THE ENTR’ACTES

  I love doing research on historical figures to find candidates for earlier iterations of the Kibsu. You’ve probably recognized a few names in the Entr’actes and I’m sure many of you have guessed that the women portrayed in these chapters are actual people. Some are among the earliest known astronomers; others have made some of the most significant discoveries in their field.

  It should come as no surprise that there have been women astronomers for as long as there have been astronomers. I will also not shock anyone when I say there have been fewer than men because doors were systematically closed to them, and they were closed early. As a result, many of the names you find are immediately followed by “wife of X, sister of X, daughter of X,” not because their contributions were not equal but because they would never have had the opportunity to make them without the connection. Take for example Theano, wife of Pythagoras, one of the first women astronomers from antiquity whose name we know. Pythagoras’s school included many women and it is very likely that many of the discoveries and inventions we ascribe to him (the identity of the morning and evening stars as the planet Venus, the triangle thing, et cetera) were the product of his school and not just him. Plato’s school also allowed women. Aristotle, on the other hand, thought women were inferior and cold (literally, one of the reasons he found women inferior is because their bodies were too cold to produce semen), and the Christian Church went the Aristotle way. The Church did a number on science as a whole during the Middle Ages and women scientists got it even worse.

  Here’s a bit of what I learned about the people in this book’s Entr’actes.

  Aglaonike (a.k.a. Aglaonice, a.k.a. Aganice) of Thessaly

  No one really knows when she lived, nor do we have undeniable proof of her existence.

  In the first century AD, Plutarch wrotefn8 that “Aglaonice the daughter of Hegetor being thoroughly conversant with the periods of the Full Moon when it is subject to eclipse, and knowing beforehand when the Moon was due to be overtaken by the Earth’s shadow, imposed upon audiences of women and made them all believe that she drew down the Moon.” She obviously had to live before Plutarch could write about her, but she could have been one of his contemporaries, and it was around the third century BC that the Babylonians were first able to predict lunar eclipses. That leaves her a window of a few hundred years to do her thing.

  It’s interesting to note that while many myths survived the test of time, serious efforts were put into debunking Aglaonike’s powers very early on. Her story is used in Greek comedic texts and even gave rise to a Greek proverb, “Yes, as the moon obeys Aglaonice,” used, presumably sarcastically, to say that something is certain to happen. It seems fairly obvious that the idea of a woman astronomer, who by virtue of being a woman could not have received “proper” training, was unpalatable to the men of the era. She had to be a witch or, worse, pretending to be a witch.

  I don’t particularly care about her motives, but what should be obvious to everyone is that two thousand years ago, they weren’t filling coliseums with people “thoroughly conversant with the periods of the Full Moon when it is subject to eclipse, and knowing beforehand when the Moon was due to be overtaken by the Earth’s shadow.” You had to be a genius.

  Hypatia

  One of the most brilliant minds of her time, she is unfortunately better known for her death than for what she did. Granted, it was quite the death, but I like to imagine how much she had to piss off the Church for them to want to kill her, kill her again, cut her to pieces, and kill the pieces. I would like to have known her. There’s a good article from University at Albanyfn9 on what little we know about her science. One thing we do know is that she built astrolabes. Many of the ancient women astronomers we know of did. From Zulema la Astróloga, the Moorish astronomer, to Mariam al-Asturlabi of Syria who inspired Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti.

  Interestingly, we don’t always know what it is people were making when we read about astrolabes. The word was used for two very different things, both of which are awesome. First, there is the armillary sphere, sometimes called spherical astrolabe, which is a three-dimensional model of the heavens. A bunch of rings, usually metal spinning around a model of the Earth or sun. It looks ridiculously cool, but it’s normally big. This is the kind of thing you put in your office, but you would hurt yourself if you tried to carry it around and use it in the field. Then there’s the more practical instrument that Ptolemy theorized and called “little astrolabe.” It’s a two-dimensional model of the heavens, so it’s made of discs spinning inside a flat casing. This one you can carry around. It was used to identify celestial bodies, calculate altitude, all sorts of things. It looks incredibly complex. It’s also one of the most beautiful instruments ever created.

  At the time of Hypatia, models of the heavens were pretty much all spherical, with the fixed stars attached inside the outermost sphere. The idea that people thought all the stars were glued to a giant sphere seems ludicrous in our times, but that belief did not simply arise from ignorance. There was actually some science behind it. Let’s do a little experiment. Grab two objects, could be anything, and place one at eye level a couple feet in front of you. Take the other one and put it far behind at the same height. Now go back to where you were. Unless you miraculously placed these two things exactly behind each other, you should see some space between them. Move a little to the right, now a little to the left. The space between your two things should get bigger or smaller as you move, as if the closer thing were moving. Right? That whole phenomenon is called parallax. That’s how we’re able to estimate the distance between us and things in space, by measuring their apparent movement against things that are farther away as the Earth rotates around the sun. People have understood the phenomenon for a long time, but because stars are really, really, really really far away, and because telescopes wouldn’t be invented for another fifteen hundred years, people like Ptolemy were unable to measure any parallax effect between stars. They concluded that all the stars had to be at the same distance from Earth, forming a giant sphere around it. The observation was flawed because they lacked the technology to measure the effect at such distances, but if we assume the observation is correct, there is no other logical conclusion. No matter how silly something may look now, always remember that smart people were always smart people.

  Blue Teeth Lady

  I called her Agnes, but she is inspired by a woman named Ende from the tenth century. She wasn’t an astronomer but what was called an illuminator. The difference between artist and artisan was blurred during the Middle Ages. Art often served a practical purpose, including teaching. Books were made by hand, written by scribes, then embellished with gold leaf, paintings, and/or fancy colored letters. Red was originally the main color added and the pigment used was called minium. The people adding the minium were called miniators, which became “illuminator.”

  Before I go on, I hope you noticed this is linguistic gold, no pun intended. You’d think “illuminator” had something to do with light, but the word comes from the name of a red pigment. Even cooler, the word “miniature” is derived from that because the miniators were making tiny tiny paintings.

  Back to Ende. Making books was doing God’s work (books were mostly about God) and it was normally work reserved for men—monks. Ende was a nun, and she is the first European woman whose art was identified by an inscription. She was good enough she got to sign her work. “Ende pintrix et Dei adiutrix, frater Emeterius et presbiter (Ende, painter and God’s helper, Emeterius, brother and presbyter).”

  Ende was thought to be the exception. Women, it was believed, rarely took part in this kind of work until much later. Enter SCIENCE! The third entr’acte is based on a real science paper titled: “Medieval Women’s Early Involvement in Manuscript Production Suggested by Lapis Lazuli Identification in Dental Calculus.”

  Yes! They looked at gunk on thousand-year-old teeth and found blue pigment, which suggests not only that women were commonly involved in manuscript production earlier than thought but also that lapis lazuli was more widely available in Europe at the time. I LOVE SCIENCE!

  You can read the paper online at Science magazine.fn10

  Annie

  I made her the daughter of Emily from the second Entr’acte, but in real life Annie—born Annie Scott Dill—was one of six children born in Ireland to devout Christian parents, neither of whom was murdered by Jack the Ripper. All of the children went into academia. Annie went to Girton College and finished at the top of her class. She received the second-highest honor bestowed to math undergraduates at Cambridge. She went on to work as a computer at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich under Walter Maunder, whom she later married. She studied sunspots and produced groundbreaking work on the subject. She left the observatory to marry Walter (married women were indeed banned from public service jobs), but the two continued to collaborate. They went on eclipse expeditions together to photograph and study solar eclipses. Norway, India, Mauritius, they traveled the world and produced amazing photographs of the sun. She’s the one who coined the term “plume” to describe long, feathery jets she observed during these expeditions.

  When the Royal Astronomical Society finally allowed women fellows in 1916, Annie Maunder was one of four women to receive the honor, along with Margaret Theodora Meyer, Mary Proctor, and Francisca Herschel, the great-niece of Caroline Herschel, who had been named an “Honorary Member” by the RAS in 1835. More recently, the Royal Observatory in Greenwich named their new telescope after Annie.

  Though she was near London during the infamous murder spree, I have no reason to believe she hunted serial killers at night. The Whitechapel Murderer, a.k.a. Leather Apron, a.k.a. Jack the Ripper, was never caught.

  It’s interesting to note that it wasn’t until very recently (my dad was alive) that we figured out what powered the sun. If you’re interested, there is a fun paperfn11 from 2016 on all the theories that were being thrown around in the late nineteenth century.

  There are tons of women astronomers you can read about, amazing people I often wish I could include as characters in this series but can’t for all sorts of reasons. You can start with Enheduanna. She was a Sumerian high priestess in the city-state of Ur in the twenty-third century BC (long before the Kibsu arrived). She was also a poet and an astronomer. She was so cool they made her an EN-priestess. You had to be royalty to be an EN, but not her. She wrote several prayers to the goddess Inanna (remember her?). Enheduanna is—get this—the first named author in the history of the world. This is an excerpt from one of her poems in which she describes her work.fn12

  The true woman who possesses exceeding wisdom,

  She consults a tablet of lapis lazuli

  She gives advice to all lands …

  She measures off the heavens,

  She places the measuring-cords on the earth.

  She was a scientist.

  Let’s move forward a bit to the 1700s. I already talked about William Herschel, the musician, who discovered Uranus and quit his day job to become Court Astronomer. Well, William had a sister, Caroline. Caroline got typhus as a child and her growth slowed. Her parents didn’t think she could find a husband and kept her home as a house servant. That is, until William took her in. He gave her music lessons and she became a professional singer. She also helped her brother make telescopes. When William got his new gig as Court Astronomer, he hired Caroline as an assistant. She was the first woman to actually get paid as a scientist and the first British woman to hold a government position. She discovered a bunch of nebulae and comets and cataloged thousands upon thousands of stars, comets, and nebulae. In 1828, she got a Gold Medal from the Royal Astronomical Society for her work. It would take over a century for another woman to receive the honor. Go, Caroline!

  If you make a list of known women astronomers and organize it chronologically, you’ll hit a cluster of Americans in the late 1800s, early 1900s. Many of them belonged to a group known as Pickering’s Harem. The name is horrible, I know, but a good reminder of the challenges these people faced, and their story is amazing. The Pickering in question is Edward Charles Pickering, director of the Harvard College Observatory and brother to W. H. Pickering, who supervised the guy who found Pluto.

  In 1881, Edward Charles Pickering fired his assistant, who apparently sucked at cataloging stars. To replace him, he hired his maid, Williamina Fleming, and this is how the story begins. More than half a century before the human computer of Hidden Figures, there were the Harvard Observatory computers. During Pickering’s tenure, over eighty women were hired to analyze stellar spectra (light split into a rainbow with gaps that tells you what stars are made of) and to compute and catalog astronomical data. Several of them made significant contributions of their own, starting with Williamina Fleming. She devised what was called the Pickering-Fleming system for classifying stars. In 1890, she and her team produced a catalog of more than ten thousand stars classified according to spectrum. During her thirty-four years at Harvard, she discovered dozens of nebulae, over three hundred stars, and ten novae. She was also the very first person to observe a white dwarf. I encourage you to read about Annie Jump Cannon, Antonia Maury, Florence Cushman, and Henrietta Swan Leavitt—scientists who, despite performing groundbreaking work, rarely or never received individual honors or recognition.

  That’s it for this book. More coming in the last one, I promise. Oh, almost forgot. Someone did steal Led Zeppelin’s money from a safe-deposit box at the Drake Hotel.

  Playlist

  Chapter Song

  1. “Helter Skelter,” The Beatles (1968)

  2. “Can’t Find My Way Home,” Blind Faith (1969)

  3. “Gimme Shelter,” The Rolling Stones (1969)

  4. “Space Oddity,” David Bowie (1969)

  5. “Everyday People,” Sly and the Family Stone (1968)

  6. “Across the Universe,” The Beatles (1969)

  7. “Ziggy Stardust,” David Bowie (1972)

  8. “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” The Temptations (1972)

  9. “All the Young Dudes,” Mott the Hoople (1972)

  10. “Old Man,” Neil Young (1972)

  11. “Mother and Child Reunion,” Paul Simon (1972)

  12. “Children of the Revolution,” T. Rex (1972)

  13. “Time in a Bottle,” Jim Croce (1973)

  14. “Higher Ground,” Stevie Wonder (1973)

  15. “20th Century Boy,” T. Rex (1973)

  16. “Dream On,” Aerosmith (1973)

  17. “She’s Gone,” Hall & Oates (1973)

  18. “Let’s Get it On,” Marvin Gaye (1973)

  19. “Mind Games,” John Lennon (1973)

  20. “I Can’t Stand the Rain,” Ann Peebles (1973)

  21. “Midnight at the Oasis,” Maria Muldaur (1973)

  22. “The Passenger,” Iggy Pop (1977)

  23. “Sweet Emotion,” Aerosmith (1975)

  24. “Sound and Vision,” David Bowie (1977)

  25. “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper,” Blue Öyster Cult (1976)

  26. “Marquee Moon,” Television (1977)

  27. “White Rabbit,” Jefferson Airplane (1967)

  28. “Lola,” The Kinks (1970)

  29. “Psycho Killer,” Talking Heads (1977)

  30. “Let’s Go,” The Cars (1979)

  31. “Sara,” Fleetwood Mac (1979)

  32. “Take Me to the River,” Syl Johnson (1974)

  33. “The Logical Song,” Supertramp (1979)

  34. “Walking on the Moon,” The Police (1979)

  35. “Boys Don’t Cry,” The Cure (1979)

  36. “Mother,” Pink Floyd (1979)

  37. “Brass in Pocket,” The Pretenders (1979)

  38. “Don’t Stop Believin’,” Journey (1981)

  39. “Rapture,” Blondie (1980)

  40. “Video Killed the Radio Star,” The Buggles (1979)

  41. “Under Pressure,” Queen and David Bowie (1981)

  42. “Kids in America,” Kim Wilde (1981)

  43. “Private Eyes,” Hall & Oates (1981)

  44. “Ghost Town,” The Specials (1981)

  45. “Anarchy in the UK,” Sex Pistols (1976)

  46. “Crimson and Clover,” Joan Jett (1981)

  47. “How Soon Is Now?,” The Smiths (1984)

  48. “Red Rain,” Peter Gabriel (1986)

  49. “Ship of Fools,” World Party (1986)

  50. “If You Leave,” Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark (1986)

  51. “Don’t You (Forget About Me),” Simple Minds (1985)

  52. “Running Up That Hill,” Kate Bush (1985)

  53. “Live to Tell,” Madonna (1986)

  54. “The NeverEnding Story,” Limahl (1984)

  55. “We Belong,” Pat Benatar (1984)

  56. “Under the Milky Way,” The Church (1988)

  57. “Everybody Knows,” Leonard Cohen (1988)

  58. “About a Girl,” Nirvana (1989)

  59. “One,” Metallica (1988)