Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Dava Sobel
Every year I gather up my courage to invite at least one writer whom I do not know and whose work is extraordinary. This year that writer was Dava Sobel. I fan-girled all over the house when she said yes.
Dava Sobel is the author of Longitude (Walker 1995, Bloomsbury 2005), Galileo’s Daughter (Walker 1999 and 2011), The Planets (Viking 2005, Penguin 2006), A More Perfect Heaven (Walker/Bloomsbury 2011 and 2012), And the Sun Stood Still (Bloomsbury 2016), The Glass Universe (Viking 2016, Penguin 2017) and The Elements of Marie Curie (Grove/Atlantic 2024). She has also co-authored six books, including Is Anyone Out There? with astronomer Frank Drake, and currently edits the “Meter” poetry column in Scientific American.
Take it away Dava!
Image credit: Glen Allsop for Hodinkee
How do you choose subjects for your books?
Choosing a subject for a book is a little like choosing a romantic partner. You’re going to be alone in a room together for a long time, through periods that will feel dark and discouraging, so it helps to really like or even love the topic. I can honestly say that I’ve fallen in love with all the people I’ve written about — or with the story their lives embody. Mme. Curie, the central figure of my most recent book, proved to be the perfect pandemic companion. Her grit had seen her through griefs and challenges far more threatening than any aspect of my situation, and I took inspiration daily from her example.
Of course there has to be science in the mix to attract me. Real chemistry, say, or the dawn of astrophysics. I enjoy learning about and then trying to explain aspects of science as a creative human enterprise. Everyone knows that scientists “do research,” but most people have no idea what such research might entail, or how it would feel to be the scientist at work in this laboratory or at that observatory.
Because I write about the history of science, and can’t interview the long dead, I rely on archives for letters and diaries. If those kinds of materials don’t exist, or they’re written in a language I can’t read, then I consider that topic out of reach. Sometimes the existence of such a trove is reason enough to take on a book project, as happened when I learned that Galileo’s elder daughter, who was a cloistered nun, had written her supposedly heretic father more than a hundred letters that still survived. I felt that familiar rush of excitement, and figured I could probably revive my three years of university-level Italian, despite the lapse of three decades. The fact that Galileo’s replies had vanished over the centuries seemed problematic at first, but he’d said enough in other contexts to carry his end of their conversation.
The Curie archives were physically out of reach because of travel restrictions during the pandemic. Fortunately, however, the fact of Marie’s fame as a two-time Nobel Prize winner, coupled with the dangerous nature of the materials she handled, had resulted in the digitization of nearly every notebook and draft letter, including the hand-written grief journal that she kept through the year following her husband’s death. The letters to and from her two daughters had been collected and published as books, so I had all of those at hand as well. The Elements of Marie Curie is a particularly female story — a tale of scientific discovery, yes, but also of love and marriage, childbirth, miscarriage, difficulty nursing, misogyny, and widowhood.
What is the most surprising thing you learned doing research for your books?
By far the most surprising — even shocking — thing was the discovery of my own misogyny. This happened rather late in my career, and explains my decision to tell only women’s stories going forward. Of course, as a woman, I didn’t think I could be accused of misogyny, but I was wrong.
I learned this while writing my previous book, The Glass Universe, which tells the story of a group of women who worked at the Harvard College Observatory in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, where they made pivotal discoveries in astronomy. I had written about many key figures in the history of astronomy, including Galileo and Copernicus, and the story of the Harvard women appealed to me precisely because it focused on female astronomers. However, once I got to work, each one’s achievements surprised me. And why was that? At length I had to admit that I’d come to them with embarrassingly low expectations. It seemed I didn’t really believe women could do science. In spite of the encouragement I’d enjoyed from my own family, at school, and through decades as a professional science writer, I had not escaped the negative attitudes about women that were “in the air” when I was growing up in the 1950s.
After that transformative moment of confronting my latent undiagnosed misogyny, all I wanted to do was tell true stories that reveal women’s scientific prowess. When I learned that some 45 women had spent a formative period in Mme. Curie’s lab, I knew I had something new and important to say about her.
Two of your books, The Glass Universe and The Elements of Marie Curie, are group biographies. How did you decide which women to include?
The Harvard Observatory women numbered in the dozens, but only five of them achieved lasting fame (at least in the astronomical community) for their contributions. Still, five main female characters are a lot, plus the charismatic director who hired them, and the two wealthy heiresses who funded their research. I longed for one stand-out who could carry the whole story, but she didn’t exist. Eventually it struck me that the several hundred thousand glass-plate photographs of the night sky, which replaced direct observation by telescope for these women, connected everything and everyone in the story. That gave me the idea for the title, since the collection of plates is truly a “glass universe.” And of course the glass universe — very fittingly — encompassed the notion of the glass ceiling. In fact, the association is so strong that people often call the book “The Glass Ceiling” without realizing they’ve misspoken.
I had the opposite problem with Mme. Curie. She is a figure of such towering fame that nearly everyone has heard of her. Although she was never the only woman scientist, she’s the only one most people can name. My initial idea was to put her in the background of the narrative. Since the women arrived at the lab in a slow trickle at first, one per year, I thought I’d treat each one individually, moving chronologically and bringing in the facts of Mme. Curie’s life only as they related to her protegees’ experiences. That didn’t work at all. My editor, George Gibson, reminded me that although virtually everyone knew Mme. Curie’s name, her name was all they knew. Her personal story had to be the vehicle that carried all the others’ stories.
As with The Glass Universe, an inanimate character also figures in this book. It’s the periodic table of the elements. Each chapter title has two parts: the name of a person (usually a woman in the Curie lab, though occasionally a man) and the name of an element relevant to that person’s work.
My choices of individuals to feature depended partly on the importance or interest of their activities and partly on the amount of available information about them. Some of Mme. Curie’s female assistants flitted through the lab so quickly that they left no historical record, not even their full names. I’m still wondering whatever happened to the mysterious “Mlle. Larch.”
A question from Dava: Is Women’s History Month a good thing or a bad thing? Please elaborate.
I struggle with this question every March. And every March, my answer remains the same. It is neither good nor bad. But for now it is necessary. In fact, I would argue that it is more necessary than ever. As I write this, Federal agencies are ordering celebration of “cultural awareness” months paused or cancelled altogether. (Perhaps by the time you read this those orders will have been rolled back. We can only hope.)
In the meantime, I intend to celebrate Women’s History month as hard as I can. The fact is that many libraries, museums, and particularly schools only include women in their programming in March. Until we regularly teach students that women were involved in, well, everything, we need Women’s History Month.
Let’s party hard!
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Interested in learning more about Dava Sobel and her work? Check out her website at http://www.davasobel.com/
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Tomorrow will be business as usual here on the Margins with a blog post from me. Then we’ll be back on Monday with three questions and a answer from philosopher and historian Lydia Moland.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and An Answer with Michele C. Hollow
Michele Hollow and I met many years ago when we were both new members of the American Society of Journalists and Authors. We’ve been following each other around the internet ever since, cheering each other on.
Michele is an award-winning writer and editor. She writes about health, mental health, autism, aging, animals, and climate. Her byline has appeared in The New York Times, Next Avenue, The Guardian, Parents, AARP, and The Costco Connection. She has also done nonprofit writing for IFAW (International Fund for Animal Welfare), Family Promise (a nonprofit that helps homeless families), and the Simons Foundation (an autism research nonprofit).
She is the author of The Everything Guide to Working with Animals (Adams Media), which came out in March 2009, and a middle grade biography on the Grateful Dead, which was updated and reissued in 2019. Her first historical novel for middle grade readers came out on September 10, 2024. It’s called Jurassic Girl and is about Mary Anning’s first major fossil discovery at age 12. This was back in 1811. The men in the London Geological Society called her a fraud; they didn’t believe a girl could make such an amazing find. Mary triumphed and today she’s known as the “Mother of Paleontology.”
Michele lives in NJ with her husband, Steven, and their rescue cat Chai. She has two sons.
Take it away, Michele:
What path led you to Mary Anning? And why do you think it is important to tell her story for younger readers today?
As a journalist, I enjoy writing about people who make a difference. I write about animal welfare and health. Interviewing everyone from a professional violinist who serenades formerly abused dogs at the ASPCA on his day off to professional clowns and vaudevillians who bring joy and laughter to Alzheimer patients at hospitals uplifts my spirit. I like getting to know people who help others.
A couple of my readers told me about Mary Anning. I had not heard of her. I did a bit of digging online. A handful of sites popped up. I learned she was a fossil hunter who discovered an ichthyosaurus, which translates to fish lizard. I later found out the ichthyosaurus is neither a fish nor a lizard. It’s in the reptile family.
What struck me about this discovery was that at the time, no one was certain what she found. Many people in her hometown of Lyme Regis, UK, thought it was a crocodile. This was in 1811 when Mary was 12 years old. Imagine being 12 and unearthing a creature no one has seen before. This was at a time when most people didn’t believe in extinction. They didn’t believe an entire species would die out.
In addition to making such a major discovery at age 12, Mary was poor and self-educated. Back then most people paid to attend school. Mary’s family didn’t have money to send her or her brother Joseph to school.
Many of the men at London’s Geological Society thought Mary was a fraud. Females did not get credit in scientific journals back then. The London Geological Society credited the man who purchased the fossil from Mary as the discoverer.
I wrote Jurassic Girl for middle grade students because Mary was a remarkable 12-year-old. I believe children would find her story relatable. Often young children don’t get the credit they deserve from adults. Reading about Mary’s perseverance and triumphs encourage readers of all ages.
How do you walk the line between historical fact and fiction in an historical novel?
This was the tricky part. I work as a journalist. One of the first internships I had while in college was working in the research department of the Time Life building in New York City. When I write articles, I interview experts and people experiencing issues that we can learn from.
I don’t own a time machine so I couldn’t go back in time and interview Mary or any of her family. I looked up books about Mary and found The Fossil Hunter by Shelley Emling. It’s a biography about Mary Anning.
While reading the book, I learned about the Lyme Regis Museum. About a year ago, the museum opened a Mary Anning wing. Lyme Regis is part of the Jurassic Coast. Today, tourists fossil hunt at the same seaside that Mary did more than 200 years ago.
The Fossil Hunter mentioned the research team at the Lyme Regis Museum. I contacted them, told them I was writing a book about Mary, and asked if I could send them questions. I sent lots of questions, and the researchers at the museum were kind enough to answer them.
In my book’s introduction, I told my readers that facts are important when writing about history and historical figures. I stated I couldn’t interview Mary or anyone else from that period so made up the dialogue. That’s where the “fiction” part comes in.
When you talk to children about Mary Anning, what surprises them most about her story?
Most here in the U.S. are not aware of her. In the UK, Jurassic Girl is doing well because many people there know about her. Last year the UK introduced a Mary Anning postage stamp.
What stood out to me was a recent interaction I had with other science writers. A few female writers complained that women scientists don’t always get credit for their work in scientific journals. Women in science even today have to fight for recognition.
When I addressed four fourth grade classes at an elementary school, many of the girls came up to me at the end of my talk, raised a fist, and said “Girl Power!” I believe girls understand that doors aren’t always open.
This statue in New York City is named “Dinosaur,” acknowledging the relationship between dinosaurs and modern pigeons.
The girls and the boys I talk to at schools love learning about Mary Anning. Many have read and enjoyed Jurassic Girl. They love everything having to do with dinosaurs. They understand that dinosaurs evolved into birds. I tell them if they want to see a live dinosaur to go outside and watch the pigeons and other birds in their neighborhoods.
My readers are smart.
A question from Michele: I’m curious if you have discussed The Dragon from Chicago with children. I know it’s for adults. I believe young adults and mature children would find the book fascinating. So, if you are so inclined, how would you talk to children about Sigrid Schultz?
I think the odds that anyone would ask me to talk to elementary school students about Sigrid Schultz are small, particularly in today’s world when there is an impulse to protect children from learning about the bad stuff. That said, if I were given the opportunity I would focus on three big-picture issues: what the newspaper business was like for women in the early to mid twentieth century, Sigrid’s courage in reporting on the Nazis, and the importance of reporters in keeping readers informed about what is happening in the world.
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Interested in learning more about Michele C Hollow and her work?
Check out some of her articles here
Check out her web page about Jurassic Girl here:
Buy Jurassic Girl here
Follow her on Bluesksy: @michelechollow.bsky.social
Follow her on Facebook: Michele C Hollow
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with best-selling science writer Dava Sobel, whose most recent book deals with Marie Curie and the forgotten women scientists who worked with her.
Talking About Women’s History: Three Questions and an Answer with Vanda Krefft
Vanda Krefft is the author of Expect Great Things!, a social history of the famed Katharine Gibbs School and its impact on the American workplace for women. The book tells the lively, unlikely story of Katharine Gibbs herself and celebrates the many pathfinding achievements of her school’s graduates during the early to mid-20th century. Expect Great Things! (Algonquin Books, 2025) is available today wherever you buy or order your books.
Vanda’s previous book,The Man Who Made the Movies (HarperCollins, 2017), is the first in-depth biography of Twentieth Century Fox founder William Fox and reveals Fox’s many pivotal contributions to the American film industry as well as the shocking events that ended his career. Previously, Vanda wrote about the entertainment industry for leading national magazines and syndicated news services. Her work has appeared in Elle, Redbook, Woman’s Day, Woman’s World, and the Los Angeles Times.
Take it away, Vanda!
What path led you to the Katharine Gibbs School?
I like people who come out of nowhere and do the unexpected. My first book, The Man Who Made the Movies (HarperCollins, 2017), was a biography of 20th Century Fox founder William Fox, who created one of Hollywood’s great movie studios and profoundly shaped not only the art of film, but also the industry’s technology and business structure. Fox grew up in dire poverty on New York’s Lower East Side and had only a third-grade education. Similarly unlikely was the success of Katharine Gibbs and her elegant, landmark school for women.
I had been vaguely familiar with the Katharine Gibbs School, which had its glory days in the mid-20th century and which, after the Gibbs family sold the business in 1968, slowly slid downhill under corporate ownership until permanently closing in 2011. When a friend suggested Katharine Gibbs as a subject for my second book, I was skeptical. I’d always assumed that founder Katharine Gibbs was a stuffy, conservative, Seven Sisters-type New England aristocrat—nothing like jumping to conclusions based on a name!—and that her school aimed to suppress young women’s ambitions by training them as secretaries. Quite the opposite, I discovered, after doing some preliminary research. In fact, Katharine Gibbs came from a small Midwestern town where her father slaughtered hogs for a living, had only a high school education, and had never worked outside the home before finding herself a near-broke middle-aged widow.
In fact, she started her school not to reinforce the status quo but to upend it. Having been betrayed three times by her belief that male family members would always provide for and protect her financially—the last straw was her husband’s dying in 1909 without a will—she was determined that what had happened to her should never have to happen to any other woman. And so, tapping long-dormant assertiveness and courage, Katharine Gibbs built a tremendously successful business with principal locations on New York’s Park Avenue and in Boston’s Back Bay.
Her mission: to give women the skills and knowledge so they could always earn a good, independent living. In an era replete with gender bias, she figured, that meant training them to use executive secretary positions as a springboard into management. Students learned not only typing and stenography, but also academic subjects taught by professors from elite universities. A sort of Trojan Horse campaign, it worked. Among the 50,000 Gibbs graduates by 1968, many became leaders across all facets of American life. It was deeply rewarding to tell the stories of these “hidden figures” of the women’s movement who helped lay the foundation for today’s more equitable working world.
We’re all familiar with the challenges of finding sources for writing about women from the distant past. What are the challenges of writing about women from the early and middle twentieth century?
Massive challenges! In general, my ladies—yes, “ladies,” because in their era, the term primarily connoted discernment, graciousness, and consideration for others—were not firebrands or banner-carrying feminists. They were women who started in the trenches, typing and taking dictation, and worked their way up gradually to leadership positions. At Gibbs, they were trained to camouflage their ambitions with a smile, correct speech, cooperation, and a ladylike hat and white gloves. (That didn’t mean they were pushovers or doormats. The Gibbs placement office assured them they could always quit, with another good opportunity ready at hand.) But because Gibbs women worked within a culture that generally regarded female employees as inferior and/or biding their time till they landed a husband, their achievements were often ignored.
For instance, having learned that in 1930, Gibbs graduate Mary Sutton Ramsdell became one of the first two female Massachusetts State Police patrol officers, I thought that surely the Boston Globe would have covered such a milestone event. Yet not a word on its pages, let alone a photo. Likewise, I found nothing of any substance in mainstream publications about Joan M. Clark who, with her Gibbs education but no college degree, rose from a secretarial job with the US army to become Ambassador to Malta and then head of the US Foreign Service.
But thank goodness for the internet and its rich, deep, and sometimes obscure resources. Via ancestry.com, historical newspaper databases, and unending Google searches, I tracked down family members and friends of Gibbs graduates, found oral histories in archival collections, and located some extensive collections of personal papers in university libraries. Here was one advantage of the time frame. Newspapers proliferated in the US before and during the early days of television. While overwhelmingly they tended to report on women only when they got engaged or married, once in a while I found breadcrumb information about dates, family history, and employment.
Following those clues led to first-hand interviews with Gibbs graduates and their descendants. While some former students were in their eighties or nineties, all those I reached were mentally sharp, with vivid recollections, good humor, and unfailing cooperation—delightful to speak with. Their family members and friends were also extremely helpful, providing illuminating personal details. I would encourage anyone researching this time frame to act fast to get firsthand testimony. Write a letter, pick up the phone, send emails to potential sources and people who knew them (and keep trying if you don’t get an answer right away), ask about scrapbooks and photos and other memorabilia, ask who else might be helpful. Yours may be the last chance to save a valuable piece of the past.
Was there a woman you were sad to leave out?
Not one, but many. The ones I didn’t know about because their achievements hadn’t turned up anywhere in my research. I’m sure there were many unrecognized, uncelebrated Gibbs graduates. One of my early research tasks was to go to Brown University’s Hay Library, home of the Katharine Gibbs School Records, where I scanned every single page of every single Gibbs yearbook they had. It wasn’t a complete collection, and some of the branches of the school didn’t have yearbooks, but something was better than nothing. As I looked at the student headshots and read their comments, it was clear that these young women had great energy, optimism, and potential. But so many times, when I searched beyond for information about them, nothing turned up.
Among the Gibbs women I did profile, I regretted not being able to tell the full story of Myrna Custis. There she was, a lone Black face among the students in the 1956 yearbook of the New York Gibbs School. Race was a complicated issue for the Gibbs School in these mid-century years. I found no evidence that school ever discriminated on the basis of race, religion, or ethnic background. To the contrary, all indications were that the faculty advocated progressive social attitudes—such as pushing back if a boss tried to dissuade them from hiring a Black employee.
More likely, the fact that Myrna Custis was the first Black student to appear in the extant Gibbs yearbooks reflected grim socio-economic facts. That is, the Gibbs School was expensive and most Black families earned substantially less than white families. Then why didn’t the school offer scholarships to help recruit Black students? That raises another, thornier question: would it have been ethical to take two years of a young woman’s life to encourage her hopes and prepare her for a job that almost certainly wouldn’t exist for her upon graduation? The Gibbs placement department well knew the attitudes of employers and no laws as yet prohibited racial discrimination.
I would have loved to ask Myrna or her family members what led her to enroll at Gibbs, what dreams she had then, how the other students and faculty treated her, and what happened to her out in the working world.
For all the Gibbs stories that I missed, I hope that readers will contact me to fill me in on more of this important hidden history. (https://www.vandakrefft.com/contact)
A question from Vanda: You know so much about otherwise forgotten or marginalized women’s history—was there anything in the book that surprised you?
I can honestly say that the biggest surprise was the underlying mission of the school. Even though I was aware of the fact that executive secretaries were (and are) often powerful figures in the organizations they worked for, I, too, assumed that the school was fundamentally conservative in its goals. Once I let go of that assumption, I was ready to be amazed. (And you did in fact amaze me, over and over again.)
One story in particular caught my imagination: Joye Hummel, who was an important writer in the early days of the Wonder Woman comics. Her story was definitely downplayed in other accounts I had read about the creation of my favorite super hero!
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Interested in learning more about Vanda and her work? Check out her website at https://www.vandakrefft.com/
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Come back tomorrow for three questions and an answer with Michele C. Hollow, the author of Jurassic Girl.