I just discovered that there is a day for this brilliant woman.
Ada Lovelace was the daughter of Lord Byron, a scholar, and wrote what is arguably the very first computer program in an essay about Charles Babbage. Of course, since she was a woman at a time when women were considered not to have either brains or rights, she would have been seen as an anomaly at best, a monster at worst. Since she had some position, however, she has not been forgotten or dismissed.
Warning: personal opinion follows.
Women who denigrate the idea of Feminism and fail to understand how tenuous their position is vis-a-vis history cause me heartburn. If they think about it at all, they seem to believe Woman As Property happens in the Third World and nothing like that can happen here (wherever the particular Here happens to be).
But then you run into something like this. One paragraph from this report says it all:
Females do not have voting privileges, but are generally allowed to speak at meetings, according to Klaetsch. Sunday’s meeting was the first time in recent history that St. John’s Council President Don Finseth exercised his authority to prevent females from speaking, church members say.
This is in Wisconsin. Recently. I grant you, this is not a state practice, but in these times when so many people seem to feel that religion trumps civic law, it’s a disturbing thing to behold. The question in my mind is, why don’t all the women there pick up their marbles and leave?
Because they either buy into the second class status accorded them or they like something about the condition they inhabit. Western women have it easy in such matters—no one will stone them if they get a little uppity. For them, this is a “lifestyle” choice, at least functionally. In parts of the Middle East and Africa it’s life or death.
Back when I was in high school, in the supposedly enlightened United States of America, in 1971, I took an architectural drawing class. The room was filled with boys. All boys.
One girl was taking the class. Where was she? The teacher put her in a separate room, the supply room at the back, with her own drafting table and tools. Why? Because the morons inhabiting the rest of the class wouldn’t leave her alone, wouldn’t let her do her work, teased her, ridiculed her, abused her, told her she was weird, unnatural, a lesbian, that she wanted to be a man, that all she needed was a good screwing and she’d get this crazy notion of being an architect right out her system. I heard this, witnessed some of it. It made me profoundly uncomfortable at the time, but I didn’t understand it other than as the same run-of-the-mill bullying that I myself had been subjected to all through grade school.
But it went beyond that, I now see, because what was doing ran counter to some idea of what the relative roles of men and women are “supposed” to be. Did the boys indulging the abuse understand that? No, of course not. They were parroting what they’d grown up seeing at home and elsewhere, with no more reflection or self-awareness than the hardwired belief that Real Americans all love baseball that Communism was automatically evil and John Wayne was just shy of the second coming. Analysis would be the natural enemy to a traditional view that maintained an absurd status quo and should therefore be resisted, hence anyone among their peers that preferred reading to sports was also an enemy.
So celebrate Ada Lovelace Day. No one, male or female, should accept restrictions imposed by cant and tradition and national dogma. But until it is entirely recognized that we are all of us People first, male and female next, and that equal rights accrue to people, not types, none of us are safe in our predilections and ambitions.
