Stealing Our Credit

 

My age is creeping up on me, and very recently small print began looking so blurry that I couldn't read it. Finally this week I dug out my reading glasses, and they seem to make a huge difference, because not only can I read the fine print, but if I use them while working, then when I take them off to look at the faraway world, everything is much clearer in my distance vision too. My eyes must have been working so hard to see close things that the muscles were too fatigued to change my focus to distance. Bonus: Travalon thinks glasses on women are sexy, so he really likes to see me in my reading glasses! Too bad I didn't meet him before I went and got LASIK...

There was an astrology book I had as a teenager that Hardingfele found some years ago at a book giveaway, and she gave it to me. What struck me as an adult that hadn't registered when I was a teen was how sexist this book was: it was written in the 60's by a woman who came of age in the 40's, and the gender stereotypes are jarring. There was one story where a put-upon secretary had to write an entire letter for her boss, who then took credit for the wonderful writing style; the author was using this as an illustration of how some sun signs take advantage of others, but I think what it really illustrates is that men have always taken credit for women's work. When I was an undergrad, I helped a well-known scholar write a book about proverbs, and one could say I did the whole thing: I collected the proverbs, I organized them by topic, and I wrote the forward. The scholar did give me a tiny shout-out in the part he added to the forward, and given our power dynamic, and the fact that he gave me a free copy of the book, I was (sort of) satisfied at the time. Now I hear stories like how Rosalind Franklin did all the work to discover the structure of DNA, and Watson and Crick gave the male grad student (who did much less work) credit for the Nobel Prize, but not her. I think of the persistent legends that some of Mozart's and Mendelssohn's compositions were actually written by their older sisters, because people would believe that a school-aged boy could create something amazing, but not a teenage girl. And then I think how some men say women are the lesser sex because throughout history they have not contributed to the body of knowledge of mankind, and I think, "Seriously? Maybe ONLY women have contributed and the credit was always stolen by men!! How would we even know?" And I don't doubt this also applies for nonwhite people as well. It's grossly unjust to always steal the ideas of people who are not white men in power and then turn around and say only white men in power are intelligent, because they are the only ones coming up with ideas. That's a logical fallacy if ever I heard one!

Famous Hat