{"id":14991,"date":"2014-02-07T00:40:38","date_gmt":"2014-02-07T00:40:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/2014\/02\/07\/women-invented-all-the-core-technologies-that-made\/"},"modified":"2014-02-07T00:40:38","modified_gmt":"2014-02-07T00:40:38","slug":"women-invented-all-the-core-technologies-that-made","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/2014\/02\/07\/women-invented-all-the-core-technologies-that-made\/","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Women invented all the core technologies that made civilization possible. This isn\u2019t some feminist myth; it\u2019s what modern anthropologists believe. Women are thought to have invented pottery, basketmaking, weaving, textiles, horticulture, and agriculture. That\u2019s right: without women\u2019s inventions, we wouldn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Women have continued to be involved in the creation and advancement of civilization throughout history, whether you know it or not. Pick anything\u2014a technology, a science, an art form, a school of thought\u2014and start digging into the background. You\u2019ll find women there, I guarantee, making critical contributions and often inventing the damn shit in the first place.<\/p>\n

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 wasn\u2019t allowed to study with the men. Then she got a research post but wasn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Men in all patriarchal civilizations, including ours, have worked to downplay or deny women\u2019s creative contributions. That\u2019s 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 women\u2019s contributions is to simply ignore that they happened. Because when you ignore something, it gets forgotten. People in the next generation don\u2019t 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 \u2018it\u2019s a fluke, never happened before in the history of the world, ignore it.\u2019 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.<\/p>\n

Finally, and this is important: even those women who weren\u2019t inventors and intellectuals, even those women who really did spend all their lives doing stereotypical \u201cwomen\u2019s work\u201d\u2014they 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 it\u2019s 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.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

Violet Socks<\/a>, Patriarchy in Action: The New York Times Rewrites History<\/em> (via o1sv<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Reblogging again for that paragraph because that is the part we forget the most.<\/p>\n

(via girlwiki<\/a>)<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Women invented all the core technologies that made civilization possible. This isn\u2019t some feminist myth; it\u2019s what modern anthropologists believe. Women are thought to have invented pottery, basketmaking, weaving, textiles, horticulture, and agriculture. That\u2019s right: without women\u2019s inventions, we wouldn\u2019t be able to carry things or store things or tie things up or go fishing … Continue reading <\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"quote","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[51],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14991"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14991\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.firechildren.net\/lightfire\/iamthefirechild\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}