The Voice that Inspired Equality.

Marian Anderson was born in 1897 in Philadelphia. She displayed this talent as a child but her parents could not afford to send her for lessons to progress and, so, members of of her church community raised funds for her to attend music school for a year.

Her parents were both hard-working and loving but due to the racist nature of the laws that were governed, Anderson's parents were poor and consequently could not afford these lessons. However, her father supported her talent and bought her a piano for her eighth birthday after saving up for a long while. Due to the lack of funds, the prodigious Marian taught herself the piano to assist her stunning vocals. Her commitment to music and her "raw talent" impressed the church choir so much so that she gained the nickname 'Baby Contralto' and they raised around $500 to allow her to be taught under a well respected singer.

After over two years of studying, Anderson entered a competition with the New York Philharmonic Opera and got the change to sing at the Lewisohn Stadium in New York - the becoming of a magnificent career. Other opportunities soon followed and in 1928 she embarked on a European Tour.

Anderson became world famous. She was invited by President Roosevelt to perform at the white house and became the first African-American to have this honour. She was the first African-American to perform as a member of the New York Metropolitan Opera. Many of the years of her awe-inspiring career were shrouded with overcoming African-American prejudices and breaking down these barriers.

Despite Anderson's outstanding success and angelic voice, the racial divide in America was still there. Many American's did not accept Marian as a qualified singer or quantify her voice as professional, purely based on the colour of her skin. This segregation was most notably manifested in 1939 when she tried to book the Constitution Hall in Washington D.C. She was informed that there were no dates available by the Daughters of the American Revolution. This was a lie told, however, as the real reasoning was the policies implemented by the so called DAR that only white performers can book the hall.

When this injustice was released to the public, chaos ensued. A huge riot began, with influential figure Eleanor Roosevelt at the forefront with thousands of rightfully angry citizens. Roosevelt invited Marian to instead perform at the Lincoln Memorial on Easter Sunday. Anderson's incredible performance was in front of a crowd of an excess of 75,000 people and was broadcast live for a worldwide audience of millions.

In 1961, she sang at President Kennedy's inauguration speech and in 63' was honoured with the Presidential medal of Freedom. In 1991, she was honoured with the lifetime achievement award from the Grammy's.

She fought against segregation her entire life: her faultless performance at the Lincoln Memorial in 1939 set the stage for the Civil Right's movement which Anderson was a pioneer for. She was an activist and this performance literally set in motion what would become the African-American Civil Right's movement. This woman, the power of her voice, inspired the likes of Martin Luther King's famous speech. You can watch her performance, here.

She is deemed to have the most powerful voice of the twentieth century but we aren't taught about this woman. Her music is not celebrated as widely as it should be and her contributions and inspiring acts behind the Civil Right's movement are not even recognised.

Thank you, Marian Anderson, for your infallible voice and your endless walk towards equality, parity and the rights of African-American's.

The Woman Who Sent Man to the Moon.

If anyone ever asks you about the first person on the moon, what would you say? Depending on where you’re from, of course, it can be one of three possibilities – Neil Armstrong, Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin or Michael Collins in NASA’s 1969 Apollo 11 mission to the moon.

This is the coding.
ENTIRELY handwritten.

What with Neil Armstrong’s hugely famous speech and the hundreds of conspiracy theories surrounding the first man on the moon, there was no apparent space (get it?) for the discussion of women.

Enter Margaret Hamilton.

Hamilton earned her B.A in mathematics and shortly after got married. She taught high school maths and French to allow her husband to finish studying at university. In 1958, she moved to Boston, with the intention to study abstract mathematics at Brandeis University. She got a job, however, at MIT - to develop software for predicting the weather.

Margaret Hamilton is a (bad-ass) self-taught computer software engineer. She taught herself the things that people go to university and spend thousands to learn. At the time, however, software engineering was neither a recognised term nor respectable profession. It was a vocation deemed effeminate like typing or filing. Hamilton’s phrase ‘software’ became recognised after she gained legitimacy for her work. She is the pioneer for computer engineering - completely subverting the norm of the time where women were not seen as equals in the scientific fields. She revolutionised the world of computing technology and set in motion the term 'software' and all of the developments that go with the term. 

She became director of the Software Engineering Division of MIT – which developed software for the NASA Apollo programs. Hamilton supervised a team of 100 engineers, mathematicians, programmers and technical writers.

Her team developed the code for the Apollo Guidance Computer.

It had 64 kilobytes of memory (a modern mobile phone apparently has 30,000x more memory than that) and was one of the first chip-based computers.

Now, during the research process of this post, I read a lot of computer jargon. There was stuff about programming and coding and words that I didn't even think existed. That both proves how clueless I am about anything computer-related and how utterly SMART Hamilton is.

In Layman’s terms, Hamilton understood that the computer could be overloaded. She and her team wrote a program that clarified the order in which the computer would do the different things it was made to do at the same time. Hamilton and her team created a feature crucial to the moon landing called the ‘asynchronous executive.’ This basically meant that the computer would be able to recognise when it was close to overloading and sojourn the low-priority tasks.

When the three men were about to land on the moon, something went wrong. All astronauts have a list – essentially a checklist – which instructs them on what action to take next. The checklist had instructed the men to activate the radar system that would be used for taking off from the moon – not for landing. The radar began sending the computer masses of information based on suspected malfunction, threatening to overload its tiny mainframe and memory. If the guidance computer overloaded, the mission would have to be aborted.

The asynchronous executive saved the landing.

Margaret Hamilton and her team saved the landing.

Her, and her team's, hundreds upon hundreds of hours of hard work manifested itself in the most almighty of manners. The indubitable fact of the matter is that without this woman, there would have been no man on the moon.

Hamilton’s incredible work, however, was not formally recognised until over thirty years later. THIRTY years. And still, if I was to have asked you before this article if you had any idea of who Margaret Hamilton is and her outstanding effect on the first mission to the moon was, what would you have said?

It is no fault of yours, or mine. It is the fault of the older societies. But we are the evolution. This generational improvement and recognition of women like Hamilton – who were so unjustly ignored by their ridiculous patriarchal society – is what will change the world.

This is an ode to you, Margaret Hamilton, for your contributions to the development of computing technology, for your fantastic mind, for your tireless efforts and for your actions towards the achievement of parity. 

Let us celebrate your intelligence, your contribution, your science. Your mind. 

We salute you, Margaret Hamilton, and thank you: the woman who sent man to the moon. 

Let's start with...

... What this blog is for.

I have created this blog in the good faith that there are hundreds of unknown, under-appreciated women throughout history who have achieved insurmountable brilliances, overcome obstacles bigger than Donald Trump's ego and have been undeniably bad-ass through it all.

These women are real and they are brilliant. They are unrecognised - lost in history - and it is my goal to bring these incredible women back into our lives for the recognition that they so well deserve. My goal is to educate myself - and others - on the achievements of these women.

I am in no manner disregarding the feats of men and their equally inspiring accomplishments. But women are just as deserved, just as fantastic, just as brave, just as strong. So why do we rarely hear about their successes?

This blog is run by an intersectional feminist. Women rule. ALL women rule.

So let's celebrate them.