In the documentary "Paris Is Burning" (1990), Pepper LaBeija, drag queen, icon of New York City's ballroom scene, and the mother of the House of LaBeija, discusses sex changes, stating, "I never wanted to have a sex change. A lot of kids that I know, they got the sex change because they felt, 'Oh, I've been treated so bad as a drag queen. If I get a pussy (…) I'll be treated fabulous.' But women get treated bad. You know, they get beat, they get robbed, they get dogged. So, having the vagina doesn't mean that you're gonna have a fabulous life. It might, in fact, be worse."
It's International Women's Day, it's 2024 and, sadly, it's challenging to dispute these words. A pussy doesn't guarantee you'll be treated fabulously, while a pussy coupled with a sharp and witty intellect and outspoken nature may also jeopardize your job.
Femicide rates worldwide, the tragic deaths of women and children in war zones, and various forms of abuse, including mental and verbal offenses, mansplaining, and inadequate medical diagnoses (hands up those women among you readers who were prescribed anti-depressant or a trip to the psychiatrist whenever you turned up at your doctor in some kind of debilitating pain that came from a mysterious source...), highlight the persistent challenges to gender equality.
So, how do we spend this International Women's Day? Well, we could celebrate getting drunk to drown our sorrows or assert our empowerment, but, in the process, we may also get more educated, and discover the stories of inspiring women who have been unjustly written out of history.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) houses the Women@MIT archive, part of MIT Libraries' Department of Distinctive Collections (DDC). This resource provides information on various women, such as Alice K. Hartley, an American computer scientist who contributed to Lisp dialects, and Annamaria Torriani-Gorini, professor emerita of biology, renowned for her work in bacterial physiology.
Besides, the MIT annually offers artists, activists, musicians, writers, and scholars the Women@MIT Fellowship, encouraging projects that focus on women in MIT's history and in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
A couple of years ago, for example, multimedia artists Mariana Roa Oliva and Maya Bjornson developed a video game entitled "A Lab of One's Own." The game, presented in a narrative format, explored various aspects of women's lives and work, utilizing archival materials, newspaper clips, and audio clips to delve into the history of women at MIT and in STEM.
One of the projects developed last year through the fellowship is simply extraordinary. Entitled "Sisters in Making: Prototyping and the Feminine Resilience" (and on display until 8th April 2024 at MIT's Rotch Library), the research was spearheaded by Soala Lolia Ajienka, known for designing artifacts rooted in material forms and transformations spanning architecture, textiles, and art, and Deborah Tsogbe, a design researcher with a Masters in design computation from MIT.
Together, Ajienka and Tsogbe researched the story of women involved in the invention and implementation of Core Rope Memory and Magnetic Core Memory in the Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC). This compact and innovative integrated processing system played a pivotal role in the historic moon landing in 1969.
The researchers sought to rediscover the women involved in fabricating woven core memory and core rope memory modules and who followed the testing and prototyping phases as well. The two researchers reunited all these figures - Space Age Weavers, Technical Assistants, Rope Mothers, Little Old Ladies, Keypunch Operators - under the moniker "Sisters in Making."
Despite being key contributors to the Apollo 11 Moon Mission, the names of these women were often overlooked in historical records.
The technology behind the AGC was developed at the MIT Instrumentation Lab in the '60s, with subcontractors like Raytheon handling the production of the final hardware for space travel. The AGC's memory was a woven form of data storage (knitwear and textile students, please, pay attention, this is extremely inspiring – take a note about these words "a woven form of data" and ponder about them, how can you turn them into an idea for a collection?).
To simplify things: ones or zeroes were encoded by threading a wire through or around a little magnetic core, so the program was literally woven in and around the ferrite cores with thousands and thousands of copper nickel alloy wires. That’s why the two researchers behind this project define the Core Rope Memory as "software woven as hardware." These women sewed the software into the cores with maximum precision and accuracy.
Weavers, with their understanding of binary code through warp and weft patterns (that could be translated as 1s and 0s), played a pivotal role in the development of the core memories that, meeting the requirements for lightness, compactness, and indestructibility needed for the Apollo 11 spacecraft.
The responsibility of ensuring correct programming fell on individuals known as "rope mothers," with Margaret Hamilton being one of them.
As the head of a team at the Instrumentation Lab, she wrote and tested software for the Apollo 11 computers (one for the command module and one for the lunar ejection module).
After verification by the Rope Mothers, a keypunch operator, such as Elaine Denniston, would translate the code into punch cards, a coding method with roots in weaving techniques, notably the Jacquard loom (historically connected to computer programming pioneers like Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace - so here we have an intricate and fascinating interplay between technology and the art of weaving).
After crafting each memory prototype, an extensive testing process was employed to identify potential failures. In case of any issues, the prototype would be remade and subjected to further testing.
Ajienka and Tsogbe, in their exploration of Core Rope Memory's development documentation, discovered images depicting female hands holding memory prototypes. Although the names were absent, the hands hinted at the delicate, repetitive nature of woven memory fabrication, a task entrusted to women who had dexterity and patience.
In a tribute to the women who contributed to this endeavor, the duo also recreated a core rope artifact. Their machine, inspired by the original AGC rope memory, was adapted to function with modern microcontrollers. With 28 core transformers, it stores 160 bits of information - 40 "words" of 4 bits each - transmitted along copper wires to the microcontroller's internal logic. These words are 7 digit numbers representing the identities of 20 women uncovered during the research, ranging from technicians and data keypunchers to engineers, librarians, and office staff from MIT, Raytheon, and NASA.
The memory dialer pays homage not only to the original core rope memory of the Apollo Guidance Computer and its interface but also to the hope it symbolized for a new perspective on the world, while the extensive research (that you can discover on the "Sisters in Making" website) and time invested in recreating the core memory, serve as a tribute to the original weavers who achieved the seemingly impossible.
So, yes, being a woman comes with challenges and it can be a total pain in the ass as Pepper LaBeija highlighted, but it is also extraordinarily beautiful. And now when men annoy you, remind them that, without women, there would be no "man on the moon". But drive home this reminder every single day of the year, not just on March 8th, only in this way you will keep the cosmic appreciation for women's contributions on a daily orbit.
Image credits for this post
All the following images in this post are taken from the Sisters in Making: Prototyping and the Feminine Resilience website:
4. Hands weaving Core Rope Memory.
5. Ferrite Memory Plane.
6. Core Memory Planes from DDC Core Rope Memory Archives.
7. Core rope memory works by magnetizing small rings with an electric current.
8. Woman with Magnetic Core Memory Plane Tester.
9. A Raytheon employee working on the Apollo Guidance Computer micrologic subassembly.
10. The memory dialer by Soala Lolia Ajienka and Deborah Tsogbe.
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