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Polish MEP Korwin-Mikke's latest outrage, insulting women [216]
And to return to the fray........
Let's break it down for you step by step.
It's only in the last hundred years or so that people of
either gender have had access to education on any large scale, be it in the arts or sciences. Therefore most of the achievements of the previous centuries were made by middle or upper class men. Working class boys had to be very fortunate or exceptional, or find a sponsor amongst the upper classes to be their patron, if they were to achieve an education beyond that of leaving school at the age of around ten, that is for those who went to school at all. Many didn't. That's one of the reasons the level of illiteracy was so high. For most of history, the overwhelming majority of people could neither read nor write. George Stephenson (Do you know anything about the Rocket or the Stephenson Gauge? Probably not but you've sat in a train I presume so that'll do) anyway, Stephenson was the son of a miner and was illiterate until the age of eighteen. He then got the money together to attend evening classes in reading, writing and arithmetic. He went on to become one of the most important engineers in the development of the steam locomotive and railways. Without that education it wouldn't have happened.
So you understand that to be educated at all was uncommon for the bulk of the population. It was largely the preserve of the middle and upper classes. Now let's look at the situation of women. Working class women basically worked at a variety of mostly manual jobs, anything from down the mines, to farm labouring or factory work, which, again for both genders, could begin at the age of ten. Middle and upper class women did get some education but a woman's main role was to marry and bear children so it was considered by those parents who had money to spare for education that the boys should be the priority. Educated women generally received tuition in reading, writing and basic arithmetic (in order to manage the household budget), French, botany,drawing, water colour painting, music (singing and piano generally, many instruments were forbidden them as 'masculine') dancing and a bit of history and perhaps geography. Very often the entire curriculum was taught from a single, yes a single, general purpose book of 'lessons' for girls. Several hours a day were devoted to needlework and embroidery. As a result of that many examples of beautiful 'art' remain. I suppose you haven't heard of the Bayeux Tapestry either............
The purpose of education for women was to fit them for their role and station in life. As much literacy and numeracy as was needed for their task of running the household (and if you read books published for example in the 1700s advising parents on education for their daughters, it is made quite clear that reading matter should be strictly controlled and there should be no free access to their father's library. Reading of course is one of the chief ways in which we develop our minds and increase our knowledge). Beyond that a woman was expected to have 'accomplishments' which would make her an attractive marriage prospect for a 'gentleman' and a suitably decorative hostess for his drawing room.
Now even within this, there were notable exceptions. There were a number of quite brilliant women (again you won't have heard of any of them because you don't read). The one thing they generally had in common was an enlightened father who saw that women were of equal intelligence to men. One that springs to mind is Margaret Roper. She was the daughter of Sir Thomas Moore (who's he you ask, see what I mean? Start reading. He had his head chopped off by Henry VIII for refusing to accept Henry as head of the Church). Anwyay this was during the 1500s and he was most unusual for his time in that he believed in education for everyone, including women, Latin, Greek, astronomy, maths, philosophy, history and rhetoric. He taught his daughter to read when she was three, later she shared her brother's tutors and outshone them, becoming a brilliant classics scholar and translator. She was the first non-Royal woman to have her work published. She did not want to marry but her father insisted that she did. She had several children who were all scholastically gifted but the most brilliant was her daughter who translated the entirety of Eusebius' 'Ecclesiastical History' from Greek. I'd like to see
you do that in your spare time..........
As I said yesterday, many professions and disciplines were forbidden to women and even when they managed somehow to receive training and education in those disciplines, they continued to face obstacles. Membership of professional socieities was closed to them, publishers refused to accept their work or they had to publish under a male pseudonym. You metioned women writers. The Bronte Sisters (surely you know they were) wrote not under their own names of Charlotte, Emily and Ann Bronte but that of Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell.
Add to that the fact that women generally married and spent a great deal of their time pregnant and nursing as it was known. One of my great grandmothers produced eleven children before dying in childbirth at the age of 38. Even if she'd had a brilliant mind I doubt that it would have much opportunity for expressing itself under those cirumstances.
In the last century since women have had access to the same educational opportunites as men, women have begun to make significant contrubtions. Because you're a bit of a simpleton (your own choice, you don't read widely enough so your mind is undeveloped and you lack general knowledge) you don't realise that most contributions to science and technology never get mentioned in the popular press. Bill Gates is a household name but who is Barbara Liskov? Barbara Liskov invented the CLU programming language.
"Professor Barbara Liskov has had tremendous impact on the fields of programming languages, operating systems, distributed systems, and information security. Much of her early research focus was on data abstraction, modularity, and encapsulation as typified by the CLU programming language
Professor Liskov changed the way that a generation of engineers thought about and constructed large software systems." (Citation from the Special Interest Group for Programming Languages (SIGPLAN) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)).
Stow Boyd, the computer scientist who came up with the language Modular C credits Liskov as follows:
It was Liskov that influenced us (Boyd and Bjarne Stroustrup) to experiment with higher order structures for C, and she really is the godmother of object-oriented design, because of the direct influence she had on C++.If you were a programmer you'd understand the importance of object oriented design in programming languages;without it you wouldn't be using this forum now.
