described a bus, and buses exist in their thing and we don't need privat buses, necessarily. And, yeah, it's easy to make fun of because we're all familiar with buses, but there are these dangerous, I think genuinely important, social implications to think about because whether it is, I mean, trains are semi-privatized, but there's a public/private aspect to them. Buses are usually a public good in some way, it's called public transportation for a reason, and you're taking all of those things and you're just completely privatizing it. You're saying these things are imperfect, and sometimes really crappy, so we're just going to have a private company totally fix this problem. But, if something is completely privatized, it's no longer available to the same people. That has, of course, racial implications, it has gender implications, it has class implications.

Rebecca: And I just kind of want all of that to go away. I don't want us to think that Lyft is going, or Google or self-driving cars, are going to solve all of the public transportation issues in the country. Until it does, I will probably keep being mad about it. Yeah. Grr. Stop ruining public goods.

Anna: I think that's a great place to sign off today. So, if you have questions about any of our segments, tweet us at @ladyxscience or #LadySciPod. To sign up for our monthly newsletter, read monthly issues, pitch us an idea for an article and more, visit ladyscience.com. We are an independent magazine and we depend on the support from our readers and listeners. You can support us through a monthly donation with Patreon or through a one-time donation. Just visit ladyscience.com/donate. And, until next time, you can find us on social media at Facebook and Twitter.