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Rick Rosner is a personal and professional friend. I interviewed Rick in an extensive interview on In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal, which came to about 100,000 words. Rick claims to have the world’s second highest IQ. He is a member of the Mega Society and was the journal editor, as well Errol Morris interviewed him for the TV series First Person. This is part 3 of a series devoted to conversation on women and the future from the extensive interview. This series is comprised of excerpts from the In-Sight: Independent Interview-Based Journal interview. Part 3 covers the examples in outstanding women in history, the poor outcomes and lives for most people in history, and more.
Scott Douglas Jacobsen: In the timeline of women, on setting examples, instances arise of historical female virtuosity in spite of different circumstances for women en masse, in the commemorated annals of geniuses such as Hypatia of Alexandria, Elizabeth Anscombe, Hannah Arendt, Margaret Atwood, Simone de Beauvoir, Hildegard von Bingen, Marie Curie, Lady Anne Conway, Sarah Margaret Fuller, Susan Haack, Ayn Rand, Dame Mary Warnock, Mary Wollstonecraft, Betty Friedan, Marilyn vos Savant (greatest living philosopher of the everyday – opining), Joanne Rowling (“J.K. Rowling”/”Robert Galbraith”), and innumerable others, one need not agree with their multitudinous productions, but ought to welcome the attainments as genuine supplements to the cerebral arsenal of the erudite world.
Most of these relate in the academic, philosophical, intellectual partition of discourse on the sexes, more exist in relation to the many types of sheer brave accomplishments and firsts for women: Élisabeth Thible (First woman to ride in hot air balloon), Sophie Blanchard (First woman to pilot hot air balloon), Raymonde de Laroche (First woman to receive pilot’s license), Lilian Bland (First woman to design, build, and fly an aircraft), Amelia Earhart (Not long after Charles Lindbergh – one could state Albert Read before either Lindbergh or Earhart, first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean), Sabiha Gökçen (First woman to fly fighter plane into combat), Jacqueline Cochran (First woman to break sound barrier), Jerrie Mock (First woman to fly solo around the world), Svetlana Savitskaya (First woman to walk in space), Eileen Collins (First female space shuttle pilot), and so on. Not enough time to enter into full listing and description – a compendium must suffice for now.
Even a single example, in depth, from this list of female bright lights in the human narrative, Marie Curie discoverer of the 88th element known as Radium, winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics (1903) and Chemistry (1911), having an element named after her: curium, and someone of potential for higher emotional impact based on the recent nature – relative to the timeline from Hypatia to the present – of the achievements by Curie.
Indeed, she lived concurrent with the most often quoted, and misquoted, of geniuses, Albert Einstein. No introduction or explanation needed for his accomplishments of unification and foundational contributions to physics, cosmology, and insights into reality in general.
However, we do not hear much of Marie Curie off the top of our minds; even so, she may arise after some time to wonder and ponder on the cases of female genius.
When examining with thorough care the deep historical roots of the situation for women up to the modern era in the world of pedagogy, or even with a mild skim through a history text, within arguably the most important societal and cultural institution, outside of raw technological change, for the influence of individuals and collectives in society, Academia holds the most sway in refurbishing the old housing of society with new frameworks for understanding the world and the relation of human beings within, and to, that new apprehension of the world.
Some modern days of recognition such as International Women’s Day, Women’s Equality Day, and Women’s History Month do some good in continual recognition from positive reflection on them.
As per the previous question, most history education tends to teach male exemplars in each field while lacking the representation of women in such fields of endeavour. History would appear to work on the shoulders of men, European men.
No exemplars in proportion to men can set tacit tones through education for the youth and in turn the upcoming generation. What could shift the focus, perspective, and conversation related to female exemplars in history?
Rick Rosner: Compared to men, a much smaller fraction of women have been highly visible to history. Of course, the fraction of men who are visible to history is already tiny.
The vast majority of the more than 100 billion humans who have ever lived have disappeared without a trace of individual presence and are remembered only as tiny constituents of plagues or wars or statistical trends.
Now, of course, everyone produces an extensive individual digital record, and the recording of our lives will only grow more thorough. (But individuals may become invisible within a deluge of information rather than a trickle.)
History is usually learned from an event- and trend-based perspective – battles, leaders, dates, economic and demographic forces. But there’s another way – the slice-of-life approach – trying to reconstruct how people lived their daily lives and thought their daily thoughts.
This puts the women back into history and provides a counter-narrative to the big events POV. Most of our lives are conducted around daily tasks, not historic events. When we see history on TV or in a movie, it’s usually people’s stories, not dry recitations of facts.
In Women’s Studies classes and by watching my daughter study history, I’ve learned that traditionally womanly arts are often assumed to be second-tier – mundane, decorative, part of the background – what Betty Draper does, to her frustration, as compared to what Don Draper does.
And even as Mad Men points out this dynamic, it still screws over Betty, making her seem unpleasant compared to Don, whom we root for even as he wrecks his life.
We’re lucky to live in an era of increasingly immersive media that offers more opportunity to build complete worlds, including the worlds of the past. But even with this ability, virtual worlds can be shitty for women – for example, the Grand Theft Auto series is brutal to women.
The video game industry remains biased towards traditionally male action stories because they’re fun, they sell, and they’re easier to make compelling. Eventually, video games and immersive entertainment will learn how to embrace more of human experience. The subtlety’s not there yet.
(My thinking about women’s issues isn’t ultra-sophisticated. But I took women’s studies in college and belonged to a pro-feminist group called 100 Men Against Violence Against Women. On the other hand, I wrote for The Man Show.
(It wasn’t anti-women – it made fun of men’s attitudes about women – but was widely misunderstood because it tried to have it both ways – making fun of men and celebrating what men like. And the fifth season, after Adam and Jimmy and the other writers and I left, was pretty mean and misogynist.))
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Read (Part 1) by clicking here.
Read (Part 2) by clicking here.
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Photo Credit: Getty Images