You Might Be a Zombie and Other Bad News - Writers of Cracked dot Com [67]
Luckily, her father managed to get her enrolled at the lesser Académie Colarossi, a place dedicated to the free and unbiased exploration of penises. Claudel thrived until she fell in love with Auguste Rodin, and it all went to le toilette.
Buried by the boobs
She became Rodin’s lover and muse, influencing and reportedly even working on some of his greatest works. Meanwhile, her sculptures were shunned by the public, since no one could stomach the idea that a female might be responsible for their favorite rock penises. In fact, artistic genius in women was believed to be a form of mental illness.
After Camille broke off their relationship, Rodin switched to shafting her metaphorically, blocking all funding for her future sculptures. Claudel’s own brother decided to have her committed to an insane asylum, despite the hospital’s protests that Camille was totally sane for the next thirty years. Sadly, convinced that she would never gain recognition, Claudel ultimately destroyed the vast majority of her works. Those that survive are lauded. In the words of Ludovic Chanzy, cultural director of the Nogent museum: “That Camille was shunned by the art world, despite her beautiful work, can be explained by the fact that she was a woman. It was just not acceptable that a young lady could sculpt erotic pieces showing men and women in the nude.”
That’s right: People turned down free, publically viewable porn because it was made by a woman. How far we’ve come . . .
2. LISE MEITNER
Lise Meitner was the physicist who, working with Otto Hahn, pioneered the principles of nuclear fission. Meitner also discovered the Auger effect two years before Victor Auger. To add to her list of challenges, she was also an Austrian Jew in Hitler’s Germany. The odds were against her, to say the least. But Meitner’s biggest problem wasn’t even the Nazis (that’s a hell of a Jew who can say that): Berlin University was so sexist that she was only allowed to conduct experiments in a carpentry shed in the basement.
In 1938, when the Third Reich began sending subtle signs that she might want to flee for her life, she reluctantly abandoned her research with Hahn.
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Despite Meitner’s crucial role in every stage of fission research, her erstwhile partner Hahn won the Nobel Prize all alone. Some of the blame in this must be apportioned to Hitler, since he drove her out of the country, but it’s not like the Nobel Foundation didn’t know she existed, seeing as she had been jointly nominated with Hahn ten times previously. But she would have been the first woman to win a Nobel Prize without her husband, and the committee had a policy to uphold.
1. BEATRIX POTTER
Beatrix Potter was a children’s author, most known for the Peter Rabbit series. That sounds about right; that’s a charming, nonthreatening, non-emasculating and totally, quaintly appropriate career for a woman.
But the bit you probably don’t know is that she was also an absolutely brilliant mycologist, someone who studies fungi and their effects.
Since she was excluded from universities, Potter was forced to assist Scottish mycologist Charles McIntosh, illustrating his fungal specimens (which is either exactly what it sounds like or sexual innuendo was a much more dense and terrifying thing back in the day).
She became a pioneer in her field, proposing that lichens were a mixture of algae and fungus living in a symbiotic relationship, a revolutionary idea in the 1890s. She also noted that some fungi produced antibiotic chemicals, a discovery so important it shook the world . . . when it was discovered again by Alexander Fleming! And, hey, we just discovered it right now! And so did you! Man, science is cake!
Buried by the boobs
In 1897, Potter contributed a paper on mycology to the Linnean Society entitled “Germination of the Spores of the Agraricinae.” It didn’t get published. The Royal Society followed suit, scientifically cock blocking Potter at every turn. In 1901, a disheartened Potter wrote and illustrated The Tale of Peter Rabbit as a means of keeping her