As a teacher, creative writer and Internet explorer, haha, I
believe that it is “A Battle Of The Minds.” That is to say, what is seen as a
battle of the sexes, the males dominating the females, is actually a battle of
discovering/recognizing new knowledge – and the not-so-intelligent minds,
mostly males it appears, do not usually comprehend it!
From this Facebook sharing of Grace Obien-Culannay that I saw Sunday, 26 March 2023 I am reading Janes
Valliere (Facebook, Weird
& Beautiful Things, facebook.com):
Since her death in
1979, the woman who discovered what the universe is made of has not so much as
received a memorial plaque. Her newspaper obituaries do not mention her
greatest discovery… The textbooks simply say that the most abundant atom in the
universe is hydrogen. And no one ever wonders how we know.
That, says Ms Janes, is “Jeremy Knowles discussing the
complete lack of recognition Cecilia Payne gets, even today, for her
revolutionary discovery.” Everyone seemed to be against her getting to know
more, to become more known – why, even “Cecilia Payne’s mother refused to spend
money on her college education”!
But Cecilia was so good she won a scholarship to Cambridge.
When you are good, you are better than the level where people put you,
including your own mother.
Cecilia completed her studies, but Cambridge wouldn’t give
her a degree. But when you are good, you are as stubborn as a mule, and she
moved to the United States. There, she became the first person ever to earn a
PhD in astronomy from Radcliffe College.
Richard Williams
says (APS News, “January 1, 1925:
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin And The Day The Universe Changed,” aps.org):
Her 1925 thesis,
entitled Stellar Atmospheres, was
famously described by astronomer Otto Struve as “the most brilliant PhD thesis
ever written in astronomy.” By calculating the abundance of chemical elements
from stellar spectra, her work began a revolution in astrophysics.
I am not into astrophysics, so that is as far as I will go.
As a
teacher, I want to emphasize that what is known as the Battle of the Sexes is
actually a Battle of the Minds rightly recognizing knowledge.
In the case of Cecilia Payne, she was right! Adrian Huxley says (untitled, undated, LinkedIn, linkedin.com):
Not only did Cecilia
Payne discover what the universe is made of, she also discovered what the sun
is made of. (Henry Norris Russell, a fellow astronomer, is usually given credit
for discovering that the sun’s composition is different from the Earth’s, but
he came [out with] his conclusions four years later than Payne – after telling her not to publish.)
Astronomers:
American Russel over British Payne – This
is to me not racist but not-so-simply male brawn over female brain!@517
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