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Comment by ThePhysicist | Hacker News Reader

Many women published research under pseudonyms in the past, for example Sophie Germain:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie_Germain

So I'd argue that many past inventions that are credited to men might actually have been achieved by women scientists publishing under their husbands / colleagues / friends name as a pseudonym.

In Paris I once saw an original print of Marie Curie's book on radioactivity, where her name is given as "Mme Pierre Curie". This probably shows how difficult it was even then to get something published under your own name as a woman (Cover and autor info here: https://www.amazon.fr/Radioactivit%C3%A9-1-Madame-Pierre-Cur...).

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> In Paris I once saw an original print of Marie Curie's book on radioactivity, where her name is given as "Mme Pierre Curie". This probably shows how difficult it was even then to get something published under your own name as a woman

Nothing to do with publishing difficulties at all. It was simply the way a married French woman would be addressed at the time - as "Madame [husband's full name]", eg Michelle Obama would be "Mme Barack Obama". (It's still in use in more formal / old-fashioned contexts.) The reader would understand that the author of the book was Pierre Curie's wife, rather than him.

Your comment only seems to reinforce the point that

> This probably shows how difficult it was even then to get something published under your own name as a woman

Or are you suggesting that it was not difficult for a woman to publish under her name, only that it was not customary to do so? Can you point to some supporting examples of this, if so?

> (It's still in use in more formal / old-fashioned contexts.)

formal / old-fashioned / misogynistic contexts.

They said it wasnt an example of it without suggesting anything

You dont need to have an opinion or dissertation on the topic of dis/enfranchisement to make this observation

They said it wasn't an example of it, but then presented a historical account which only seemingly reinforces the original claim they were claiming it was not.

> only reinforces the original claim

It didn't though, the "Mme" part stands for mademoiselle, indicating it is a woman. Therefore they weren't pretending to be a man for the purpose of getting a paper published.

> It didn't though, the "Mme" part stands for mademoiselle, indicating it is a woman. Therefore they weren't pretending to be a man for the purpose of getting a paper published.

The specific claim I was addressing is not that one had to pretend to be a man to get something published, the original claim is, once again, that it was difficult to publish under your own name as a woman, as quoted several times now:

> This probably shows how difficult it was even then to get something published under your own name as a woman

The comment that it was customary to use a husband's name preceded by Mme. thus does not negate this original claim, if anything it reinforces it.

> The comment that it was customary to use a husband's name preceded by Mme. thus does not negate this original claim, if anything it reinforces it.

We don't have anything to support or negate the idea of whether a French women could have published in her own name if she was single, or if she was married and addressed herself in a non-customary way.

We just don't and the conversation never went that direction. This is in your interest to understand alone but in a conversation where nobody has provided anything. As such it will be impossible for anyone to prove or disprove your assertions, and may have to be your own area of research, alone.

"Mme" is "Madame", indicating a married woman. "Mmelle" stands for "Mademoiselle", which means an unmarried woman, and in that case it would have her own name (as there is no husband).

In a pedantic sense it is her own name in the sense that it was a name by which she was referred, though obviously it’s a misogynistic custom which is thankfully uncommon now.

It was simply the way a married French woman would be addressed at the time

Not just in France, and not just in centuries past. I've met women in the United States, England, and Austria who refer to themselves as Mrs. husbands_first_name husbands_last_name.

It's formal. It's not insulting. You can see it commonly in 19th- and early 20th-century literature.

Several of the Christmas cards my wife received this year were addressed that way, plus "and family."

> It's not insulting.

It is unfortunate that you do not consider such blatant, ham-fisted patriarchy as insulting.

In American movies, I'll sometimes you'll hear "Mr. and Mrs. John Smith" when introducing a couple at an extremely formal event where everyone wears tuxedos and such. I've never been to such an event before, so I don't know how accurate that is. But it's definitely something odd I've noticed in movies.

My first wife was an M.D. (and did not change her last name), and we occasionally received wedding invitations addressed to “Mr. and Dr. Aaron Harnly”, which I found hilarious. The endurance of the patriarchy and its subversion, all in one line.

> It's formal. It's not insulting.

It can be both. Many do consider it insulting.

It can be both. Many do consider it insulting.

Personally insulting, or are these people who feel insulted for other people?

The reason I ask is that the women I know who use this convention are not shrinking violets. This is not being imposed upon them by some male-dominated relationship. They are all strong-willed individuals. One is a C-level at a global company.

I know more than one person who would take it very, very personally.

I’m not sure I understand. What kind of a person is offended by how someone else chooses to write their name?

That's the whole point. Their name is /not/ "Mrs. [husband's first and last name]"

There are definitely people I know that would be okay with being addressed this way. There are many I also know who have expressed that this makes them feel less like an individual human and more like an accessory to their husband.

It's not about how. I don't think anyone would mind an honest spelling mistake for example. The issue is what you're saying about them. If you call them by their partner's name it may mean you either don't care about them more than "they belong to Mr X" or that person's life is defined by the existence of their partner. Those kind of views are decades old and some people will actively fight them.

Both you and the rebuttal from piaste are correct. "Mme Pierre Curie" was published under her actual name, however lots of women published work under male pseudonyms. Even those who were known by their own names tend to be obscure historical footnotes, not as well remembered as male counterparts.

A few related links:

https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/articles/12-fem...

https://jezebel.com/homme-de-plume-what-i-learned-sending-my...

http://introductionsnecessary.com/2016/06/14/wang-zhenyi/

(Yes, I realize my sources are about mostly writers, not scientists.)

JK Rowling published the first Harry Potter book using her initials to hide her gender, which was recommended by her publisher. She could go back on that, but it's too late now that she's known by it.

> She could go back on that, but it's too late now that she's known by it.

Interesting. I read the first Harry Potter novel (i.e. the german translation) as a kid about 3 or 4 years after it was released. I'm pretty sure I knew the "J" stood for Joanne from the get go.

OTOH, I still can't remember what H.G. Wells' first name was, although I must've looked it up a couple of times by now…

The 1911 Solvay Conference photo illustrates just how exceptional a woman scientist was then: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solvay_Conference she's there at the table with Henri Poincaré.

The amount of brainpower in that room is incredible. Now think about it this way: probably half of what was available at the time got lost somehow. Makes you wonder where we'd be technologically if we had not systematically repressed one half of the possible scientists. On the positive side: probably a lot of that research got done anyway, with some guy taking credit for it.

It's way more than half. All those people are still white.

Well, they are all Europeans. I am not denying that racism existed at the time, but hardly any non-white person lived in Europe back then. (Even nowadays in most European countries the percentage of non-white people is so low that, in a group of 30, finding none is well within statistical error).

Interestingly, many (if not most) of people on that conference were Jews, which were often treated as second-class citizens even before Hitler.

Also, an additional testament how Marie Curie was exceptional was that she was an immigrant from Poland (which didn't even exist when she was born; her initial studies were in secret), and that she is still the only person ever to win two Nobel prizes for two separate fields (physics and chemistry).

If you want to go down that route - which is definitely your right - you could re-shoot a similar picture today and it probably would not show a major shift in demographics. Sad but true.

I may be going on a limb here, but I have a sense of the same broken logic here as the ubiquitous argument of lost revenue[1].

To be clear, I don't argue the point of suppression and cultural standards affecting the scientific (or, not specifically, any other) thought, but using such simplistic way to quantify that effect.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_sales

That is an absolute nonsense link that you are trying to make there. Lost sales are sales that make assumptions about every sale as though it is lost as a result of piracy, an alternative and often more convenient mode of delivery.

Denying half (or even more than half) of your citizens access to education and more prestigious stem jobs means you are tossing away an Einstein or a Bohr once every generation or so. The cumulative costs of that are enormous, and are compounding, compared to that a couple of $ of money that does not end up in the pockets of media moguls is very small potatoes.

Didn't knew about her... Fascinating.

http://www.pilloledistoria.it/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/hed...

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