Jeanne Villepreux-Power - Women's History Month 10

This month I wish to introduce to you some outstanding women...some of whom are still alive. And some you already know well, but I've enjoyed especially learning about women I'd not heard about until recently.  

Number ten is an oustanding example of how a woman from the 18th century was able to become a scientist, with no training or support for her to do so.

Jeanne Villepreux-Power (1794–1871)

When she was 17 she began her 186 mile walk from her home in rural France to her dream job as a seamstress in Paris. On the way, the cousin assigned as her guardian sexually assaulted her and fled with her identity papers. Jeanne found shelter in a convent and, as soon as she had new travel documents, kept going. By the time she made it to Paris, the position she had been promised was already taken. The only job she could secure was as a seamstress’s assistant.

Four years (and thousands of dresses) later, Jeanne was tasked with outfitting a duchess for a royal wedding. At the ceremony, she met and fell in love with an English merchant, married & moved with him to Messina, Sicily. There, she immersed herself in reading about geology and natural history and set out to study the island’s ecosystem.

Walking the shoreline and wading into the sea in her long skirts, she observed one of Earth’s most alien life-forms: the small octopus Argonauta argo, known as paper nautilus. This creature had fascinated naturalists like Aristotle and Leonardo da Vinci with the mystery of its spiral shell. They wondered whether the animal made it, or, like the hermit crab, inherited as a hand-me-down.

Observing argonauts in the wild is incredibly difficult — the skittish creatures flee the surface and plunge into the depths as soon as they feel they are being approached, puffing a cloud of ink between themselves and their perceived predator.

To bypass their shyness, Jeanne designed and constructed the world’s first offshore research station— a system of immense cages she anchored off the coast, complete with observation windows through which she could study the argonauts undisturbed. Every day, she prepared food for them, rowed her boat to the cages, and knelt at the platform, making notes & drawings.

For closer observation, Jeanne invented the first aquarium. Her home became a marine biology lab, stacked with vast tanks. She started with the obvious yet radical insight that you cannot understand the living morphology of a creature by studying dead specimens (how all naturalists studied at the time). To find out when and how the argonaut gets to have a shell, you must observe it from birth. She wrote: “I armed myself with patience and courage, and only after several months managed to dissolve my doubts and see my research crowned with happy confirmation.”

In a series of groundbreaking experiments she began in 1833 — the final year of her thirties — the seamstress-turned-scientist solved the ancient mysteries of whether, how, and when the argonaut makes its spiral home: she demonstrated “by unequivocal proofs, that the female Argonauta octopus is the builder of its shell.”

Her most revolutionary experiment demonstrated a phenomenon no one had ever imagined. Jeanne made a small puncture in the shell of an adult female to see whether and how the animal would repair itself, and what that might reveal about its intelligence, in an era when science was yet to recognize the consciousness of non-human animals. She watched in marvel as the octopus protruded its front arms and, sweeping the silvery membranes previously thought to function as sails over the puncture like a windshield wiper, seal it back into cohesion with a glutenous substance, the chemical composition of which she analyzed and determined to be identical to the calcium carbonate of the original shell. The restored part, she observed, was more robust than the shell itself, “somewhat bumpy, puffy,” not following the regular furrows of the shell but corrugating sideways, a sort of scar.

Next, she developed an experiment that only someone who had spent years sewing pieces of fabric together might consider. She decided to see whether the argonaut could repair its shell using spare parts. She broke off a small piece of an adult’s shell, but this time she placed in the tank next to it fragments from other shells. To her astonishment, the argonaut rushed to the pieces and began feeling them out with its arms, searching for the suitable shape, then applied it to its own shell and began the work of welding, struggling to orient the furrows of the borrowed piece parallel to those of its existing shell to patch the hole.

She spent hours bent over the cage, watching this staggering feat of multiple intelligences. Naturalists before her, working only with dead specimens and theoretical conjecture, had declared this impossible.

Since women were excluded from the scientific establishment, unable to attend universities or speak at learned societies, her research was transmitted to the world by proxy. In 1839, Sir Richard Owen — England’s preeminent scientist in the era before Charles Darwin, read one of her letters and presented her findings to the London Zoological Society. Her research was a revelation. Soon, it was being published in English, French, and German, and circulated widely across Europe. By the end of her long life, she belonged to more than a dozen scientific societies. Her research not only illuminated an enduring mystery about the physiology and biology of a particular species of octopus, but, through her experiments on shell repair, laid the groundwork for the study of octopus intelligence, which has forever changed our understanding of consciousness itself.

Source: Women in History

"The Girl Who Built an Ocean: An Artist, an Argonaut, and the True Story of the World's First Aquarium" by Jess Keating. Jeanne Villepreux-Power began her life as a dressmaker, sewing fancy gowns for Parisian aristocracy – but when she married and moved to the seaside, she discovered a new passion for studying the ocean’s mysteries! She loved collecting shells and examining specimens, and she was particularly fascinated by the argonaut or paper nautilus. But argonauts were so shy that she struggled to study them. If only she could keep them where they were easy to see… and just like that, an idea was born. Jeanne built a glass box so she could take a piece of the ocean home and invented the world's first aquarium. In this lively new picture book, Keating, the bestselling author of "Shark Lady," vividly captures the curiosity and perseverance of this pioneering woman whose invention has inspired countless people around the world. Highly recommended for ages 5 to 9.

Another great article is available at The Marginalian

Ruth Bader Ginsburg - Women's History Month - 9

A woman for all time, well deserved to be in Women's History Month!

The ERA:

When Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was asked what amendment she would most like to see added to the U.S. Constitution, she replied that she would choose "the Equal Rights Amendment," noting that when her granddaughters read the Constitution, she would like them to see "that that is a basic principle of our society." Although more than 80% of countries guarantee gender equality in their constitutions, including, as Ginsburg noted "every constitution written since the Second World War" -- the period during which most of the world's constitutions were written -- the world's oldest written constitution does not include this protection.

In effect since 1789, the U.S. Constitution was written during a period when gender equality was far from being an important societal value. Over time, the US has passed many laws protecting women's rights but, as Ginsburg observes, "Legislation can be repealed. It can be altered... That principle belongs in our Constitution." The U.S. Constitution is exceedingly difficult to amend, however the ERA was nearly added to the Constitution forty years ago. The Amendment, which was originally drafted by suffragist Alice Paul in 1923, was approved by both houses of Congress and endorsed by then President Richard Nixon in 1972. It then went to the states for approval, but ultimately only received 35 of the 38 state ratifications needed to become a Constitutional Amendment.

Today, there is renewed interested in an Equal Rights Amendment, which, according to Ginsburg, would recognize that "women are people equal in stature before the law." Many older women's rights activists observe that young people are often shocked to learn that the Constitution does not guarantee equal rights for women; in fact, one survey found that 72% of adults incorrectly believed that the Constitution included such a gender equality guarantee. Justice Ginsburg did not see the passage of the ERA in her lifetime, She said it's an essential part of ensuring women's equal protection, observing that a "prime part of the history of our Constitution is the story of the extension of constitutional rights to people once ignored or excluded."

RGB's life:

Here is the excellent biography from Britannica

Wikipedia says this:

Joan Ruth Bader Ginsburg ; March 15, 1933 – September 18, 2020) was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1993 until her death in 2020. She was nominated by President Bill Clinton to replace retiring justice Byron White, and at the time was generally viewed as a moderate consensus-builder. She eventually became part of the liberal wing of the Court as the Court shifted to the right over time. Ginsburg was the first Jewish woman and the second woman to serve on the Court, after Sandra Day O'Connor

Ginsburg was born and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. Her older sister died when she was a baby, and her mother died shortly before Ginsburg graduated from high school. She earned her bachelor's degree at Cornell University and married Martin D. Ginsburg, becoming a mother before starting law school at Harvard, where she was one of the few women in her class. Ginsburg transferred to Columbia Law School, where she graduated joint first in her class.

Despite two bouts with cancer and public pleas from liberal law scholars, she decided not to retire in 2013 or 2014 when Obama and a Democratic-controlled Senate could appoint and confirm her successor. Ginsburg died at her home in Washington, D.C., on September 18, 2020, at the age of 87, from complications of metastatic pancreatic cancer. The vacancy created by her death was filled 39 days later by Amy Coney Barrett, a conservative. 

The Wikipedia article has much more information about her long life and many judicial decisions.

She left a great impact on women's rights.

Women's History - 8 Maria Popova

Maria Popova, born July 28, 1985 in Bulgaria.

Author and bi-weekly publisher of the Marginalian, formerly Brain Pickings. There are 3.5 thousand people looking at these interesting mergers of genius from different fields on their similar leanings.

Wikipedia says: "In addition to her writing and related speaking engagements, she has served as an MIT Futures of Entertainment Fellow, as the editorial director at the higher education social network Lore, and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic, Wired UK, and other publications. Since 2010, she has resided in Brooklyn, New York.

One can subscribe for the free newsletter-styled Sunday Marginalian:

The Marginalian has a free Sunday digest of the week's most mind-broadening and heart-lifting reflections spanning art, science, poetry, philosophy, and other tendrils of our search for truth, beauty, meaning, and creative vitality.

Then there's the Wednesday issue, of which Maria says:

Because The Marginalian is well into its second decade and because I write primarily about ideas of timeless nourishment, each Wednesday I dive into the archive and resurface from among the thousands of essays one worth resavoring. 

The Universe in Verse has been a springtime project that gathers even more talented people since 2017 (as Maria says:)

"...as part celebration of the wonder of life and the splendor of reality, and part protest against the assault on science and nature — that is, on life and reality — in the era of “alternative facts” and vanishing environmental protections. An act of resistance and an act of persistence. Fierce insistence on the felicitous expression of nature in human nature, with our capacity for music and mathematics, for art and hope.

Her way of molding a topic from science or poetry together is exemplified in the following:

To be human is to live suspended between the scale of gluons and the scale of galaxies, yearning to fathom our place in the universe. That we exist at all — on this uncommon rocky world, just the right distance from its common star, adrift in a galaxy amid hundreds of billions of galaxies, each sparkling with hundreds of billions of stars, each orbited by numberless possible worlds — is already miracle enough. A bright gift of chance amid the cold dark sublime of pure spacetime. A triumphal something against the staggering cosmic odds of nothingness.

Stationed here on this one and only home planet, we have opposed our thumbs to build microscopes and telescopes, pressing our curiosity against the eyepiece, bending our complex consciousness around what we see, longing to peer a little more deeply into the mystery of life with the mystery of us.

For the fifth annual Universe in Verse, (in April 2022 Maria) joined forces with her astronomer friend and three–time alumna Natalie Batalha ...to explore this longing through a kaleidoscope of vantage points.

In a majestic outdoor amphitheater built into a former quarry in the redwoods, we gathered to celebrate the marvel and mystery of life, from the creaturely to the cosmic, with stories from the history of science and our search for truth, illustrated with poems spanning centuries of human thought and feeling — poems about entropy and evolution, about trees and mushrooms, about consciousness and dark matter, about the birth of flowers and the death of stars — composed by a constellation of extraordinary humans, from Emily Dickinson to Gwendolyn Brooks, and performed by a constellation of extraordinary humans: writers Rebecca Solnit and Roxane Gay, musicians Zoë Keating and Joan As Police Woman, artist and Design Matters creator Debbie Millman, artist and DrawTogether creator Wendy MacNaughton, poet Diane Ackerman, cosmologist and jazz saxophonist Stephon Alexander, cognitive scientist, writer, and Dog Cognition Lab director Alexandra Horowitz, physicist and writer Alan Lightman, and On Being creator Krista Tippett (my largehearted collaborator in the Universe in Verse animated interlude season ... who long ago kindled my friendship with Natalie). 

Having seen the free show The Universe in Verse 2022: What is life?  which was available for a while through her link I wanted to offer her as one of the outstanding women for March history (did anyone say they had to be dead?) I really believe she has something happening that nobody else has. And I found under the title Universe in Verse, her site offers the editions that were done in 2017, 18, and 19. Something more to entertain me soon...

Maria was born and raised in Bulgaria, and was able to attend the University of Pennsylvania by working 4 jobs concurrently. In the one focused on advertising, the creativity was spurred by employees sharing what other ads were doing. Maria thought to bring together more diverse topics and started emailing them around. That was the basis of Brain Pickings, which she put on the internet in 2006.

She shares how she comes up with what she presents on the Marginalian:

Is it interesting enough to leave the reader with something – a thought, an idea, a question – after the immediate fulfillment of the self-contained reading or viewing experience? Is it evergreen in a way that makes it just as interesting in a month or a year? Am I able to provide enough additional context – historical background, related past articles, complementary reading or viewing material – or build a pattern around it to make it worth for the reader?

This articulate petite young woman has no Bulgarian accent when presenting some of the leading poets and musicians on her live programs. She has an incredible memory of bits and pieces that can be woven together. (Or she may have an excellent filing system, or both!!) Her degree in Communication was just icing on the cake of what her grandmother and parents had taught her of the world. 

 

-------------------------------
SOURCES:

Donnelly, Kate (October 11, 2011). "Maria Popova" From Your Desks.

Wikipedia: Maria Popova

Tippett, Krista & Popova, Maria (February 7, 2019) [May 14, 2015]. Maria Popova: Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age [interview] (audio transcript). OnBeing.org. Minneapolis, MN: The On Being Project. Retrieved 20 December 2019. Ms. Tippett:... From a weekly email to seven friends in 2006, Brain Pickings became a website, a Twitter feed, a weekly digest, and much more, and has been included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive since 2012. Maria Popova was born in Communist Bulgaria, and she came to the United States to study at the University of Pennsylvania. She started Brain Pickings as an internal office experiment while she was working one of multiple jobs to pay for her studies.

Ruth Graves Wakefield - Women's History Month -7

 If you've enjoyed a chocolate chip cookie [any time,] you can thank Ruth Graves Wakefield!

A chef, business owner, and author, Wakefield was the inventor of the chocolate chip cookie. Today, versions of the cookie she invented are available nearly everywhere... and it all started with a bit of ingenuity and a desire to add a new treat to her restaurant's menu.

Unusually for a woman of her day, Wakefield was a university graduate: she was educated in household arts at the Framingham State Normal School and toured as a dietitian, teaching people about food and nutrition. In 1930, she and her husband bought the Toll House Inn in Whitman, Massachusetts. Wakefield cooked and served all the meals, and quickly became famous for her food, particularly her desserts. Popular legend says her cookie invention was the result of a happy accident, but Wakefield maintained that she was actively working on creating a new treat. “We had been serving a thin butterscotch nut cookie with ice cream,” she said. “Everybody seemed to love it, but I was trying to give them something different." So Wakefield took an ice pick to a block of chocolate, added it to her cookie dough, and the chocolate chip cookie was born.

The cookie rapidly became a hit with her guests and when Wakefield reissued her best-selling cookbook, “Toll House Tried and True Recipes,” in 1938, she included “The Toll House Chocolate Crunch Cookie.” The recipe made the book even more popular, and soon the Nestlé chocolate company found demand for its semi-sweet bars of chocolate spiking. Andrew Nestlé approached Wakefield about the rights for the recipe, and soon Nestlé was making semi-sweet chips specifically for cookies -- and printing the Toll House cookie recipe on every package. What did Wakefield ask for the rights to the recipe and the Toll House name? One dollar... plus a lifetime supply of Nestlé chocolate!

Wakefield died in 1977, but her legacy lives on: her cookbook is still in print today and her recipe is still printed on each package of Nestlé Toll House Morsels. And, of course, it’s a rare person who hasn’t sampled some variation of her chocolate crunch cookie. After all, as the vintage ads said, “They never get enough of my Toll House cookies!”

Ruth Graves Wakefield's original cookbook "Toll House Tried and True Recipes" is available at https://amzn.to/3mwK3SS

Thanks to Face Book's Mighty Girl

Thanks to The Scientista Foundation for this image!

Rachel Carson - Women's History Month 6

 Born in 1907 in Springdale, PA, Rachel Carson grew up in the hills overlooking the Allegheny River, where she fell in love with nature after exploring the landscapes and wildlife on walks with her mother. And it was also there that she fell in love with writing, winning several awards in her youth. She would tell people her dream was to become a writer.

While her family was not well off, her mother insisted that Rachel attend college. Rachel entered intending to study English but changed her major to biology. After graduating, she earned a master's degree in zoology and then began a doctorate. But because of the Great Depression and with her father's passing in 1935, Rachel dropped out, taking a job with the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries to help support her family.

In addition to working in this job, Rachel began writing articles about environmental issues for publications. Those articles evolved into books. And in these works, which were beloved by many, she helped people better understand nature while courageously challenging practices that hurt people and the environment. These challenges had policy implications, leading to a national ban on DDT and other pesticides.

Many of us, including myself, consider her the mother of the environmental movement.

Today more than ever before, we must each individually decide what we can do to help keep our earth safe in which to live and thrive against the forces of climate change.

From the Marginalian:

“The real wealth of the Nation,” marine biologist and author Rachel Carson wrote in her courageous 1953 protest letter, “lies in the resources of the earth — soil, water, forests, minerals, and wildlife… Their administration is not properly, and cannot be, a matter of politics.” Carson’s legacy inspired the creation of Earth Day and the founding of the Environmental Protection Agency, whose hard-won environmental regulations are now being undone in the hands of a heedless administration. Carson was a scientist who thought and wrote like a poet. As she catalyzed the modern environmental movement with her epoch-making 1962 book Silent Spring, she was emboldened by a line from a 1914 poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox:

To sin by silence, when we should protest, makes cowards out of men.

Ruthy Alon - Women's History Month 5

From my own life...

I learned about Feldenkrais from a friend who was an Occupational Therapist, and she offered small workshops where maybe 8-10 of us would listen to a taped session of Ruthy Alon. We may have also listed to Moshe Feldenkrais, her teacher. This was in the early 1980s when incidentally I was back in college.

I've taken part in many somatic therapies in my lifetime. At this particular moment, I'm returning to Feldenkrais, and taking a class in Bones for Life, taught in the methods of Ruthy Alon. These days it's on zoom, right in my home. But the class has 64 or so members, as well as three trained teachers. It's intense, meeting for 4:30 hours, with breaks and a half hour for lunch.

I quote from her web site:

Ruthy Alon’s journey in promoting and restoring well-being in human lives began in 1950’s when she, a woman in her 20s and mother of two, started attending Dr. Feldenkrais’ group classes for the public in Tel Aviv. At that time Dr. Feldenkrais was well-known in Israel, which included serving as the personal trainer for then Prime Minister David Ben–Gurion.

In addition to being a student in Dr. Feldenkrais’ group somatic learning classes, she also taught them, which contributed being selected as one of thirteen individuals to further study with Dr. Feldenkrais from 1968-1971, in Tel Aviv, Israel. In 1972, as a practitioner, she accompanied him to the Esalen Institute in California, where she also met with Stanley Keleman, another pioneer and leader in the field of somatic therapy.

When Moshé Feldenkrais passed away in 1984, she conducted the first four-year professional Feldenkrais training in San Diego, as well as directed Feldenkrais trainings in other locations.

In the 1990s, she completed a Ph.D. in the field of Mind-Body Medicine and Holistic Psychology and wrote the book Mindful Spontaneity. Since then she has been a Senior Trainer in the Feldenkrais Method and has developed a body of work with its roots in and expanding from the Feldenkrais Method, her first program being Bones for Life. Throughout her life she has frequently traveled from her home is Israel to other countries to facilitate trainings and make presentations. Age 90 on January 25, 2020, Ruthy continued to lead a remarkable life – is interviewed about Movement Intelligence and the Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Learning and continues to develop specific topics within Movement Intelligence. Ruthy passed away December 30, 2020.

Charlotte Powell and Jessie Tarbox Beals - Women's History Month 4

 Greenwich Village...many a Bohemian woman...The Treasure Box

Hope this link works - Charlotte Powell 

But the photographer was 

Jessie Tarbox Beals

Alice Walker, Women's History Month - 3

 THE TALENTED & BEAUTIFUL, MS. ALICE WALKER!

Alice Malsenior Tallulah-Kate Walker is a novelist, short story writer, poet, and social activist.

In 1982, she became the 1st African-American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, which she was awarded for her novel The Color Purple.

Calling All Grandmothers - a poem by Alice Walker

We have to live

differently.

or we

will die

in the same

old ways.

Therefore

I call on all Grand Mothers

everywhere

on the planet

to rise

and take your place

in the leadership

of the world.

Come out

of the kitchen

out of the

fields

out of the beauty parlors

out of the television

Step forward

and assume

the role

for which

you were

created:

to lead humanity

to health, happiness

and sanity.

I call on

all the

Grand Mothers

of Earth

and every person

who possesses

the Grand Mother

Spirit

of respect for

life

and

protection of

the young

to rise

and lead.

The life of

our species

depends

on it.

& I call on all men

of Earth

to gracefully

and

gratefully

stand aside

& let them

(let us)

do so.

Over the span of her career, Ms. Walker has published 17 novels and short story collections, 12 non-fiction works, and collections of essays and poetry. She has faced criticism for alleged antisemitism and for her endorsement of the conspiracist David Icke.

Her spirituality has influenced some of her most well-known novels, including The Color Purple. She has written of her interest in Transcendental Meditation.

Acclaimed author Alice Walker who is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Color Purple,” as well as the critically-acclaimed film of the same title. The youngest daughter of sharecroppers in Georgia, Walker benefited from her parents’ determination to ensure a good education for their children. Walker graduated as valedictorian of her class and attended Spelman College in Atlanta before transferring to Sarah Lawrence College to graduate in 1965.

 Born in Eatonton, Georgia (1944). She was the youngest of eight children, the daughter of poor sharecroppers. Walker graduated first in her high school class and won a scholarship to Spelman College (1961). She transferred to Sarah Lawrence after two years, and a short story she wrote there was sent to Langston Hughes, who became an early champion of her writing. 

SOURCE: Writer's Almanac

Her third novel was "The Color Purple."

Walker became involved in the Civil Rights Movement as a young woman thanks to the interactions she had had with both Martin Luther King, Jr. and Howard Zinn while at Spelman College. She was part of the 1963 March on Washington and worked to register black voters in the South. In the 1970s, she joined the editorial staff of Ms. Magazine, where she recommitted herself to writing. Her 1975 Ms. Magazine article "In Search of Zora Neale Hurston," also revived interest in Zora Neale Hurston’s works which had fallen into obscurity for several decades.

Alice Walker's list of publications is long, but the majority of her writing focuses on the both modern and historical issues related to race and culture, in particular the struggles of African-American women. Considered one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, Walker became the first African American woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1983.

All of the above are quotes from vvarious public media. A friend of mine said "she's my mentor" and I agree. What a wonderful grounded person she is!

Agnes Keleti - Women's History Month 2

 Happy 102nd birthday on Jan. 9, 2023, to Agnes Keleti, the world's oldest living Olympic champion!

The Holocaust survivor from Hungary won a total of ten gymnastics medals, including five golds, at the 1952 Helsinki Games and the 1956 Melbourne Games. Keleti survived WWII thanks to working as a maid under a false identity but many of her family members were among the 550,000 Hungarian Jews killed during the Holocaust. Following the war, she was able to return to gymnastics training and won her Olympic medals at the ages of 31 and 35.

Today, the energetic centenarian still prefers to look forward, asserting: "The past? Let’s talk about the future. That’s what should be beautiful. The past is past but there is still a future."

Joanna Macy - Women's History Month 1

 

Here's a video of Joanna giving 20 minutes to share with us a bit on her approach to climate change.

Joanna Macy has made other YouTube videos, just search her name inside the YouTube listings.

My good friend, Sarah Vekasi sees Joanna as a mentor. Sarah is a leader in our community, former activist, and Eco-Chaplin (after getting her own M.Divinity.) And her current interest is a business of making and selling pottery.

Quote for Today:

United Nations

"Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns, mainly caused by human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels."