There’s a tongue-in-cheek joke that occasionally circulates on the internet: What did Watson and Crick discover?
Rosalind Franklin’s notes.
Franklin’s work in physical chemistry and X-ray diffraction found DNA to have a helical structure, with her mathematical analyses suggesting the double-helix structure we know today. In 1953, Franklin’s colleague showed one of her X-rays of a DNA molecule to James Watson and Francis Crick, who had been working on a theoretical DNA structure. Her X-ray confirmed the men’s theory, and they published their findings without acknowledging they’d seen her work. Franklin died of cancer in 1958; Watson and Crick won a Nobel Prize in 1962.
In their March 15 podcast, “Now and Then” hosts and historians Heather Cox Richardson and Joanne Freeman explored the forgotten contributions of women, specifically during wartime.
There are, of course, the headline grabbing tales of the old Ukrainian woman who told Russian soldiers to put sunflower seeds in their pockets; or the one who threw a jar of pickled tomatoes at a Russian drone and brought it down. But we don’t hear about the women who make up 15% of Ukraine’s military and are fighting on the front lines.
Going back into our own history, there are standout women like Deborah Sampson, who dressed as a man and fought in the Revolutionary War, or Margaret Corbin, whose husband manned the cannons and when he fell in battle, she took over his post (perhaps the basis for the fictional Molly Pitcher). But they were not the only women at war.
Who cooked for hundreds of hungry men? Who washed the blood and dirt from the uniforms and mended the tears and bullet holes? Who nursed the wounded and tended to the dead?
Women. The ones whose names history has long forgotten — who marched, and often fought, alongside the soldiers, enduring the same conditions as the men.
In the Civil War, Harriett Tubman played a pivotal role in leading enslaved people to freedom, as well as spying for the Union. But alongside larger-than-life figures like Tubman were the hundreds of women who worked behind the scenes to push for abolition, organizing rallies and petitioning men to exercise their political power to end slavery.
Then there are the suffragists of the late 19th to early 20th centuries, who fought to secure the right to vote for women; the flappers of the 1920s, who turned gender norms on their head, at least for a while; the Rosie the Riveters, who brought women en masse into the workforce; the members of the Women’s Army Corps, who were the first women in the military to receive the same pay and benefits as their male counterparts; and so many other barrier breakers, all the way up to the present day, with Ketanji Brown Jackson on track to become the first Black woman to serve as a Supreme Court justice.
Richardson and Freeman make an argument about the ways history remembers or erases certain women’s influence to affirm gender roles, but as Women’s History Month comes to a close, we come to this conclusion:
Every woman’s contribution — seen or unseen, recorded or ignored, big or small — shapes our world, and we should celebrate the named and unnamed women who pave the way for the next generation.
