Infinite Women

Elizabeth Freeman, also known as MumBet, fought a legal battle for her freedom from slavery in 1700s Massachusetts. Elizabeth had been born into slavery around 1744, and was given to her owner’s daughter when she was just seven years old, remaining in that woman’s household for almost 30 years. In 1780, Elizabeth heard the newly ratified Massachusetts State Constitution, which included that “All m...

Dr. Jess Bugeja, a CERC postdoctoral fellow in the CSIRO’s Australian eHealth Research Centre, Neurodevelopment and Plasticity team, joins us to talk about neuroplasticity pioneer Dr Marian Diamond, one of the founders of neuroscience. Read the interview transcript: https://www.infinite-women.com/wp-content/uploads/Interview-notes_-Jess-Bugeja-on-Dr-Marian-Diamond.pdf

Anacaona was a Taíno cacica (female cacique or chief), religious expert, poet and composer of Xaraguá, in what is now Haiti. Born into a family of caciques, she succeeded her brother as ruler of Xaragua after his death in 1500. Although she was famous for her poetry, songs, oral histories and traditional dances, little remains of her work today. In 1493, the Spanish had established a colony to min...

CSIRO behavioural scientist Dr. Emily Brindal, who uses her understanding of human behavior to help people investigate and promote healthy lifestyles, joins us to chat about about philosopher and psychologist Dr Mary Whiton Calkins. Read the interview transcript: https://www.infinite-women.com/wp-content/uploads/Interview-notes_-Dr-Emily-Brindal-on-Mary-Whiton-Calkins.pdf Read more about Dr. Calki...

We know for a fact that multiple women reigned over the centuries in ancient Egypt, but understandably, the further back we go, the less clear the records get - because there simply isn’t much documentation left after thousands of years. Apart from the natural causes of materials being lost, damaged or destroyed over time, there were also instances of deliberate attempts to erase women from histor...

In this episode, we're joined by Evelien de Bruijn, a glass artist from the Netherlands, to discuss biases in how women’s lives are documented, and the impact this has on future generations. Read the interview transcript

Dr. Ides Wong, a program manager at CSIRO, joins us to talk about 18th century Chinese astronomer, mathematician, and poet Wang Zhenyi. Read more about Wang Zhenyi on the Infinite Women site: https://www.infinite-women.com/women/wang-zhenyi/

Known as the Lioness of Brittany, Jeanne de Clisson turned to piracy to avenge her husband, who the French king had had executed for treason. Olivier de Clisson was her third of four husbands, the first having died and the second marriage having been annulled. Together, they had ruled part of Brittany, but following the Breton War of Succession, he was accused of not defending his city vigorously...

CSIRO’s Dr. Denis Bauer, whose work focuses on improving human health by applying cloud-computing technology to better understanding the genome, joins us to discuss both her own work and one of Dr. Bauer’s scientific forebears - Rosalind Franklin. Read the interview transcript: https://www.infinite-women.com/wp-content/uploads/Dr.-Denis-Bauer-on-Rosalind-Franklin.pdf Read more about Franklin on th...

Kimberly Hess, author of the 2021 biography, A Lesser Mortal: The Unexpected Life of Sarah B. Cochran, joins us to discuss the philanthropist and businesswoman who rose from housemaid to head of a coal empire. Sarah was also a suffragist and builder of not one but two National Register-listed buildings. Read Sarah's entry on Infinite Women , written by Kimberly for the National Women's His...

Dr. Brandy Schillace, Editor in Chief of Medical Humanities for the British Medical Journal, joins us to discuss women and Autism. For context, both Dr. Schillace and host Allison Tyra are Autistic. https://brandyschillace.com/ Read the interview transcript: https://www.infinite-women.com/wp-content/uploads/Dr-Brandy-Schillace-on-Women-and-Autism.pdf

In the late 1860s, Russian mathematician Sofya Kovalevskaya needed permission from her father or husband to study abroad, so at age 18 she entered into a fake marriage with another student so they could move to Germany and continue their education. In 1874, she became the first woman to earn a modern doctorate in mathematics and published papers on topics that are far beyond my understanding. Afte...

Denise Mimmocchi, senior curator of Australian art at the Art Gallery of New South Wales, joins us to talk about Australian modernist painter Grace Cossington Smith . Read the interview transcript See Grace Cossington Smith's work on the Art Galley of New South Wales website

Before she became one of the most successful pirates in world history, it is believed that Ching Shih likely worked in a brothel. In her mid-20s, she married the pirate Zheng Yi, becoming an equal partner and, after he died, taking over the confederation of pirates that they had built together. Ching Shih is awesome and I’ve dedicated her own episode to her incredible career, so let’s move on to t...

Today we’re talking about the unseen contributions of women mathematicians. Einstein declared of his first wife, Mileva Maric, “I need my wife. She solves for me all my mathematical problems”. Helping him was one of her few options after she gave up a promising career before it really got started when he got her pregnant out of wedlock. That didn’t stop him from divorcing her so he could marry his...

Elder sister to composer Felix Mendelssohn, Fanny was arguably the more talented sibling, but was held back throughout her life by Felix himself, as well as their father. Their suffocating dynamic empowered Felix to prevent her from pursuing a career as a composer. Although she wrote almost 500 beautiful compositions, he and their father forbade her from publishing them or performing in public. Ev...

Microbiologist Esther Lederberg was a pioneer of bacterial genetics, but she experienced a common issue for women in the sciences - she worked with her husband, so everyone gave credit for her work to him. Including, in 1958, the Nobel committee, which awarded the prize for physiology or medicine to Joshua Lederberg and two other men they worked with. Lederberg’s accomplishments included discoveri...

Dr Rachel Franks is the coordinator of scholarship at the State Library of New South Wales, and she joins us to talk about one of Australia’s literary legends, Miles Franklin. Read the full transcript Read more about Franklin on the Infinite Women site: https://www.infinite-women.com/women/miles-franklin/

Read full transcript Yvonne Chouteau , Rosella Hightower , Moscelyne Larkin , and sisters Maria and Marjorie Tallchief all rose to prominence as ballerinas in the mid-1900s. They also all happened to be Native Americans from the state of Oklahoma, born in the 1920s. Chouteau was Shawnee, the Tallchief sisters were Osage, Hightower was Choctaw and Larkin was Peoria and Shawnee. While each of the wo...

For more than 15 years, American Dr. Mary-Claire King worked tirelessly on research that most people dismissed. From 1974 to 1990, King searched for an answer to why breast cancer ran in families. Because the prevailing theory of the time was that the cause was viral, most scientists considered her efforts to find a genetic marker to be a waste of time. Even King herself sometimes worried that her...

This week's podcast is about legendary Norwegian shield-maidens and pirates Rusla and Stikla. Also known as the “Red Woman” for her ruthlessness, Rusla is a princess mentioned in Saxo Grammaticus’s History of the Danes and in Irish annals. When her brother’s throne was stolen by a Danish king named Omund, Rusla gathered a pirate fleet to attack Danish ships in revenge. Stikla, who had turned t...

Cathy Perkins, author of The Shelf Life of Zora Cross , joins us to talk about the best-selling Australian poet, novelist and journalist. Cathy is also an editor at the State Library of New South Wales. Read transcript

Fashion is one of the few areas where sewing really gets to shine, but even then modern designers are the ones getting the credit rather than the people building their imagined creations. But not too long ago, the roles were often combined by dressmakers like Elizabeth Keckley, a formerly enslaved woman who gained her professional reputation in Washington, D.C. by outfitting the city's elite,...

In the 1960s, Walter Keane’s “Big Eye” paintings gained immense popularity across the US. Derided as kitsch by critics, they were a massive commercial success. Andy Warhol remarked "I think what Keane has done is just terrific. It has to be good. If it were bad, so many people wouldn't like it."  But while they were done by “Keane,” they weren’t Walter’s. Like other women who escaped...

The Turing Award is generally regarded as the highest honor in computer science. In more than 50 years, only three women have won: Frances Allen, Barbara Liskov, and Shafi Goldwasser, but plenty of brilliant women computer scientists were overlooked: U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was a trailblazing mathematician who was one of the first programmers to work with the Harvard Mark I computer in...