An Under-Appreciated Resource: Dr. Rose Frisch

Picture of Dr Rose Frisch from the New York Times


Henry Frisch, a physicist, said his mother also benefited from that environment, because, not expecting to receive tenure or equal treatment, she and other women were “free to follow paths that weren’t conventional.”Still, she was paid so little that her son said the National Institutes of Health once called to say that a grant application she submitted should list her annual salary, not her monthly salary. “That is my annual salary,” she replied.
Please read Dr. Frisch's obituary, and see if you aren't overcome with frustration at how such a brilliant scientist had to work three times as hard as a man to get the support she needed to continue her work. How many talented women scientists, researchers, professors and others have to leave their work because of lack of financial support, flexible jobs, and tenure?
If we want more young people to choose careers in the sciences, stories like hers will hardly encourage them, because associates of mine who are scientists say it is still pretty sexist out there.
We can do better.

My Weekly Reader

Picture from Public Domain Review

What I've been reading this week:

Make your own yoga bag from Spoonflower (I know someone who might like one of these. Maybe you do too?)

Interesting article about the history of chocolate.

An amusing article about poor, disadvantaged men who quilt, struggling to have their artistic voices heard. "Luke Haynes, pictured, says there is no gender bias in his quiltmaking."  
This article is a little bit clueless: men have been sewing for centuries; men sewing and doing art is nothing new. There have always been men who sew, design clothes, quilts, and are textile artists. Do men really need more attention when they do art? Are they really oppressed? 
 As opposed to our culture's long bias toward disrespecting and ignoring the domestic arts of women, who have been making something out of nothing for centuries, with little or no acclaim? Just sayin'.

Relatedly, here's a controversy about the value (or undervaluing) of handmade art quilts (or any women's art).

Oh wait, the artist undervalued the work herself!   Many of us undervalue our work. This is a common mistake. I read an interview once where someone asked Caryl Bryer Fallert how long it had taken her to make a prize winning quilt. She laughed and said she was asked that all the time and her answer always was however many hours/days it took to sew it, plus twenty years of learning how.
The artist above should read Caryl's statement on pricing your work. "You are so right, too many people undercharge and give their work away." Yes, they do.

I've had people ask me, when they see a baby quilt I had made as a gift, how much I would charge them to make one for them. I would always say that they could not afford that, I would have to charge them $1000 or more.  This has happened several times; the coworker is always shocked and says something like, "But I can get one at Target for $30!" 
Then do that, I'd tell them.

Have a great. (or should I say Super?) weekend.


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2014 Round Up

 What did I make in 2014? I designed these needle felted stockings for new babies

Snowmen/Gingerbread people

Is this my favorite? Red Poinsettia on white wool felt

Four Calling Birds, Cardinal variety

Four Calling Birds on Blue

Handmade Vanillas  Brandy, Rum, Bourbon and Vodka (recipe for these is in my Toll House Cookie essay.)

  In the fall of 2013, I took a online class offered by Penn on Modern Poetry, recommended by Bad Mom, Good Mom. I enjoyed the class, but best of all, it inspired me to start writing again. I was so inspired that I wrote "Thirteen Ways of Looking at Bad News" . On a whim, I submitted it to The-Toast.
No one was more surprised than I when they replied that they would be delighted to publish this in January of 2014.

Inspired by the incredible sexism of the NY Times obituary of Yvonne Brill, I wrote the blog post about their incredible wrongheadedness. But our friends at the NY Times continued to be sexist trolls, which spawned a Twitter hashtag: #NYTwomensobits
I read these and thought  NO, they are doing them wrong. They should write them as if we were in The Handmaid's Tale, but as if women were in power. So I wrote a few, submitted them for fun and got this reply back: Write MORE. So I  wrote some Misandrist Obituaries, published last January.

In the spring, I took an online class at Duke in Behavioral Economics: A Beginner's Guide to Irrational Behavior. I liked this so much, I wrote, How to Avoid a Bank Robbery, which was published on Medium.

Inspired by the amazing sexism that accomplished women face, and the unacceptable attitudes in the media regarding their clothing choices, I wrote Wearing the Pants, A Brief History of Women wearing Pants in the West, published last summer.

I read a study about cats, and how they hear you calling, but choose to ignore you and wrote:
T.S. Eliot and the Science of Naming Cats. There is a lot of interesting research out there about cats. Basically, scientists have discovered that they are all acolytes of Ayn Rand, and Slytherins.

He hears you calling him, but chooses to ignore you. Cats are not dogs, people.

  While reading a cookbook, I noticed in the headnotes of a chocolate chip cookie recipe a glaring historical error. Cookbooks full of inaccuracies like this (Food writers are very seldom trained in historical research techniques), but this one was particularly egregious. They claimed that the Toll House Cookie recipe was based on a Colonial recipe called a "Butter drop-do". Curious about the weird name, I did some research and discovered that everything we thought we knew about the origin of Toll House cookies was based on a web of lies.  My Secret History of Toll House Cookies was published on Dec 5th.

They still keep publishing the wrong stories. It's amazing how difficult it is to correct a deliberate falsehood. Read my essay and tell Epicurious to get their act together. Do it for Ruth Graves Wakefield.

That's a brief list of what I did in 2014. I wish for all of my Dear Readers a Happy New Year.