Paging the shade of Joanna Russ - some 'how to suppress' cases
I.e., 'She did it - but - '
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Early scientists - tracing the contribution of female alchemists: “The female alchemist takes on different guises in the writings of these women: she is a medical practitioner and distiller; a religious meditator; a woman poet-maker; a female friend; patroness; a transformative widow-poet; and spiritual visionary,” explains principal investigator Sajed Chowdhury, based at Leiden University in the Netherlands.
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He offers Grace Mildmay (c. 1552-1620) as an example of why their role is important to understand. “Women like Mildmay were practising medical and spiritual alchemy in their households and local areas. If we are to gain a more accurate and inclusive understanding of Renaissance scientific, medical and spiritual cultures, then we must reintegrate into that history the identity and practices of the female alchemist.”
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Chowdhury poured over records in the Northamptonshire Record Office which houses some of Grace Mildmay’s handwritten scientific papers. “These manuscript papers document Mildmay’s medical and chemical practices. Although Grace Mildmay was an elite woman, textual evidence survives to suggest that she was practising medicine and chemistry in a cross-class environment. In one extant letter addressed to Mildmay’s housekeeper, Bess, for example, Mildmay instructs Bess on how to concoct a healing balm,” says Chowdhury.
We rather hope the forthcoming monograph is not going to cost a hideously sum...
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‘They deserve a place in history’: music teacher makes map of female composers: Interactive tool features more than 500 women who are often forgotten in the classical music world: Many of the women listed on the map languished in obscurity, their careers marred by the long-held notion that music could be a pastime for women but not a profession. Some, like Maria Anna Mozart, nicknamed Nannerl, saw their careers come to an abrupt halt amid concerns that performing and touring could put her reputation at risk. Others were stigmatised by the belief, stubbornly clung to for centuries, that women were incapable of the kind of higher level thinking needed to compose. “It was taken for granted that a work composed by a woman wouldn’t be of the same quality as that composed by a man,” said Ventura. The barriers forced female composers to get creative; some enrolled in convents in order to study music while others published works under male pseudonyms.
I suspect that it might also have to do with the kinds of music they composed?
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A thought which this article evokes - it's not just that she's a woman artist, it's that she's working in a very unusual artistic space and more generally anti-establishment:
Interview: Anne Bean: ‘People said Yoko Ono ruined the Beatles. I think the Beatles ruined her’: 'The performance artist on her new 10-hour work, rethinking her distance from feminism, and why she told Malcolm McLaren her avant garde covers band was ‘unmanageable’': Collaboration with other artists is a huge part of Bean’s ethos, which is perhaps why she hasn’t taken centre stage internationally in the same way as performance art superstars Yoko Ono or Marina Abramović. “Collaboration shows you parts of yourself that you never knew existed. It can reveal a potent space that you just hadn’t recognised,” she says. She doesn’t seem interested in fame, but is an admirer of Ono. “People said she ruined the Beatles, but I think the Beatles ruined her in many ways.” She elaborates. “Yoko had this really expansive art practice [that was] pushing such extraordinary uncircumscribed boundaries (pre-Beatles). I think having to deal with the whole edifice of that kind of fame seemed comparatively ordinary, with all the toxicity and censoriousness implicit.”
The other reason for Bean’s under-the-radar status might be that her work can be difficult to categorise, though is all the more effective for it.
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