Claire Messud, Novelist b. 1966
New York Times Magazine August 13, 2017

One of our foremost chroniclers of women's hidden appetites

Her mother attempted to go to law school but chose to quit when the pressures of her family and her husband overcame her.  She never spoke of it again, but her mouth would close into a thin line and she would leave the room when law school was mentioned  Later, suffering from dementia   she said "There's so much of life to get through after you realize that none of your dreams will come true." 

Messud too confessed dismay at the encroachment of day-to-day demands on intellectual life.  There are trade-offs.  But more life is more life.  And if you're in the business of life . . . I had a sense that the costs were high and I didn't want that to be my fate.  I had a sense that's I'd better not learn to cook, which I never did.  And I had a sense that you have to be ruthless in some way.  And she chose as her partner someone who was raised with the expectation that fathers share in the child care and housework, and who, as she puts it, would do "never less than 50 percent" with what she calls "very careful subconscious Darwinian selection." 

If Messud is angry about something, it's the social constructs that work against women's ambition and desire, rendering them invisible or even snuffing them out.   The literary taboo on women with "unseemly" emotions is just part of a problem female writers and readers have long been articulation:  a male dominated literary canon offering a restricted vision of women's possibilities.   Readers crave depictions of women as real, as flawed, as people who can't be constrained by a predetermined narrative, not just women in relation to men.  Her work quietly seethes at the idea that a woman needs to be "likable" - or that a man should be the judge of her liability. 

Yvonne Brill Aeronautical scientist 1924-2013
Rocket woman who gave satellites their soundness of thrust

Yvonne Madelaine Brill was a Canadian-American propulsion engineer best known for her development of rocket and jet propulsion technologies. During her career she was involved in a broad range of national space programs in the United States, including NASA.  Conscious of her role as a pioneer both for her sex and in her field, she urged girls to study maths and science.  In 2010 she was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, along with the creators of Post-its, prompting ironic comment that it took two men to come up with slightly sticky stationery and one woman to discover how to keep satellites aloft.  Her achievements were remarkable with someone with no engineering degree, thought at was through no fault of her own.  The University of Manitoba in her native Canada rejected her application for its course on the grounds that it required fieldwork for which there were not female facilities on-site.   

Beate Sirota Gordon, Consitutionalist 1923-2012
Interpreter who wove women's rights in the fabric of Japan

Douglas MacArthur assembled a fair-sized galaxy of talent after WWII to help reshape a defeated Japan, and that included giving the country a constitution for its post-feudal existence.  But the US general could not have imaged that one of the most important contributors to the process would be 22-year-old female interpreter on his staff.  Sirota Gordon was the daughter of a Ukrainian-born concert of some renown who had grown up partially in Japan, and was "the only woman in the room" (the name of her autobiography) among the two dozen men on the constitutional committee.  Almost single-handedly she drafted articles 14 and 24 of the document, giving Japanese women the civil rights they had not previously possessed.  After a 50 year veil of silence her military superiors began talking about it and she became something of a heroine in Japan.  There is no provision in the US constitution guaranteeing women the rights they enjoy in Japan. 

Financial Times, April, 2016

Joan Eardley, Painter
Scottish 1921-1963

Joan Earldey was born within a decade of Lucian Freud.   Her originality lies in two bodies of work: portraits of Glasgow tenement children, and the winter seascapes of Catterline, the Scottish fishing village where she lived alone in a cliff-top cottage from the mid-1950's.  Eardley's street children are often painted in pastel on fine glass paper, lending sparkle and spontaneity, look powerful in the obdurate sense of self, and vulnerable.