Because I am on a train (did I mention?) I must briefly and a little angrily vent, in manner of pressure cooker for example, regarding women and the history of women in education and the sciences (and in fact all fields) >

whilst blamelessly attending to a weekend gin & tonic over an episode of Antiques Roadshow, I was pleased to see mention made of a woman in, as i recall, the late 19th century who had been a keen astronomer and microscoper. During the discussion, a woman historian & Fiona Bruce>

agreed with a melancholy sigh that: WASN'T she remarkable, WHAT an extraordinary woman, IMAGINE a woman - A WOMAN?!?!?! - being allowed- ALLOWED! - to use a telescope back in the Olden Days! Why, women and girls didn't even go to SCHOOL back then! >

Now look. I'm afraid I really must insist that you all shut the fuck up with this bollocks.

The reason you were not taught about 19th (& 18th, &17th...) century women engineers & mathematicians & astronomers and so on was not because they were not ALLOWED to do these things >

it is because they DID them and then then NOBODY TALKED ABOUT IT and they were WRITTEN OUT.

When prime time BBC telly (& novels, & the Discourse in general) mournfully sigh & lament the ghastly plight of poor luckless embattled women of history barely knowing their alphabet >

...what they are doing, and what you are doing if you believe it, is *joining in a great act of silencing*.

You do not need to fuel feminism with a false idea of pitiable women. Feminism is not a question of PITY it is a question if JUSTICE. >

I don't know how to counter this! I try and I try! But we were THERE in the laboratories and among the political agitators and in the observatories and in the surgeries and in the school rooms and this includes poor women and women of colour!

Anyway read my new book.

(If you were wondering quite how pernicious this view of women is, I'd remind you that the LRB published a review of TES in which a man said the depiction of women in the 1890s as being involved in the sciences &c was a fantasy. If this nonsense makes it into the LRB...well.)

This is the only time I have ever replied to a review of one of my books; and I did it not for my sake but for the sake of all the brilliant women who have been SAT ON by mediocre men for the last few centuries.