Women Academics From The United States

"When one HBCU wins, we all win."

"I’ve spent a lot of time tutoring kids in math as a volunteer. I’ve always enjoyed helping people understand what they can find in math. There’s no judgment there."

"English Quotation"

"I was always interested in math. I counted everything as a child — the number of steps up the stairs, the dishes, the steps to church. Those thoughts just came naturally. While I skipped grades in school, my parents made sure I stayed grounded."

"But then we’d be back with our colleagues on the job. People are people. My father’s advice helped. He said, “You’re no better than anybody else, but nobody is better than you.”"

"I believed I was where I was supposed to be. When I was a student, my mentor told me I’d make a good research mathematician. I said, “What is that?” and he told me I’d have to find out for myself. At NASA, I happened to be at the right place at the right time. When you put bright people in a room and they had something to do, they worked on it until they got it done. But honestly, it was never work to me."

"It’s just there. You can’t do anything without it. It’s in everything. I like to work problems. If you do your best, nobody can ask you to do it over again. I never had to repeat what I did."

"We put in some long hours at times, and I had three children at home. But they were very responsible, and I had family and friends who helped look after them."

"In the cafeteria, we just ignored the sign [for segregated seating]. But at some point, we started eating at our desks. When we left work, our lives were definitely separate — separate communities, separate schools for our children, separate grocery stores and churches."

"When I heard about doctors in Italy having to ration ventilators and then the incredibly likely possibility that that is going to happen here, my first thought was so many Black people are going to die."

"...For many years the only woman in her department, she along with others established the Organization of Women Faculty at Northwestern University in the late 1960s. In the late 1970s their study of faculty salaries revealed significant gender disparities that embarrassed the administration."

"...One can see traces of arguments that she developed in her later work critiquing the orientalist notion of an Islamic city, or the urban apartheid of Rabat, when she carefully explains the ways in which foreign elites separated government and social decision-making from the indigenous population for centuries."

"Except for the extermination of the Tasmanians, modern history recognizes no case in which the virtually complete supplanting of the indigenous population of a country by an alien stock has been achieved in as little as two generations. Yet this, in fact, is what has been attempted in Palestine since the beginning of the Twentieth century. Herein lies the nub of the Middle East – at once its greatest tragedy and its most perplexing but inescapable problem."

"What would be the point to discuss the craft of Jean Rhys, Janet Frame, Christina Stead, Malcolm Lowry, all of whose works can teach us little about technique, and whose way of touching us is simply by exploding on the lintel of our minds. It is not technique that guided them. Their craft consisted of desire. We are American writers, absorbing the American experience. We must absorb its heat, the recklessness and ruthlessness, the grotesqueries and cruelties. We must reflect the sprawl and smallness of America, its greedy optimism and dangerous sentimentality. And we must write with a pen—in Mark Twain’s phrase—warmed up in hell. We might have something then, worthy, necessary; a real literature instead of the Botox escapist lit told in the shiny prolix comedic style that has come to define us."

"In July of 1995, the Copa, along with the chic restaurant Antonia's, burnt to the ground in the traditional suspicious, middle-of-the-night fire. Built in 1917 as a movie theater, it had been wearily showing Deep Throat for a decade before it was transformed in the '80's into a glossy gay cruise bar."

"Marilynne Robinson says she read Moby-Dick when she was nine. I wish I could say such a thing! I was reading horse books, dog books, the Baba Yaga stories in : my was my most treasured possession, but I didn’t read with much discrimination."

"... when I just started this book I thought: Roth’s pretty much has it down on what the worse thing a Jewish boy can do but what is the worst thing a Jewish girl can do? Well: it is most likely throwing up her mother’s cooking. Food is identity, it’s love, it’s politics, it’s family. To reject that, and in such a self-destructive manner, is something I wanted to investigate. It also implicitly brings up the notion of privilege, which is also a stereotype many young Jewish women are saddled with."

"My husband and I were on this protracted and tragic adoption journey. It was really hard and there were a lot of things that went wrong, so I decided while this is happening I'd write a book about it to make it more interesting as opposed to just tragic. It's definitely based on our experience, but not exactly our experience. You know, I feel like if writers used writing as therapy we'd have a ton of happy writers [laughs]. I think I learned some things about it, how to be patient, a little bit, and I'm so hard on that narrator, that I got to see the worst of how I felt. My husband said this to me actually—he said I was taking this horrible thing that we were going through and turning it into something positive. I felt productive in that way."

"Our new headquarters were at the laboratory at , outside of , right next to 's . He was always going out alone on horseback by our building and I always just missed seeing him."

"The of would have been a very different story had advances and applications in chemistry matched progress in . As it was, there wre no "green revolutions," and chemical knowledge played a minor role until almost the end of the nineteenth century. Margaret W. Rossiter's interesting monograph on the influence of shows that the indifference of s to the blandishments of science was as much a consequence of the meager fare offered by the scientists as of any ingrained anti-intellectualism on the part of cultivators."

"Hand pick the s where you can and use bait. A barrier of lime on the soil around trees will keep snails away. s are named for their sooty black spore mass. They are important on grains and grasses, not too common on . Corn and onion smuts appear in backyard gardens."

"Margaret W. Rossiter, a historian whose trilogy, “Women Scientists in America,” documented in sharp detail the ways women were excised from the annals of science — and who coined the term “,” named for the 19th-century suffragist , to describe the age-old practice of attributing scientific achievements of women to their male colleagues — died on Aug. 3 in ... Among the scientists Dr. Rossiter wrote about was , who with the German chemist developed the theory of . He won the for that discovery; she did not. The “Matilda effect” was but one of the many career blows that were queasily familiar to female scientists. So was the “harem effect,” a term Dr. Rossiter coined to describe male scientists’ habit of surrounding themselves with, as she put it, a “bevy of competent female subordinates who would not be as threatening as an equal number of bright young men.” (And who would presumably stay put, because their opportunities were so limited.)"

"Dogs sometimes disturb roses by burying their bones too near the roots, but in general rose thorns provide adequate self-protection."

"We live in historic times. This is especially trued for American women in science and engineering. Opportunities have greatly expanded since the early 1970s because of a variety of factors, starting with but extending beyond —new expectations, new energy, a growing economy, new technical industries and opportunities, battles won and programs instituted. The women's liberation movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s inspired many women scientists and their supporters to new levels of activism, and legislators passed and President Richard M. Nixon signed significant legislation that greatly affected traditional patterns in academia."

"Raspberry Horntail, Hartigia cressoni (). One of the , a western species, injuring young shoots of , , , and . Bright yellow-and-black females appear in April and May to insert eggs with a curved point under epidermis of tender tips of host plants."

"In 1933, Dr. Westcott bought a garden in , as a laboratory. She described it as "equipped with all the common plant diseases." Home studies and experiments with plant problems led to a career as a plant doctor, and for many years, she tended gardens in the New York area. The first of her seven books,The Plant Doctor, published in 1937, was based on her experiences. She wrote on rose growing, plant diseases and pests. The Gardener's Bug Book appeared in 1946 and is undergoing its fifth revision. Dr. Westcott was a contributor to many publications. During World War II, she lectured on pest control for s. Dr. Westcott was known for her annual Rose Day Open Houses for hundreds of visitors at her gardens in Glen Ridge and, later, at her retirement home in Springvale in ."

"It's actually quite frightening to be an author and know the business side of publishing. I imagine it's easier to be in Iowa and not know what's going on with your book. If the industry had stayed the same, I might still feel in control of the publishing process, but sales reps' jobs have changed, marketing jobs have changed, publicity jobs have changed."

"I can still recall my astonishment when I discovered in 1972 some women's entries in the old directories, and when I read biographies of several scientists in the then-new '. Here were people who had been present at many of the familiar places and events, but were totally unknown even to those well versed in the history of American science. I felt like a modern Alice who had fallen down a rabbit hole into a wonderland of the history of science that was familiar in some respects but distorted and alien in many others. Learning more about these women and bringing their stories into closer connection with the rest of history of this period became a compelling and absorbing intellectual task. The initial stumbling block was locating material, since most of the women scientists bordered, for a variety of reasons, on the "invisible.""

"are tiny insects with rasping-sucking mouthparts, gradual metamorphosis. They feed by macerating surface layers of plant cells and sucking up the juices. They belong to the order Thysanoptera ..."

"Although by all accounts the period 1940–72 was a golden age for science in America, it has generally been considered a very dark age for women in the professions. ... How could this have been? Were not women an integral part of American science by 1940? Why, then, in a period of record growth in almost every aspect of American science that one could count—money spent, persons trained, jobs created, articles published, even s won—were women so invisible?"

"Written in an English of singular resonance, of lyric richness informed by history, by legend, by political awareness, and everywhere by a deep perception, the poems of this and her other books bring her background of Philippine culture, its past and present, into the larger world of late 20th Century concerns. This is a poetry outside of schools, of fads and fashion, highly accomplished and deserving of wide, enthusiastic readership."

"I think what I was trying to say in Trill & Mordent (2005) is that we are all affected by this climate of anxiety; we're living in an age of terror. People are getting deployed; there's the fear of avian flu, and those riots in Paris. What do you do in the face of anxiety? Do you go into a hole and shut yourself up in a safe place and not come out again? I've heard people say how hard it was for them to do the normal things they enjoyed after 9/11, or after those sniper shootings, or after every event tinged with tragedy or trauma. But you need to find a way back to the experience of beauty and release, and I think that's what I was trying to say in this book. (2006)"

"I feel that poetry is mystery, an intangible magic that I approach again and again in the hopes that I might be able to learn some of its lessons well. (2006)"

"I believe that art does not arise out of a void, and that it is effective when it makes heartfelt human connections, and even more so when it enables a sense of agency (the belief that there is something we can do in the world so that change might be effected). There is power in its ability to engage memory and intellect, compress and distill emotion, idea, and experience—and it is this power which poets and writers seek to harness when speaking to others through their art. Why does one have to sing, when there is suffering? Why is beauty necessary, when there is so much poverty or violence or depravity in the world? (2009)"

"If you're a writer, you do get pulled toward that, attracted toward that idea of duality, because it is what attracts you to language. The idea of language as not just attentive to the surface matter of experience, but to the other things that might lie underneath, is why we write. (2006)"

"...what we love most fiercely, the joys that deliver the keenest edge -- are the way they are because we understand their perishability. (2014)"

"Every poem carries the seed of a story. And like music, it’s able to get to the emotional heart of an experience, sometimes even before we grasp the idea of it. It’s that capacity for opening up and listening more deeply to the world around us that poetry offers. Poetry is powerful this way because it asks us to really pay attention to the world. I think poems can convey some of our deepest feelings in images, in language that shows rather than masks. The sense of communing with others, which is at the root of the idea of community, is when we feel we can talk to each other about our joys, our doubts, our fears, our hopes—in the same way, perhaps, in which a poem talks to us and invites us in. (2022)"

"One cannot expect to be a writer without being a reader!…I often draw from contemporary works, but I remind my students that radical progression does not only mean looking for the newest thing: it also comes from a reinvigorated understanding of how works that have come before us -- including the classics -- can instruct us in new ways. I like to remind my students too that we may be heir to certain cultural histories and traditions, ways of doing things with language -- but that there are other global traditions of literature and we have really only just skimmed the surface in our understanding of these riches. (2014)"

"Writing poetry is always a little archaeological—we dig and sift not only through our fund of experiences and memories, but also through a variety of textual fragments. As a writer in the diaspora, I am always reminded that the past, history, is a hallucinatory presence right here with us; that our life in the contemporary moment is marked by the displacements that time is eternally enacting."

"History is a field at once very large and very intimate. But I like to think of the past as not completely done, of history’s archives as not static; we can enter the archive, we can reconstruct and re-imagine events, we can insert ourselves as figures or characters into its landscapes."

"(LR: Do you have any advice for young poets just out of, or in the midst of, writing programs?) LI: Don’t lose whatever fuels your passion for life and for language. Don’t lose the fire in your gut. (2009)"

"What I am most moved by about poetry through all these years, is how it works in this ineffable register—how it’s really something (in the way that we would say, isn’t that something? meaning, how amazing is it!) to note that we often don’t even know what it is that’s seized us by the hair-roots, or caught us in the gut. For me it’s a process that very much begins with intuition—in the gut, or in the heart. The “head” or thinking part of it starts to get involved as we follow the lure, whatever it was to begin with, and try to figure out what shape and structure to house it in. (2009)"

"Vermont sort of demands humility and equanimity. No one really cares if you’re fancy or high achieving, and if you lead with that energy you will learn quickly that it’s unwelcome. There’s a coldness here that shocked me for years—but I’ve learned to appreciate the authenticity. No one’s faking much of anything; there’s no lipstick on the pigs here."

"My good habits: I don’t really watch television. I read a lot. I teach, which makes me think about what makes good work. I run, which helps me work out s and combat nerves about a first book. I parent, which is radically humbling and physical and informs my characterizations. I always have a in progress. I try not to read rejection letters twice."

"As a , I want to deepen my relationship to the natural world. I have no need to dominate nature, just a desire to live a little closer to it. When I read the work of female naturalists like LaBastille and Robin Kimmerer, whose work blends the scientific, tribal and spiritual, I sense a shared love and humility in the relationship between self and nature, not the loud note of personal triumph and chest-thumping we hear so loudly in early environmental work."

"... crying at your own work is like laughing at your own joke — it's just not done."

"and I grew up, thirty years apart, in the small town of , situated on the in eastern North Carolina. A life-size portrait of Gurganus hung in our local library’s entryway, and I used to leaf through a copy of his best-known novel, “,” while waiting for my piano lessons to start. (Gurganus knew my music teacher, Gene Featherstone, socially. “A sweetheart,” he assured me.) For me, Gurganus was proof that you could come from the place where I lived—a place steeped in propriety, religion, and tradition—and become a writer."

"Ignore mean-spirited people, if all attempts to establish harmony fail. Also ignore people who evaluate you not by your research contributions but by their stereotyped impression of you, whether that be because of your gender, background, or something else. You can’t control what other people think. Science (like other careers) can sometimes bring out people’s less prosocial instincts. When it does, I just focus on my science, and on the mentors, friends, and family members who love and support me. Even if you’re not the most popular person, if your science is true, then I believe what my mother-in-law says: The cream rises to the top."

"And finally, have fun. My motto all along has been “work hard, play hard,” although now for me playing hard means spending evenings with my kids. Scientists have the greatest career in the world. We get to decipher humankind’s greatest mysteries, and pursue our own unique, creative visions. There are few things in life more rewarding than that. It’s an absolute privilege to be able to spend your work life innovating and pursuing questions no one has ever known the answer to. Remember that."

"Briggle. — To be in an uneasy mental condition, to shift the attention rapidly from one thing to another. “Don’t briggle so.” In common use in Ohio. —Fanny D. Bergen, Cambridge, Mass."