“If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.” - Camille Paglia

[LabubuSixSeven]

I came across this (in)famous quote by feminist academic Camille Paglia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camille_Paglia) a few weeks back, and it has stuck with me.

At first, I was offended. However, as I’ve thought more about it, I can’t help but feel she has a point. Men are risk takers in ways that women are not. There are both positives (technology etc) and negatives (violence, war) to this. Is it the case that culturally and socially women aren’t allowed to take risks? Or is it that we biologically driven to not? If there were no men, would society be as progressive as it is?

I’d like to hear others opinions on this.

Good point. Profit has been a more powerful impetus to innovation than war.
Ways of getting more products for less investment, which included cutting out human work as much as possible, has been the guiding principle in tech for a couple of centuries now.

Sometimes that means industry borrowing ideas from the military sphere, sometimes it's the other way round - the Spitfire was developed as a civilian, racing aircraft during peacetime, and was adopted/adapted as a fighter plane when war was declared.

Not being designed as a military aircraft, the engine was unable to cope with the steep dives needed in aerial combat, causing the engine to cut out temporarily at crucial moments.

Previous posters have referred to the engineer who came up with the solution: it was a woman named Beatrice Shilling, who designed a modification which solved the fuel cut-off. The importance of this improvement in the performance of the Spitfire in WWII is incalculable.

How was this crucial contribution to the war effort and ultimately to victory referred to?
'Miss Shilling's Orifice'
nudge nudge wink wink har har😠
She is described as having accepting this 'with good humour' but she probably didn't have a choice; it's a shame to see it still in use.

'Hunting' is largely a male occupation only if you define 'hunting' as 'the type of animal capture done by men'.

Fishing is very often a female job, or women and children, or the whole village. Grub collecting is female or everyone. Amphibians usually female. Small birds can go either way. Small and medium sized mammals are male hunted if using projectiles, but more often whole village if using nets...

I thought of Camille Paglia and this thread when I watched River of No Return, starring Marilyn Monroe and Robert Mitchum, on the telly the other day.

They're stranded out in the wilderness with no food.
Mitchum makes a pointed stick to hunt fish with,
Monroe gathers berries.

Mitchum - who hasn't caught anything - finds Monroe gathering berries, and says [her character is a saloon singer, 'no better than she should be..']
'I didn't think people like you ate berries'
she replies
'Even 'people like me' get hungry'

He makes another disparaging remark about her 'gathering' and she gives his unsuccessful pointed stick a withering look and says
'Show us your fish'😂

You are still ignoring the seminal point - these women were exceptional, not because they discovered things but because they broke through male controlled power structures to do so. They managed to make these discoveries despite the barriers put in their way by men. In our theoretical world those barriers do not exist. It would no longer be only occasional women and girls who had the fortune to be allowed a ‘hobby’ that led to scientific discovery. Women were only granted full degrees at Cambridge, where Watson and Crick worked, in 1948 - just five years before they published their paper.

Cambridge was notably late in officially awarding degrees to women, but Girton College was established in 1869 so there had been women there for a long time. Rosalind Franklin was an undergraduate and postgraduate student at Cambridge in the late 30s and early 40s.

So 660 years when women were unable to attend Cambridge, let alone be awarded a full degree. And Oxford was open over 700 years before they admitted women, and another 40 before they awarded full degrees. And even at the point of being awarded degrees, women hardly had the same opportunities as men.

So many jobs used to be reserved for boys and men only. And when a woman was able to get a job, she was sacked if she got married.
I went to an all girls' school and the woman supposedly acting as a careers advisor (they got rid of the real advisor to save money) gave very simple advice: academic girls were told to become librarians and less academic girls were told to become nursery school teachers. We were all told not to work too hard for our A'levels.

This is a really important point. I've heard conservative commentators saying that if you look around you at all the fine buildings and bridges and railways - they were all built by men and men should get credit for these achievements which women had no part in.

As Turtlesgottaturtle says, women weren't allowed in the crafts and trades, either explicitly by not allowing women into training or apprenticeships, or when equality legislation made that illegal, by subjecting women to harassment or even worse if they dared to transgress by wanting to go into 'men's work'..

The abuse of women in non-traditional jobs has continued up to very recently, as was revealed in a 2023 report which found cases of gross abuse in the UK Fire Service,, making women firefighters feel not just unwelcome but under threat from male colleagues, even threats of rape in some cases.

If that was happening 13 years after discrimination had been made illegal, what chance did a young woman have in 1823 or 1923 to learn a trade and help build the infrastructure which is now quoted as evidence of men's superior skills.

The Sex discrimination Act came into force in 1975 and made sex discrimination in employment and training illegal. Though we know such discrimination continues to this day.

And yet some women still lose their job because they are pregnant (pregnantthenscrewed.com/about-maternity-discrimination/)

Thanks, Poppiesmocking, I was thinking of the Equality Act 2010 when I said '13 Years'. That said, my arithmetic is so bad.......😏

It reinforces my point: in 2023 women were found to be not accepted in 'men's' jobs nearly half a century after the Sex Discrimination Act..

Advances happen through problem solving and critical thinking, and sometimes that might also involve risk, or just plain luck. Women are not incapable of any of these things, and have been responsible for a lot of inventions that have advanced society.

I was in secondary school in the 1980s, I wasn’t allowed to take woodwork, metal work and technical drawing. Because those subjects were for boys. My mum left work when she got married in the 1960s (a job she loved, and went back to in the 1980s) because that’s the way things were done back then. So many people assume women don’t do certain things because we don’t want to but it’s actually because we weren’t allowed to.

That quote is just bait tbh… history isn’t “men did everything”, it’s who had access to power and resources, and for a long time women didn’t, simple as that. Give any group the same education, money, and freedom to take risks and you’ll see innovation too, we already do. Acting like half the population would just chill in huts is kinda lazy thinking.

Same for me too. The boys took wood working, metal working and car mechanics while the we girls took home economics, sewing and cooking.
I had been raising my younger siblings so knew all the girls stuff but my request to take the boys classes was refused.

Agree on this

I like that film : wish more people knew it.

Yes, I've seen pps say Crick & Watson lied or stole the structure but that doesn't seem to be the case

https://www.google.com/url?sa=i&source=web&rct=j&url=www.newscientist.com/article/2370348-was-dna-pioneer-rosalind-franklin-really-a-victim-of-scientific-theft/%23:~:text%3DAccording%2520to%2520many%2520accounts%252C%2520Franklin,a%2520researcher%2520called%2520Pauline%2520Cowan.&ved=2ahUKEwivwqGwgM6TAxUZUUEAHdr2CrUQ1fkOegQIDBAS&opi=89978449&cd&psig=AOvVaw1klD0As68ncApKVmzkGPUg&ust=1775179304780000

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/jun/23/sexism-in-science-did-watson-and-crick-really-steal-rosalind-franklins-data#:~:text=The%20epilogue%20to%20the%20book,is%20published%20by%20Profile%20Press

It doesn’t require men to lie or steal for women’s contributions to undermined. It just requires the women to be unacknowledged. And when your work is not acknowledged then you don’t get the opportunities that come with that - as many many women know throughout the male-dominated working world and can testify.

Same, I could already cook and sew to a higher standard than they were teaching in the lessons. I could also handle power tools and make stuff from wood, but wanted to learn it properly, I was (and still am) incredibly pissed off that I wasn’t allowed to do it.