Women invented all the core technologies that made civilization possible. This isnât some feminist myth; itâs what modern anthropologists believe. Women are thought to have invented pottery, basketmaking, weaving, textiles, horticulture, and agriculture. Thatâs right: without womenâs inventions, we wouldnât be able to carry things or store things or tie things up or go fishing or hunt with nets or haft a blade or wear clothes or grow our food or live in permanent settlements. Suck on that.
Women have continued to be involved in the creation and advancement of civilization throughout history, whether you know it or not. Pick anythingâa technology, a science, an art form, a school of thoughtâand start digging into the background. Youâll find women there, I guarantee, making critical contributions and often inventing the damn shit in the first place.
Women have made those contributions in spite of astonishing hurdles. Hurdles like not being allowed to go to school. Hurdles like not being allowed to work in an office with men, or join a professional society, or walk on the street, or own property. Example: look up Lise Meitner some time. When she was born in 1878 it was illegal in Austria for girls to attend school past the age of 13. Once the laws finally eased up and she could go to university, she wasnât allowed to study with the men. Then she got a research post but wasnât allowed to use the lab on account of girl cooties. Her whole life was like this, but she still managed to discover nuclear fucking fission. Then the Nobel committee gave the prize to her junior male colleague and ignored her existence completely.
Men in all patriarchal civilizations, including ours, have worked to downplay or deny womenâs creative contributions. Thatâs because patriarchy is founded on the belief that women are breeding stock and men are the only people who can think. The easiest way for men to erase womenâs contributions is to simply ignore that they happened. Because when you ignore something, it gets forgotten. People in the next generation donât hear about it, and so they grow up thinking that no women have ever done anything. And then when women in their generation do stuff, they think âitâs a fluke, never happened before in the history of the world, ignore it.â And so they ignore it, and it gets forgotten. And on and on and on. The New York Times article is a perfect illustration of this principle in action.
Finally, and this is important: even those women who werenât inventors and intellectuals, even those women who really did spend all their lives doing stereotypical âwomenâs workââthey also built this world. The mundane labor of life is what makes everything else possible. Before you can have scientists and engineers and artists, you have to have a whole bunch of people (and itâs usually women) to hold down the basics: to grow and harvest and cook the food, to provide clothes and shelter, to fetch the firewood and the water, to nurture and nurse, to tend and teach. Every single scrap of civilized inventing and dreaming and thinking rides on top of that foundation. Never forget that.
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