Today, I'm taking a break from our platform and healthcare legislation, and through the power of Twitter, focusing on herstory and other gems of knowledge lost or forgotten. This choice is not because our resistance is over or because we can take our eyes off the ball, but because things in DC are still very fluid, making "current events" hard to cover, especially since I write these posts a day in advance. This post was prompted by this tweet from last week, and my awareness of how much of our history is written by the white, male “victor” to the detriment of the historical Others.
A chemist who decided to test, rather than toss, a cloudy solution.
However, Kwolek persuaded technician Charles Smullen, who ran the spinneret, to test her solution. She was amazed to find that the new fiber would not break when nylon typically would. Not only was it stronger than nylon, Kevlar was five times stronger than steel by weight. Both her supervisor and the laboratory director understood the significance of her discovery, and a new field of polymer chemistry quickly arose. By 1971, modern Kevlar was introduced.[7] Kwolek learned that the fibers could be made even stronger by heat-treating them. The polymer molecules, shaped like rods or matchsticks, are highly oriented, which gives Kevlar its extraordinary strength. (source)
She had to use patriarchy against itself and fight racism; nevertheless, she persisted.
Believing Thomas Key's paternity proved, by common law the Court granted Elizabeth Key her freedom. Mottram's estate appealed the decision to the General Court, which overturned it and ruled that Elizabeth was a slave because of her mother's status as Negro.[1]
Through Grinstead, Elizabeth Key took the case to the Virginia General Assembly, which appointed a committee to investigate. They sent the case back to the courts for retrial. Elizabeth Key finally won her freedom on three counts: the most important was that, by English common law, the status of the father determined the status of the child. Her father was a free Englishman, and she was a practicing Christian. Other cases had demonstrated that black Christians could not be held in servitude for life.[1] The Assembly may also have been influenced by the reputation of her father Thomas Key and wanted to carry out his wishes for his acknowledged daughter. In addition, the father of her mixed-race child (three-quarters white) was an English subject.[1] The court ordered Mottram's estate to compensate Key with corn and clothes for her lost years. (source)
She gave back to her community.
She wrote the programming that anticipated errors and incorporated the fix.
Hamilton wrote of the incident,
The computer (or rather the software in it) was smart enough to recognize that it was being asked to perform more tasks than it should be performing. It then sent out an alarm, which meant to the astronaut, I'm overloaded with more tasks than I should be doing at this time and I'm going to keep only the more important tasks; i.e., the ones needed for landing ... Actually, the computer was programmed to do more than recognize error conditions. A complete set of recovery programs was incorporated into the software. The software's action, in this case, was to eliminate lower priority tasks and re-establish the more important ones ... If the computer hadn't recognized this problem and taken recovery action, I doubt if Apollo 11 would have been the successful moon landing it was.[26]
(source)
She pioneered documentary photography. And she lived her life.
Not herstory, but if the top hat is a gendered indication, history: