Female “Firsts” – Page 2 – Women's History and More

Ada Byron Lovelace – “Enchantress of Numbers”

Ada Lovelace by Alfred Edward Chalon (source)

Often women in the 18^th and 19^th centuries overcame significant odds to study mathematics or science, but as with every rule there is the exception. Ada Byron Lovelace is one of those exceptions. In Ada’s case, not only did she have a parent who approved of her interest, but one who pushed her to develop that interest; and it wasn’t her father who pushed her, but her mother.

Augusta Ada Byron, born December 10, 1815, was the daughter of Annabella Milbanke and the poet Lord Byron. The marriage was short-lived and Ada never got to know her father. Only a few weeks after her birth, Lord Byron left England and went to the continent, her mother made the separation official and took custody of Ada, something that was unusual for the time. Annabella was well-educated with a particular interest in mathematics and was determined that her daughter would be as well. (Lord Byron referred to Annabella as “princess of parallelograms” and later as the “Mathematical Medea,” which may give us a feel for her expertise in math, but also their relationship.) She researched the best education techniques and obtained the best tutors for Ada. Because they were of the aristocracy (in 1856, Annabella became Baroness Wentworth in her own right,) Ada also had access to some of the best intellectual minds of the time; including Mary Somerville, Augustus De Morgan., Michael Faraday, Charles Dickens, William Frend, Charles Wheatstone, and Woronzow Greig.

Annabella was a domineering mother. Some say that she wanted to suppress any tendency that Ada might have toward the mental instability of her father, so she insisted on strict lessons focused on rational pursuits and the avoidance of any romantic subjects such as poetry. (One anecdote says that Annabella fired a tutor for giving her daughter too much geography and not enough math.) Although Ada’s mother may have pushed her, Ada did have the talent for mathematics. Even though she was often ill as a child, suffering from blinding headaches and a period of paralysis, she worked hard to achieve the goals her mother set for her. De Morgan once wrote to Annabella that Ada had the capacity to become “an original mathematical investigator, perhaps of first-rate eminence.” Of course, he proceeded this by saying “if she were a man entering university.”

In 1833, Ada entered London society and was introduced at court to King William IV and Queen Adelaide. During one of the many social events they attended during the year, Ada and her mother were introduced to Charles Babbage, a noted mathematician and inventor of the Difference Machine. During that time astronomical tables were created by giving the calculations to two people (often women) and then comparing the results for discrepancies. Once when going over some of these calculations with Sir William Herschel, the astronomer, and finding many mistakes, he declared that he wished the calculations could be done “by steam,” meaning by machine. Babbage went on to design such a machine which he called the Difference Machine, so when Ada and her mother met him they were both very interested in learning more about it. They arranged to go see a prototype that Babbage had built and Ada asked to see the blueprints. For whatever reason, Babbage agreed to show this teenaged girl and her mother his plans, and a life-long friendship and collaboration was born.

Ada Lovelace by Margaret Sarah Carpenter (source)

As much as she enjoyed it, mathematics didn’t interfere with Ada’s social life and in 1835 she married William King who would become the Earl of Lovelace in 1838. They had several large homes, lived well, some might say too well, and had three children: Byron (1836), Anne Isabella (1837), and Ralph Gordon (1839). Ada doesn’t seem to have had much to do with her children; in fact her mother seems to have had more to do with their upbringing than she did. Certainly after Ada became sick and died, her mother directed the education of the children. King was supportive of Ada’s continued work in mathematics and from the time she met Babbage in 1833 until around 1842, she continued studying mathematics and corresponding with the best mathematicians of the day, including Babbage.

Analyzing the personality of a historical person is difficult and a number of different things have been said of Ada; that she was a hard drinking gambler; she inherited her father’s mental instability; and that she led a rather boring life, except of course for the rather long horseback rides with a man from a neighboring estate! What does seem clear from her letters is that she had fluctuating moods and that she did go to the horse races. However, over the course of William’s life he sold off many of his estates and by the end of his life was borrowing money. Considering he lived much longer than Ada, it seems likely that he was the primary source of the gambling debt, although Ada may have contributed to it. I’m not sure about the drinking, but Ada died of what is believed to have been uterine cancer, so for the last several years of her life she surely would have been prescribed laudanum (an opiate) for pain.

Babbage meanwhile, received financial support for building his Difference Machine, but had instead designed a more complex machine, the Analytical Engine. Where the Difference Machine could only perform basic addition and subtraction, the Analytical Engine could perform many more calculations, basically the equivalent of a modern day calculator. It is the earliest design of its kind that we are aware of and quite remarkable for its time. In 1842, Babbage was persuaded to give a lecture on the Analytical Engine at the University of Turin. One of the attendees, Luigi Menabrea, an engineer and the future prime minister of Italy, wrote a paper on the Engine and published it in a Swiss Journal, in French of course.

After Menabrea’s paper was published, Babbage asked Ada to translate it into English. At Babbage’s suggestion, Ada added notes to the paper explaining the concepts in more detail and adding information. The resulting paper was three times as long as the original and was well received. Included in the notes is an algorithm, a sequence of steps, which would allow the engine to calculate Bernoulli numbers, a series of numbers used in various branches of mathematics. Today we would call this a computer program, which is why Ada is often called the world’s first computer programmer. There is some controversy surrounding this, however. Many people believe that Ada was not the originator of the algorithm; that Babbage, in fact, wrote all the mathematics contained within the paper. She and Babbage were close friends and corresponded on a regular basis often multiple times during the day, so it is sometimes difficult to determine. He seems to have thought highly of her and referred to her as an “enchantress of numbers.”

Ada did contribute something that is significant and was acknowledged by Babbage to be her idea. She envisioned the machine being used to produce music. She was familiar with the Jacquard loom, which used punch cards similar to the Analytical Engine to produce complex patterns in weaving. Ada reasoned that if numbers could represent other things such as frequencies, that the engine could be programmed to produce frequencies in a particular way and produce music. This idea of using numbers to represent other things or as symbols was ahead of her time and prophetic of our present day computers.

Unfortunately, the paper on the Analytical Engine would be Ada’s crowning achievement. She died on November 27, 1852 at the age of 36 from what seems to have been a type of uterine cancer. Her mother came to take charge preventing any of her friends from seeing her in the last months of her life, including Charles Babbage. At her request, she was buried beside her father. Many mathematicians do their best work at an early age, but Mary Somerville, one of Ada’s mentors, began doing her best work in her 40s, so who knows what Ada might have achieved had she lived.

Learn about other Famous Women in Mathematics and Science.

Resources
Notable Women in Mathematics edited by Charlene Morrow and Teri Perl
Women in Science: Antiquity through the Nineteenth Century by Marilyn Bailey Ogilivie
Pictures of Babbage’s Difference Machine at the Computer History Museum in CA and a short NPR piece.

BBC show “In Our Time” – Melvyn Bragg with Patricia Fara, Senior Tutor at Clare College, Cambridge; Doron Swade, Visiting Professor in the History of Computing at Portsmouth University; John Fuegi, Visiting Professor in Biography at Kingston University.

Dame is a Four Letter Word – an audio recording about the life of Ada Lovelace

Sketch of the Analytical Engine invented by Charles Babbage by L. F. Menabrea – this is the translation of Menebrea’s paper with Ada’s notes.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary – Blazing the Trail for Women

Mary Ann Shadd, National Archives of Canada (source)

Not very many people accomplish as much as Mary Ann Shadd Cary did in her life, much less blaze a trail to do it. She has many “firsts” to her credit: first African American woman publisher in North America, first woman publisher in Canada, first woman to enroll in Howard University, first woman to graduate from Howard with a law degree (sort of, more to come) and only the second African American woman to practice law in the United States, at 60 years old no less! She was even commissioned by the governor of Indiana to recruit black soldiers to the Union army, the only woman to hold this position.

Mary Ann Shadd was born free in Delaware on October 9, 1823, to Abraham and Harriet Parnell Shadd, the oldest of their 13 children. Her father was a prosperous boot manufacturer and her mother a woman who wanted her children to be educated. Delaware was a slave state and it was illegal to educate black children, so when Mary was 10, the family moved to West Chester, Pennsylvania where she enrolled in a Quaker school. After graduating at 16, Mary began a career in teaching. For ten years, she taught in schools in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, and amazingly returned to Wilmington Delaware to open a school for black children. It was partly through her efforts that Wilmington began to make provisions for educating free black children in 1844.

During her childhood, her parents were actively involved with many prominent abolitionists. In the 1830s and 40s, her father helped lead a series of conventions led by black leaders, and when the time came they were also involved in the Underground Railroad. This was risky enough, but when the Fugitive Slave Law passed in 1850, it became even more dangerous. Even the northern non-slave states were no longer safe, and, it wasn’t only escaped slaves who were at risk. Freed slaves and free-born blacks were at risk as well. In a time where civil rights were non-existent for African-Americans, the law wasn’t much help, so many free blacks as well as escaped slaves moved to the safety of Canada. Mary Ann Shadd was one of these.

In 1851, Mary and one of her brothers moved to Windsor, Ontario, after meeting Henry Bibb and his wife at the Convention of Colored Freeman in Toronto. In Windsor, she opened a school for fugitive slaves with assistance from the American Missionary Association and eventually brought the rest of her family to join them. Mary became active in the community and began to write and promote Canada to other blacks in the United States, both slave and free. Her first published pamphlet was Notes on Canada West, and it described the virtues of Canadian living. Canada had abolished slavery in 1833 and had no agreement with the United States to extradite escaped slaves. In her book Homespun Heroines, Hallie Brown recounts an incident where a young boy, pursued by slave hunters, was captured and about to be carried off when Mary “tore the boy from the slave hunters, ran to the court-house and had the bell rung so violently that the whole town was soon aroused. Mrs. Cary with her commanding form, piercing eyes, and stirring voice soon had the people as indignant as herself–denouncing in no uncertain terms the outrage perpetrated under the British flag and demanded that these man-hunters be driven from their midst.”

She definitely was not shy. In fact, she had substantial disagreements with some of the other residents of Windsor, in particular Henry Bibb, the publisher of a newspaper called The Voice of the Fugitive. When Mary moved to Windsor, she established a racially integrated school. She believed that blacks must fight for equality and integration into society, and that self-segregation would hinder the fight. Not everyone agreed, and she came under attack by Henry Bibb in his newspaper. Rather than just defending herself, she started her own newspaper, The Provincial Freeman. She had the help of Samuel Ringgold Ward, a newspaper man in his own right, who agreed to be the editor, but it seems likely that he was editor primarily in name only and that Mary was the driving force and primary writer and editor for the paper. The Provincial Freeman gave Mary a way to get her message out about the advantages of moving to Canada, but also about other causes important to her such as women’s rights.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary House in Washington DC (source)

Financing was difficult, and they published the paper off and on between 1853 and 1859. Mary spent a good deal of time traveling back in the United States, distributing her pamphlets, extolling the virtues of Canada, and raising money to keep the paper going. This was a challenge, because in 1856 she married Thomas Cary. Thomas was a barber with three children, but it seemed to work well for them even though she was often away. She and Thomas were both still very involved in the abolitionist cause and in 1858 attended John Brown’s Constitutional Convention. They were friends with Osborne Perry Anderson, the only surviving African-American member of the raiding party, and Mary later helped him prepare his memoir, A Voice From Harper’s Ferry, for publication in 1861.

Mary and Thomas had two children Sarah and Linton, but Thomas died while Mary was pregnant with Linton and she found herself in a position of having to support two young children and three teenagers. She continued teaching, but wanting to be of service to the war effort, she returned to the United States. In 1863, President Lincoln called for volunteers and Mary as always wanted to be of service, so she was commissioned by Levi P. Morton, the governor of Indiana, to recruit black soldiers for the Union army.

At the end of the war, Mary had a decision to make. Although she considered life in Canada a good option, she decided to remain in the United States to help in the assimilation of the newly freed slaves. A strong believer in self-determination, and believing in the importance of education for this purpose, she obtained a US teacher’s certificate and relocated in 1868 to Washington, D. C. She eventually became a principal in the D.C. public schools and enrolled in Howard University.

There seem to be different accounts of her graduation and acceptance to the District of Columbia Bar, one stating that she was the first black woman to become a lawyer in the US and others say she was the second. Mary Ann Shadd Cary is on the roles of the senior class of 1870 at Howard; however, it appears that she was refused her law degree because she was a woman. In the meantime, Charlotte E. Ray graduated in 1872 and was admitted to the bar in Washington D.C. under the name C. E. Ray. (I’m sure the assumption was that C. E. Ray was a man!) So Charlotte Ray became the first black woman lawyer in the US and Mary was awarded her law degree in 1883.

Mary was a strong believer in self-determination whether black or white, male or female. So while her primary work was as an abolitionist and in education, she was also involved in the suffrage movement. During her years in Washington D. C. she continued writing, joined the National Woman Suffrage Association, working with Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, and testifying before the House Judiciary Committee. She also founded the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise in 1880 to work toward equal rights for women.

Mary Ann Shadd Cary continued to speak and write as long as she was able. She died on June 5, 1893, having blazed a trail for women both black and white. As a teacher, writer, publisher, speaker, in the cause of abolition and equal rights for women she was truly an amazing woman!

Resources
Mary Anne Shadd Cary: Abolitionist by Adrienne Shadd
Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction ed. Hallie O. Brown

Ship Commanders, Nuns, and Boxers

I recently posted about Molly Kool, the first North American female sea captain. Today the BBC News announced that Sarah West will become the Royal Navy’s first woman warship commander with the HMS Portland in Scotland. In addition, Royal Navy Commander Sue Moore recently became the first woman to command a squadron of minor war vessels, the First Patrol Boat Squadron. Women first went to sea with the Royal Navy in 1990 and will join men in submarines in 2013.

More “first” women in the News

Hildegard of Bingen, a 12th century German, was the first woman to be recognized as a prophetess by the Roman Catholic Church. Hildegard has inspired both church leaders and feminists for years. Although, she has been considered a saint for centuries, she has now been officially recognized as a saint by Pope Benedict XVI.

Kateri Tekakwitha (1656 – 1680) was the first Native American to be venerated by the Roman Catholic Church and was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 1980. Pope Benedict XVI has set Oct, 21 as the date to make her a saint along with Mother Marianne Cope who cared for leprosy patients in Hawaii for many years.

The Aligarh Muslim University in India, has elected S Chandni Bi, assistant professor of history, to the executive council of the AMUTA (Aligarh Muslim Unversity Teachers Association). She is the first woman elected to this position and her election was unopposed.

When Marlen Esparza defeated Luu Thi Duyen of Vietnam in the Women’s World Championships on May 15, she became the first female boxer to qualify for the US Olympic boxing team. “It’s a big step — not really just for boxing, but for women in general,” Esparza told 713News, ” it’s just an honor, first of all, to represent your country. It’s an even bigger honor to be the first in that position and also being female.”

Women are still making history! Do you know of other women who are first in their field? Please comment and let us know.

Molly Kool – First Certified North American Female Sea Captain

Myrtle ‘Molly’ Kool (February 23, 1916 – February 25, 2009), a Canadian and North America’s First Certified Female Sea Captain.

Molly’s boat collided with another ship in the dense fog. Falling overboard, she grabbed a piece of floating timber to keep afloat. Passengers from the boat began to throw life preservers at her. Her response? “Stop throwing useless things at me, send a boat!” This is a story often told about Molly Kool to demonstrate her courage and presence of mind. Sometimes described as “frivolous and pretty” on land, she earned the respect of her crew, doing any and every job necessary from repairing engines to sewing canvas and splicing rope

Myrtle Kool, known as Molly, was the second of five children born to Myrtle Anderson and Paul Kool, at Alma, New Brunswick in 1916. Paul Kool was a Dutch sea captain who sailed his scow the Jean K between ships anchored at sea and the shore from Alma on Fundy Bay as far south as Boston. Although, his boat was named after his oldest daughter, Molly was the one who took to the sea spending as much time on board with her father as she could.

Wanting to make her career on the sea, she applied to the Merchant Marine school in St. John, New Brunswick. She was turned down, but persevered and in 1937 earned a mate’s certificate. Two years later in 1939, she earned a Coastal Master’s Certificate at the Merchant Marine Institute in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, making her the first woman in North America to become a certified Captain. (They had to amend the Canadian Shipping Act to include the word “she.”) Molly was also only the second woman in the world to achieve this standing, the first being Anna Shchetinina of the Soviet Union just a few years earlier.

Molly’s father turned the Jean K over to her and for five years she sailed some of the roughest seas in the world. In addition to the rough tides at Fundy Bay, she navigated through drift ice, snow, fog, and gale force winds to carry her cargo, most often paper and pulp products.

In 1944, while waiting on repairs after a gas explosion, Molly married Ray Blaisdell and decided to retire from the sea. She and Blaisdell lived in Maine for the next 20 years before Blaisdell’s death, where she sold Singer sewing machines and sailed for pleasure rather than profit. At some point in the 1960s, she married John Carney.

Molly Kool died of pneumonia on February 25, 2009 at the age of 93. She lived a long life, but in 2003 when the “Molly Kool”, named in her honor, was launched she was still able to give the captain instructions on sailing the boat. A monument to her accomplishments has been erected near the wharf at Alma.

Can you think of other female “firsts.” Let us know.