AAUW-Astoria Oregon

09/09/2026

The year was 2003. Aspen, Colorado.

Rebecca Solnit was forty two years old. She had just published her seventh book. The New York Times had reviewed it. She held a Guggenheim Fellowship. She was an established writer and historian with decades of serious work behind her.

None of that mattered.

Because when the host of the party asked what her books were about, and she began to mention her recent work on the photographer Eadweard Muybridge, he cut her off.

"And have you heard about the very important Muybridge book that came out this year?"

He hadn't read the book. He had read about it. In the New York Times Book Review.

He was talking about her book.

And he would not let her tell him.

Solnit tried to interrupt. Her friend tried to interrupt. Three or four times, her friend said, "That's her book." The man didn't hear. He kept talking, eyes fixed, as Solnit would later write, "on the fuzzy far horizon of his own authority."

Finally the friend's voice cut through.

The man stopped.

He went ashen.

And then, remarkably, he kept talking anyway.

Solnit and her friend left the room. And once out of earshot, they started laughing. They laughed because it was absurd. Because it was humiliating. Because every woman they knew had a story exactly like this one.

For years afterward, Solnit joked with friends about writing an essay called "Men Explain Things to Me." It was a story she told at dinner parties. A pony that never quite made it to the racetrack, as she put it.

Until April 2008.

She was having dinner with activist and theorist Marina Sitrin, who stopped her mid story and said simply, "You have to write this down. People like my sister Sam need to read it."

Young women needed to know that being belittled wasn't the result of their own secret failings. It was the boring old gender wars.

So Solnit sat down at her computer.

The essay practically wrote itself.

On April 13, 2008, "Men Explain Things to Me" was published online. It opened with the Aspen story. But it didn't stay there. Solnit connected that one humiliating party moment to everything else. To the female FBI agent whose warnings about al-Qaeda were ignored before 9/11. To women who needed male witnesses to corroborate their own rapes. To the silencing of women's voices as an act of violence in itself.

"Credibility is a basic survival tool," she wrote.

The essay went viral.

One month later, in May 2008, the word appeared.

A commenter on LiveJournal, responding to a discussion about a television show, wrote simply, "Oh, gosh, thank you so much for mansplaining this to us."

The word spread. By 2009 it was on Twitter. By 2014 it was in major news outlets. By 2018 it was in the Oxford English Dictionary and Merriam Webster.

Rebecca Solnit had never used the word in her essay. She has said so many times since. But her essay had named the thing. And once it was named, it could not be unnamed.

Before 2008, when a man talked over a woman at work, at a party, in a meeting, the woman often questioned herself. Am I being too sensitive? Did I not explain myself clearly? Is this my fault?

After "mansplaining" entered the language, women had a framework. A way to say, this is a pattern. This is not about me. This is not in my head.

Solnit kept writing. Hope in the Dark. The Faraway Nearby. A Paradise Built in Hell. And in 2014 she published a collection of essays titled Men Explain Things to Me, which became essential reading around the world.

"One of the rights that the powerful often assume," she wrote, "is the power to dictate reality."

In 2003, a man at a ski chalet in Aspen talked over Rebecca Solnit about her own book. He went ashen when he finally understood his mistake.

Then he kept talking anyway.

Solnit left the room and laughed. Because what else could she do?

But five years later she wrote it down.

She told the story. She named the pattern. She gave millions of women language for something they had known their entire lives but never quite had the words to describe.

The word "mansplaining" wasn't hers.

But the revolution it sparked started with a woman who refused to be talked over. Even when the man doing the talking was explaining her own work back to her face.

Even when he had only read a review.

Even when he went ashen and kept going anyway.



~The History Today

09/08/2026

09/08/2026

"The Woman Who Photographed a Secret Inside All of Us

In the spring of 1952, in a cramped basement lab at King's College London, a chemist adjusted a camera aimed at a strand of DNA fiber thinner than a human hair. She had spent hours calibrating the humidity in the room, because she knew that even a tiny shift in moisture could blur the image she was chasing. Precision wasn't a preference for her. It was almost a moral position.

Her name was Rosalind Franklin, and the photograph she was about to take — with her PhD student, Raymond Gosling, operating alongside her — would later be nicknamed ""Photo 51."" It would become one of the most famous images in the history of science.

But the story most people know about what happened next isn't quite the story that happened.

A Mind Built for Precision

Franklin was born in London on July 25, 1920, into a family that valued education and public service. She earned a PhD in physical chemistry from Cambridge and spent several years in Paris mastering X-ray crystallography — a technique that uses X-ray beams to reveal the hidden architecture of molecules, essentially by reading the shadows they cast.

By the time she arrived at King's College in 1951, she was already one of the most technically skilled crystallographers in Britain. The lab she joined, however, was not an easy place to work. The head of the DNA project, Maurice Wilkins, appears to have been told Franklin would be his assistant. She had been told she would run her own independent research. That mismatch created friction that never fully resolved.

Working under those conditions, Franklin produced X-ray images of DNA so sharp that other scientists in the field considered them the best anyone had made. Photo 51 was the clearest of all — a stark, symmetrical X pattern that all but announced the molecule's helical twist.

The Real Turning Point

Here is where the popular version of the story usually goes: Wilkins secretly showed Photo 51 to a young American researcher named James Watson, who took one look and immediately understood DNA's structure, racing back to Cambridge to build the double helix model with his research partner, Francis Crick.

It's a dramatic scene. It's also, according to a major 2023 investigation published in the journal Nature, not quite what happened.

Historians Matthew Cobb and Nathaniel Comfort spent months digging through archived letters and an unpublished magazine article written about Franklin during her lifetime. Their conclusion: Francis Crick likely never even saw Photo 51 before the double helix model was already public. The real turning point, they argue, was a research summary written by Max Perutz — a senior scientist who later won his own Nobel Prize — that compiled findings from the King's College team, including Franklin's data, for an internal committee. That report, not a single photograph, appears to have supplied the missing measurements Watson and Crick needed.

Even more strikingly, the researchers found a letter suggesting Franklin was not entirely unaware that her work had reached the Cambridge team. The image of her as a scientist who was secretly robbed while she unknowingly sat on the answer may be more myth than fact.

A Story Retold Too Simply

For decades, the narrative of Franklin as a wronged genius — brilliant but cheated, a woman erased by men who took credit for her work — became a kind of shorthand for sexism in science. There's real truth underneath that framing: women in 1950s British academia were routinely excluded from common rooms, denied titles their male colleagues held automatically, and rarely credited with the weight their work deserved. Franklin experienced all of that.

But Cobb and Comfort make a case that flattening her into a pure victim actually shrinks her. Their argument is that Franklin should be remembered as an equal architect of the discovery — someone whose meticulous, independent research was one of several essential pieces, not a stolen prize. She wasn't a passive source of raw data waiting to be interpreted by smarter men. She was doing the interpreting herself, on her own timeline, insisting on more evidence before publishing conclusions — a scientific caution that, ironically, may have cost her the race but reflected exactly the kind of rigor her field valued.

What Happened Next

Franklin left King's College in 1953, before the double helix paper was even published, and moved to Birkbeck College, where she pursued groundbreaking work on the structure of viruses, including the to***co mosaic virus and early foundations for understanding polio. Colleagues who worked with her there — including Crick himself, with whom she developed a warm friendship in her final years — described her as generous, exacting, and deeply respected.

In 1956, Franklin was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She continued working through treatment, publishing papers even while undergoing surgery and chemotherapy. She died on April 16, 1958, at the age of 37.

Four years later, in 1962, Watson, Crick, and Wilkins were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for the discovery of DNA's structure. Nobel Prizes are not given posthumously, so Franklin's name was never in contention — a rule of the prize, not a snub in that specific moment, though it does raise the harder question of whether she would have shared the recognition had she lived.

A Legacy Still Being Rewritten

Interest in Franklin's story surged again recently: James Watson himself died on November 6, 2025, at age 97, prompting a fresh wave of tributes, obituaries, and renewed debate over how the DNA discovery should be remembered — and by whom.

What's emerging from historians now isn't a tidier story, but a truer one. Rosalind Franklin wasn't a footnote waiting to be rescued, and she wasn't simply a victim of theft. She was a scientist of extraordinary skill working inside an imperfect, competitive system that undervalued her while she was alive — and whose real contribution turns out to be even sturdier than the legend suggested.

Sometimes correcting history doesn't make it smaller. It makes it more honest — and Rosalind Franklin's science was always strong enough to stand on facts alone."

09/08/2026

In 1870, a courtroom in Boston listened to a machinist swear, under oath, that a woman was simply not capable of designing the machine sitting in evidence a few feet away from him. He was wrong. And the woman he was trying to rob of her life's work was about to prove it in front of everyone.

Her name was Margaret Knight, and by the time she walked into that courtroom she had already spent twenty years learning how to solve problems nobody asked her to solve.

She was born on Valentine's Day, February 14, 1838, in York, Maine. Her father died while she was still a young girl, and the loss pushed the family to Manchester, New Hampshire. At just twelve years old, Margaret went to work in one of Manchester's cotton mills to help her mother keep the household afloat. It was loud, relentless, and dangerous. Fingers and limbs were lost to unguarded machinery on a regular basis, and the workers, many of them children like Margaret, had no protections beyond their own reflexes.

But Margaret had never been an ordinary child. She loved woodworking and kite-building. Her homemade sledges were reportedly better than anything the boys in town could put together, and when she was asked what she wanted as gifts, she didn't ask for dolls. She asked for a jack-knife, a gimlet, and scraps of wood to build with. Even as a pr***en standing at a mill machine, she was already the kind of person who looked at a dangerous system and started sketching a fix in her head, forming her earliest ideas about workplace safety long before she knew that habit would define the rest of her life.

In 1867, Margaret left the mills behind for good and took a job at the Columbia Paper Bag Company in Springfield, Massachusetts. The work itself was simple and repetitive: fold paper bags, by hand, one at a time. It was the kind of task that seemed too small to reinvent. Margaret reinvented it anyway.

At the time, sturdy flat-bottomed paper bags barely existed for everyday shoppers, who mostly carried groceries home in flimsy paper cones that tore and spilled. Flat-bottomed bags existed in a limited sense in Britain, folded by hand since 1840 and semi-mechanized by 1850, but nowhere on earth had anyone built a fully automated machine to make them. Margaret set out to be the first, designing a machine that could feed, cut, fold, and glue paper automatically, forming the precise squared bottom that turned a flimsy cone into the sturdy grocery bag people still use today.

Her first working prototype was made of wood, but to secure a patent she needed a functioning iron model, which meant handing her design over to a machine shop to be built. That decision nearly cost her everything. A machinist working in the same shop, Charles Annan, saw her design, liked it, and filed for a patent on it himself, claiming the invention as his own. Because Margaret's iron model wasn't finished yet, she had no completed machine to point to as proof, and on paper, Annan appeared to have gotten there first.

Margaret did not fold. She poured a large portion of her savings into hiring the best patent attorneys she could find and took Annan to court. It was 1870, a year in which women held roughly ten percent of all patents in America, and Annan clearly believed that fact alone would win his case. He told the courtroom, in all seriousness, that no woman was capable of engineering something as complex as her paper bag machine. The room reportedly broke into laughter, and not in his favor. Margaret arrived with something Annan didn't have: stacks of meticulous, hand-drawn technical blueprints documenting every stage of her design process. There was no contest. The court ruled in her favor, and in 1871 her patent for the automatic paper bag machine was officially issued in her name.

Here is what most people miss: winning that lawsuit wasn't really about proving she was clever enough. Everyone who saw her drawings already knew that. It was about access. A working iron model required a machine shop, tools, and capital most women of her era simply weren't given room to use, which is exactly the gap Annan tried to exploit. Margaret didn't beat him with a better idea; she'd already had the better idea for years. She beat him by refusing to let the system's blind spot toward women inventors decide who got the credit.

With her patent secured, Margaret partnered with a Massachusetts businessman to found the Eastern Paper Bag Company in Hartford, Connecticut. She had no interest in running a factory herself, so she let her partner manage operations while she collected royalties, a shrewd arrangement for a woman who understood her own strengths. Those royalty payments were reportedly capped at twenty-five thousand dollars, and once she hit that ceiling, the checks stopped. It became a pattern for the rest of her career: invent something valuable, license or sell it, live on the proceeds, then move on to the next idea.

And she kept moving. Margaret relocated to Ashland and then Framingham, Massachusetts, while keeping an inventor's office in downtown Boston. In the 1880s she patented a dress and skirt shield to protect clothing from rain, snow, and street grime, followed by a clasp for robes and a design for a cooking spit. She then turned to footwear manufacturing, eventually earning six patents for machines used to cut shoe materials. In the early 1900s, well into her sixties, she was still filing patents for components used in rotary engines and motors, along with a numbering machine and a new type of window. Over her lifetime she was granted at least twenty-seven patents, possibly as many as thirty, and by her own account she dreamed up dozens more ideas she never bothered to formally patent.

By 1913, her reputation had grown enough that The New York Times ran a lengthy feature spotlighting great female inventors, with Margaret as its headline subject. The paper wrote that the time had come for men to look to their laurels, because the modern field of invention was now full of capable women. The same reporting noted that Margaret worked roughly twenty hours a day and had accumulated close to ninety inventions across her lifetime.

Margaret never married and had no children. She kept inventing well into old age, chasing the next mechanical puzzle right up until her final years. When she died on October 12, 1914, at age seventy-six, she reportedly had only two hundred and fifty dollars to her name, despite a lifetime spent solving problems that made other people enormous amounts of money. She earned the nickname Lady Edison, and suffragettes and women's rights advocates held her career up as proof of what women could accomplish when given the smallest opening. In 2006 she was formally inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, and a scaled-down, fully functional model of her original paper bag machine still sits in the Smithsonian in Washington, D.C., a quiet monument to a piece of paper folding that changed how the world shops.

Sometimes the most ordinary object in your hand carries the most extraordinary fight behind it.

09/08/2026

09/08/2026

📚 September 8 is International Literacy Day.

Literacy is more than the ability to read. It gives people the power to learn, participate in civic life, evaluate information, and shape their own futures.

At a time when books are being removed from schools and libraries—and access to inclusive, fact-based education is increasingly challenged—we must defend the freedom to read and the freedom to learn.

AAUW of Colorado supports educational opportunity for people of every gender, background, and age. When we protect access to books, libraries, and quality education, we strengthen individuals, communities, and democracy.

09/08/2026

In the 1920s, a group of factory workers known as the "Radium Girls" fought for compensation after their work with radioactive paint made them sick. In honor of Labor Day, we're sharing the story of their hard-fought legal victory which forever changed the face of labor rights in the United States. The Radium Girls had spent years painting watches and military dials with glowing radium paint, but even once the dire consequences of radium poisoning were clear, manufacturers like the U.S. Radium Corporation refused to provide help or compensation to their former employees.

"They were going to die, there was no hope for them," says Kate Moore, author of "The Radium Girls." "[The women] are trying to speak out, and of course the radium firms not wanting that lucrative industry to be affected in the slightest, they're silencing the women with everything they've got."

When radium was first discovered in 1898, its use as a cancer treatment kicked off a craze for using the element in health and beauty products. "People were fascinated with its power," Moore says. "It does give this illusion of good health, because it stimulates the red blood cells… [but] in the long term you're poisoning yourself." At first, the Radium Girls were considered lucky: not only were they paid three times what a regular factory worker received, but they spent their days surrounded by this miracle substance. Their technique to put a point on their brushes by sticking it between their lips, though, exposed them to a huge amount of radiation.

"[I]t was the easiest way to get a fine point on the brush, to paint on numbers as small as a single millimeter in width," Moore says. "The first thing they asked was [whether] the paint was harmful, but the managers said it was safe, which was the obvious answer for a manager of a company whose very existence depended on radium paint." Radium dust was so thick in the factory, Moore notes, that "they were nicknamed 'the ghost girls' because... they would glow ethereally, they would literally be covered in it."

In the early 1920s, some of the Radium Girls started having symptoms like fatigue and toothaches. The first death came in 1922: 22-year-old Mollie Maggia's whole lower jaw had been eroded by the radiation, but her death certificate mistakenly listed the cause of death as syphilis. "[T]hat was seized upon by these companies," Moore says. Existing laws also made it difficult for the women to force the company to act: radium poisoning was not on the list of diseases companies were liable for, and the two-year statute of limitations prevented workers from suing for a condition that often didn't present immediately.

"It's mind-boggling," Moore says. "We knew from the turn of the century that radium was dangerous and large amounts of it could destroy human tissue…. The radium was destroying the bone and literally drilling holes in the women's jaws while they were still alive."

In 1925, Grace Fryer, a worker from the original New Jersey plant, decided to take U.S. Radium Corp. to court; it took her two years to find a lawyer who would take her case. In 1927, she and four workers filed, making headlines around the world. They were backed by the New Jersey Consumers League, who helped keep up the media pressure.

The case was settled in 1928, by which point companies had already stopped recommending the lip pointing technique and started providing protective gear. Survivors were given compensation and doctors were directed to start listing the correct cause of death on death certificates. Even still, companies appealed for years; the Supreme Court rejected the final appeal in 1939. The case became a key milestone in the history of workers' rights.

"It was one of the very first cases in which an employer was held accountable for the health of its employees, and so it lays the groundwork for organizations like OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) that will eventually protect many millions of other workers," Moore says, "and I think that's quite a legacy to leave."

That legacy, however, is now under threat. Last year, the Trump administration set out to dismantle much of the worker-safety system the Radium Girls' fight helped build. It gutted the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health -- OSHA's research arm -- laying off some 90 percent of its staff, and moved to slash OSHA's own budget and eliminate hundreds of inspector positions.

An administration that claims to champion the American worker was, in practice, tearing down the very protections that keep workers alive. It took an outcry from workers, unions, scientists, and public-health advocates -- and a Senate unwilling to go along with the deepest cuts -- to beat much of it back: NIOSH's staff were largely reinstated and its funding restored, and lawmakers rejected the steepest OSHA reductions.

But the assault by the Trump administration has not stopped. It is now pushing to eliminate more than 60 workplace-safety rules -- among them protections against extreme heat, mine hazards, and unsafe worksites -- while shuttering OSHA field offices, driving enforcement and inspections to historic lows, and shifting from holding employers accountable to letting them police themselves. The fight is far from over.

Nearly a century after Grace Fryer and her coworkers forced a reckoning, the protections they fought and died to win are once again under attack. It is a reminder that the rights working people secure are never permanent -- and that defending them still takes the same kind of collective pressure the Radium Girls understood a century ago.

For adult readers inspired to learn more about these heroic women and their fight on behalf of all workers, we highly recommend "The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781492650959 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/46K5k2e (Amazon)

There is also a Young Readers adaptation of "The Radium Girls" for ages 10 and up at https://www.amightygirl.com/the-radium-girls-young-readers-edition

For books for children and teens about the contributions of women to the fight for workers' rights, check out our blog post "Fighting For Justice: 25 Books About Women and the Labor Movement" at https://www.amightygirl.com/blog?p=9881

For fans of the bestselling "Radium Girls," we also recommend author Kate Moore's recent book about a forgotten hero who helped countless women whose voice had been silenced: "The Woman They Could Not Silence" at https://www.amightygirl.com/woman-they-could-not-silence